Art curator Simon Njami — Europe’s reigning monarch of Afro-hip — swept into town last week scouting for possibilities. Rumour has it that the 42-year-old, of Cameroonian heritage, intends bringing his exhibition Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The collection — arguably the greatest showing of African art since the second Johannesburg Biennale of 1997 — is currently on at London’s Hayward Gallery before touring Europe. South Africans will have to wait until the show gets a break, given the demand.
The Guardian newspaper critic, Jonathan Jones, wrote that Njami’s significant showing of African works “attempts the impossible” by grouping a whole continent’s worth of artistic expression in one show. Jones found the exhibition “misdescribes the continent, by insisting on the urban and the technological”. He went on to lambaste the work of South African artist Willie Bester, claiming Africa Remix “lacks quality control”.
Africa Remix has, however, been lauded for its depth of field incorporating, as it does, work from the African diaspora.
Njami is co-founder and editor of the impressive large-format art magazine Revue Noir. From 2001 to 2003 he was artistic director of the group Rencontres de la Photographie Africaine. While in Johannesburg Njami attended an exhibition at Newtown’s Market Photo Workshop of images from the Bamako Biennale, a significant event he has contributed to.
In your view, what are the key differences between African and European contemporary art practices? Also, where do you situate South African art in relation to African and Western art worlds?
There is a critic who, in 1969, wrote [that] his fear was that European art was getting far from life — and art that was far from life would be meaningless. This is what we are observing in Europe: we are getting into post-conceptual art where the ideas are more important than the making. And the ideas are not even that good at times.
In Africa, I think art is still very close to life. And issues [that] African artists are dealing with are issues of life; human issues. They are not only theoretical, they are also physical. They deal with politics, identity, representation — things that Europe has long ignored.
A French writer said once that the third millennium would be spiritual, or it wouldn’t be. What he means is that we need to bring spirit into whatever we are doing, which means our humanity. This is what African artists are doing.
A key strategy of the Negritude and the pan-African intellectual movements was to argue against the homogeneity of Africa. And now, post-colonial and postmodern thinking celebrates this heterogeneity. How did you take this into account in Africa Remix, an attempt to present the art of one continent as a coherent show?
There is no definition of an African. What I’ve been trying to do [is] to show this kaleidoscopical view of Africa, to remind [Europe] that Africa is a continent that starts in Algeria and ends in South Africa. The Africa we are longing for, that maybe existed, is not existing any more. Africa is the result of shifts, of changes.
What Africa Remix wanted to show is that you have different practices, different sensibilities; to fight this idea of an Africa that would be a country; to fight this idea of an archetypical African contemporary artist; to fight against this notion of origins.
You can read what makes the contemporanity of Africa through the show. And the whole of [the show] is what is happening in Africa now.
If you look at South African artists — Jane Alexander, Wim Botha, Willie Bester, Santu Mofokeng and others — I am not sure you would say they come from the same place. I want to force people to look at Africans as individuals, to recognise one’s humanity. When you recognise an individual you deal with an individual, not with a whole bunch of preconceived ideas. That is the aim of the show.
Can you see differences between art from white and black South African artists?
Yes, I can see differences, but as many differences as I can see among white South African artists. But when I look at the South African works, I can tell [they are] from South Africa. How? We are the product of the times we have been living in, the places we have been living in. We are the products of personal and global history. This is what we are trying to translate through our works.
Dealing with what we know — the way we speak, the way we love, the way we walk — is part of the construction made by the situation. This defines our unique and individual humanity, translated in whatever we have done.
And you might see from one [artist’s] perspective to the other that there is a twist in this commonality of experience, that people are looking at it from different angles. You can see when you look at Wim Botha’s work that he is probably not a black South African because of the material he is using, because of the way he is telling the story. Art is the making visible of the invisible; all those things that we don’t know.
Would a show such as Africa Remix have the same impact in South Africa as it did in Europe, or would have in America?
I hope it would have a bigger impact. In Europe we were unpacking the idea of Africa Europeans have. And I think it is necessary as well, in Africa, to unpack the idea of Africa. The ideas imposed on to ourselves. We all have preconceived ideas about Africa, and maybe Africa [has] the most.