Contemporary African art

Contemporary African art is commonly understood to be art made by artists in Africa and the African diaspora in the post-independence era. However, there are about as many understandings of contemporary African art as there are curators, scholars and artists working in that field. All three terms of this "wide-reaching non-category [sic]" are problematic in themselves: What exactly is "contemporary", what makes art "African", and when are we talking about art and not any other kind of creative expression?
Western scholars and curators have made numerous attempts at defining contemporary African art since the 1990s and early 2000s and proposed a range of categories and genres. They triggered heated debates and controversies, especially on the foundations of postcolonial critique. Recent trends indicate a far more relaxed engagement with definitions and identity ascriptions. The global presence and entanglement of Africa and its contemporary artists have become a widely acknowledged fact that still requires and provokes critical reflection, but finds itself beyond the pressure of self-justification.
By closely examining reviews of contemporary African art from 1990 to 2014, it seeks to uncover the underlying discourses of power and ideology. It also sees the art critic as a component of a larger system that creates and re-creates knowledge about Africa and African culture.
Although African art has always been contemporary to its producers, the term "contemporary African art" implies a particular kind of art that has conquered, or, as some would say, has been absorbed by the international art world and art market since the 1980s. It is in that decade when Europe and the United States became aware of art made in Africa by individual artists, thus breaking with the colonial tradition of assuming collective "ethnic" origins of so-called "tribal art" as found in most ethnographic collections. The exhibition Magiciens de la terre by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989 is widely considered (but also challenged as) a key exhibition in this very recent history of international reception of African and other non-western art. However, this reception, too, has its roots in an exotic and mystifying view on African culture from a dominant western position, as Rasheed Araeen argued in his response to Magiciens de la terre.
Therefore, although this exhibition and many that followed had a strong influence in creating a kind of a common understanding of what constitutes contemporary African art, it is true that it has been and still is subject to discussions and controversies. Almost every exhibition following Magiciens de la terre offered a taxonomy or system of categorization that helped to reflect the very notion of contemporary African art, but they failed to recognize the postcolonial need of giving up the Eurocentric epistemology.
Contemporary African art is believed to feature particularities typical to African aesthetics, while at the same time it shares properties with other international contemporary arts. Therefore, it is both, shaped by and feeding into the globalizing art worlds and art markets, like any other contemporary art. At the same time, there are a lot of contemporary art practices and forms in African regions and cities that are almost exclusively locally known. While meeting all three requirements of being contemporary, art, and African, they fail to fit into a certain type of art production that has been spreading on the international art market since at least the 1980s.
Exhibitions variously showed work by artists based in Africa; by artists using aesthetics typical to African traditions; by African artists living in the West but including aesthetics and topics related to their "roots"; traditional artworks related to customary practices such as rituals; and urban African art that reflects the modern experience of cultural pluralism and hybridity. Modernity as a colonial and postcolonial experience appears as an intrinsic and significant attribute in most conceptions of contemporary African art. Scholars and curators therefore have proposed a wide range of taxonomies that tried firstly to define what is African about this art, and secondly, the range of genres it covers. Diverse attempts to define particular genres of contemporary African art, however, mirrored the fascination of art scholars and curators for the appropriation of cultural elements from assumed "Western" into "African" modes of expression and traditions.
One example is Marshall W. Mount, who proposed four categories: first, "survivals of traditional styles", which show continuities in traditional working material and methods such as bronze casting or wood carving; secondly, art inspired by Christian missions; thirdly, souvenir art in the sense of tourist or "airport art", such as by the likes of artworks by South African visual artist Ezequiel Mabote, as defined later by Jules-Rossette; and finally, an emerging art requiring "techniques that were unknown or rare in traditional African art". Valentin Y. Mudimbe, in turn, proposes to think of three currents, rather than categories, namely a "tradition-inspired" one, a "modernist" trend, and "a popular art", whereby Mount's categories would be situated somewhere "between the tradition-inspired and the modernist trend". Similar to other categorizations, this proposal considers the education of the artists as well as the envisaged clientele/patrons as important factors for the respective "currents". In the exhibition catalogue of Africa Explores (1991), curator Susan Vogel distinguished between "traditional art", "new functional art", "urban art", "international art", and "extinct art". Rejecting these categories, collector André Magnin proposed grouping similar works into sections named "territory", "frontier" and "world" in his survey book Contemporary African Art, thus placing them into "imaginary maps". However, this approach was also criticized by Dele Jegede, with convincing arguments against its ethnocentric perspective. Among other things, Jegede pointed to the hubris of attempts to talk about art of a whole continent, but also to the common reflex to exclude Northern Africa from such considerations and to follow a global, rather than "particularistic focus on the study of the art of the continent" that would provide more specific and deeper bodies of knowledge. In the 1990 exhibition Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, the Studio Museum in Harlem tried to take the perspective of the presented artists and distinguished between African artists who refuse outside influences; African artists who adopt modes of Western art; and African artists who fuse both strategies.
Common to all these categorizations is their reliance on dichotomies between art and craft, Europe and Africa, urban and rural, and traditional and contemporary. These dichotomies tend to consider mutual influences in African and European art as an exception, rather than the norm. Moreover, they fail to think of African art independent from Europe as its counterpart or "influence", resulting in a frequent reproach of African artists "copycatting" or "mimicking" European achievements of modernism. Such Eurocentric attitudes have been revealingly criticized by theorists such as Olu Oguibe, Rasheed Araeen, Nkiru Nzegwu, Okwui Enwezor or Salah M. Hassan. This problem is not easy to solve, and in some cases, it is tackled by simply subverting any attempt at categorization.
The exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, directed by Clémentine Deliss and curated by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Salah M. Hassan, David Koloane, Wanjiku Nyachae and El Hadji Sy (London, 1995) is a case in point. Rather than grafting binary taxonomies, the show narrated seven modern art histories in different parts of Africa by invited curators and artists who were familiar with these recent histories and their respective art scenes. The exhibition proved to offer a highly complex, historically informed and well-researched presentation.
Another example for subverting binary taxonomies is the book Contemporary African Art after 1980 by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu. Rather than putting contemporary African art in relation to Western traditions, they contrast it with modern African art, in that it defies linear grand narratives of modernism and is radically postcolonial. "[F]irst, within categories of time, it is neither belated nor does it exist out of time; second, because it is post-historical, it did not emerge out of a succession of historical styles; third, because it is critical of colonial valorization of an authentic past, it is postcolonial; and fourth, in relation to its post-colonialism, it seeks, according to Hans Belting's thesis, to be post-ethnic […]. Neither being out of time nor belated, contemporary African art strategically inhabits a third epistemological space by being in time." As they add, this being "fundamentally of its time" counts for all contemporary art, not only the African. In their book, Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu discuss contemporary African art by its approaches and guiding topics, rather than trying to define categories on the basis of styles, markets or traditions. Their chapters therefore are designated as "Between postcolonial utopia and postcolonial realism", "Networks of practice" in the globalized field of cultural production, "Politics, culture and critique", "Archive, document, memory", "Abstraction, figuration and subjectivity" and "The body politic: difference, gender, sexuality". In doing so, they locate contemporary African art within a historical perspective, something that had largely been missed in previous discussions.
Digital art has been defined in different ways. For instance, Lizelle Bisschoff defines it as "artistic work or practice that uses digital technologies as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation, dissemination and exhibition process". Such works include, among others, audio-visual production, animation, interactive projects, websites, filmmaking, graphic art, and design. And such practices include, among others, net art, digital installation art, virtual reality, and digitized forms of painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, music, etc. When applied to or exhibited in and on Africa, they constitute what is referred to as African Digital Art. Below are some artists who can be regarded as African digital artists.
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Including: Said Afifi (Morocco) | Nirveda Alleck ( Mauritius) | Jude Anogwih (Nigeria) | Younes Baba-Ali (Morocco) | Rehema Chachage (Tanzania) | Saidou Dicko (Burkina Faso) | Ndoye Douts (Senegal) | Kokou Ekouagou (Togo) | Mohamed El Baz (Morocco) | Samba Fall (Senegal) | Dimitri Fagbohoun (Benin) | Wanja Kimani (Kenya) | Nicene Kossentini (Tunisia) | Kai Lossgott (South Africa) | Michele Magema (D.R.Congo) | Nathalie Mba Bikoro (Gabon) | Victor Mutelekesha (Zambia) | Johan Thom (South Africa) | Saliou Traoré (Burkina Faso) | Guy Woueté (Cameroon) | Ezra Wube (Ethiopia).
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