Many African artists stay silent. Even though they are today offered what was once forbidden. They travel the world and present the fruits of their quest to a public that changes daily. They are famous. Recognised? Maybe so. But this matters little to them. Only yesterday, an artist — who had studied in the fine arts college of a major European capital and spoke the language of what would end up his adopted country — was viewed suspiciously by those seeking the authentic African. Terms like ‘scholarly art”, ‘international art” and whatever else have evolved.
Now and then I have found myself debating these themes with a number of artists. Their response has never varied. They care little about the labels pinned on them. All that matters is for their work to be seen. African artists can be indifferent to the way the surrounding world sees them because, deep down, they pursue a different goal, think different thoughts and speak a different language. Their refusal to raise their voices amid the throng is not a throwback to the timidity passed on from other eras; it marks their deliberate will to master their own space — that precious and unique space that is the hearth of all creation worthy of the name. This all too long-forgotten silence is, in my view, the best way to approach African creativity. Everything starts and finishes with this silence.
Kingdom of immateriality
Endless silences of mosques and sacred forests; oneness of spirit and its environment; the silence of prayer, when men suddenly stop in the middle of a crowded pavement and throw themselves to the ground facing Mecca. For you don’t just have to be within the walls of a mosque for His word to be audible. Africa is without doubt the kingdom of immateriality. Admittedly, ever since the Middle Ages the empires have built palaces — made of earth, as though to stress the transitory nature of all things; the mass industrialisation that transformed the face of 19th- century Europe did not travel this far. Even in cities such as Johannesburg, Lagos or Cairo the order is provisional and there is a constant feeling of being in a pre-industrial world. One where men have not yet been replaced by machines and, given the extent to which bartering still represents a founding element of society, the virtuality of the stock markets has no established rights. The importance of giving your word, of trading words, of this silent word only revealed to those who can hear it.
Children of lands
The art critic Pierre Restany claimed that the artist should never be cut off from life. If there is one thing Africans cannot cut themselves off from, it’s life. Whatever they do, whichever ivory towers they try to surround themselves with, there will always be an aunt, brother or cousin to remind them that life is lived on earth and that its demands, however prosaic, are a top priority. We are all children of lands that leave their marks on us forever. All movement has an origin. The place where we love, laugh and cry is the raw material from which the first raw movements spring. It plays a full and inevitable part in the gestation and birth of art. It predetermines and shapes the work, as it were. And its influence can be seen in insignificant yet determining details.
If you had to find something all African artists have in common, you would probably notice that they all draw from the raw materials they grew up with, each in their own way. Our five senses are the gateways to the soul. Art — in Africa as elsewhere — can only be its most sensitive, human and imperfectly completed translation. Its quest, I believe, is translated in the search for the self. The silent communion of shisha smokers on the pavements of Cairo has no purpose other than that, silence and communion. The silence forged in the bosom of childhood develops later in artists and becomes a metaphor. It is the attempt to solve what [composer] Ernst Bloch called ‘the problem of the We in itself”. The we of community, the we of art, the we of the collectivity we live and dream in. What are these different ‘we’s” made of and, for an artist, how to translate them into a work that testifies to one’s singular belonging to the world? This is the question. But let there be no misconception: stating one’s belonging does not amount to proclaiming one’s Africanness. Africanness is self-evident. A fact. A fundamental that can be kept silent. What shows through is the sense of this Africanness. What makes a work open, legible to all, is the fact that it contains a slice, no matter how tiny, of ourselves.
Owning African creativity
Questions on contemporary African art have developed hard and fast since the early 1990s. The origins of local quests for modernist practices can be traced back to mid-to-late 19th-century inceptions of resistance to colonial rule by elite black intellectuals in the cities of West Africa. And the history of these debates goes back to the African independences, when the new states tried to define their own aesthetics. But this art, which could be called ‘modern art”, was restricted by political and aesthetic questions. The primary aim of the schools founded at the time, such as the Dakar school, was self-assertion. Being an African artist had to mean something. Intellectuals, such as historian Cheik Anta Diop, one of the celebrators of Afrocentrism, went as far as advocating a social and functional art. Since then, African creativity has tried to break free from the exogenous, often Western, gaze in which it was imprisoned. But not until the late 1980s did a structured debate on the nature of this creativity begin to emerge.
In 1989, the Magiciens de la terre exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris sparked things off by proposing a definition of contemporary creation that fuelled many years of debate. Since then, numerous other exhibitions have been held in the United States, Europe and Japan, displaying other visions. A split appeared between English-speaking, French-speaking and Arabic-speaking visions — though the latter has been kept out of the major debates — that revealed ideological divides among young exhibition curators, a number of whom, notably, were African. Nevertheless, it seemed a hopeless gamble to want to approach this creation in a purely aesthetic manner, without all the historical, political and ideological trappings, despite the odd isolated attempt. Doubtless for many reasons, the most obvious in my opinion being that you cannot think a continent without taking into account its complexity. Africa is not a country.
Intellectual context
For even though the past decade has witnessed an interesting evolution in the approach to African art, the same theoretical stumbling blocks still stand firm. That some artists from the continent have managed to make a small space for themselves on the international circuit cannot suffice. Until today, the possible unity of a contemporary African creativity had still not been tackled head on. The exhibitions dotted over the past decade have mainly striven to define historical and thematic frameworks focusing on context more than aesthetics, or sources of inspiration, political problems rather than creative processes. The time has come to tackle the contemporary fact as such — that is, to look first at the work then envisage the intellectual context that produced it. And this is where a continent-wide vision of creativity can be justified. We have seen the contradictory currents that ripple across contemporary Africa: from the end of apartheid in South Africa to the land disputes in Zimbabwe; from learning peace in Angola and Mozambique to the explosions coursing through Central Africa; from the upsurge in religious fundamentalism in the north to the apprenticeship of what, for want of a better word, we will call democracy. Several questions underlie the spirit of the Africa Remix exhibition: What is Africa? What does contemporaneity represent within this geographical entity? How is it defined?
Africa Remix is multidisciplinary because creativity is multidisciplinary; because Africa has always considered creativity in its entirety, by integrating all creative forms and disciplines. Art has remained magic. And while the West killed God in order to enter the modern age, Africans have too many gods — it would be pointless to kill them all now. Some of the artists will no doubt deny it, but it seems to me that in each presented work the spirit, in the broadest sense of the word, is fully visible. For the majority of artists in Africa Remix, the Africa that was — the myth some people still feel nostalgic for — ceased to exist long ago. They have exchanged the dreamland for the real land, though nonetheless still virtual. A land they recompose each in their own way, with their own sensibility.
The period that Africa Remix proposes to illustrate, bears witness to a certain maturity and appeasement, where artists have no need to prove anything through their work. The stakes have changed. They are no longer essentially ethnic, though no-one can disown their roots, they are aesthetic and political. The quest remains, but its nature has changed.
Their quest today is existential. It is a quest where space and territory — as a shaper of individuality — intervene naturally. But the notions of space and territory no longer correspond to tangible borders. They no longer apply to an enclosed political or geographical space. This is why we have divided Africa Remix into three parts — identity and history, body and soul, city and land. Again, this should not be seen as a classification, but rather as an attempt to understand which forces are at work in contemporary African art, which recurring elements leave traces in each of the works on show. For we have had ample time to learn that what is contemporary cannot be restricted to a single, global definition. It inevitably passes through individual filters. It reveals itself as recognition of the other. The artists brought together in Africa Remix are here because they all have something in common. From one end of Africa to another, artists share ambitions and doubts that don’t necessarily find an echo in their own societies.
This is an edited version of the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, published by Jacana Media. The essay was translated from the French by Gail Courcy-Ireland