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Home Features International International The Politics of Exclusion: The Undue Fixation of Western-Based African Curators on Contemporary Africa Diaspora Artists-A Critique

This emergent development of contemporary African art curatorship is harmful and detrimental to the growth of contemporary art on the mother continent. Even though some may argue that these Diaspora-based contemporary African art shows have put contemporary African art on the world map of art, and that there is a resurgence of interest in African art, the truth is that the negatives outweigh the positives. Certain African curators and writers living in the West are responsible for this deceptively positive, but ultimately degenerate, trend in the development of African art.

 

The latest in this line of lopsided contemporary African art exhibitions is the blockbuster exhibition dubbed Who Knows Tomorrow, which took place in the German capital, Berlin, in 2010. Five leading African artists, El Anatsui, Zarina Bhinji, António Ole, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Pascale Marthine Tayou had their works prominently displayed in four of Berlin’s state museums. None of the artists in Who Knows Tomorrow should need any introduction. They are all internationally renowned; their works have been shown all over the world and are in major museum collections.

 

The  year 2010 marked 125 years of the infamous Berlin Conference, which split Africa into bits and pieces and began the scramble for the continent, from which’s yoke and bondage the African continent is still reeling and struggling to extricate itself from, in spite of all the liberation struggles of the twentieth century.1 With the exhibition, Germany has confronted its responsibility for its colonial history as well as its post-colonial present by inviting African artists into its special spaces closely synonymous with its self-image and national and spiritual identity.

 

The show was accompanied by a voluminous, hardbound catalog, many of the contributors, prominent writers on African cultural issues. But for a clause in the essay by Chika Okeke-Agulu, “No Condition is Permanent: The Art and Politics of Euro-African Encounter,” I would describe all the essays in the book as excellent and insightful. However, I was grossly put off by this clause in Okeke-Agulu’s otherwise beautiful write-up on El Anatsui’s work – photographs from places he visited on his 2009 site-visit to Berlin.

 

Okeke-Agulu suggested that the piece might be a “coded response” to “critics who celebrate Anatsui’s residency in Africa, as though it makes him any more African than his compatriots who live and work outside the continent.”2 He says that the series locates Anatsui within the “debate about the identity of contemporary African artists” who are part of the “postcolonial world in which subjectivities are mediated by images, travel, nationality, and by networks of finance, technology, and so forth.”3

 

I would have to respond that Anatsui presenting prosaic photographs of places he visited and events he attended during his site-visit to Berlin was “no coded response,” I reiterate, “no coded response,” to critics who celebrate his residency in Africa. It is this careless commentary by Okeke-Agulu that has sparked off this essay.

 

The artist is a universal being who speaks a universal language, which cuts across national and geographical barriers. The artist can be inspired by anything he encounters, even if it is far removed from his national geographical origin. I myself left Germany a few weeks before the opening of Who Knows Tomorrow, and splashed whole sets of pictures from my time in Berlin onto my Facebook page. This does not mean I entered into any debate about my identity as an African artist in a globalized village. Anatsui, similarly, was simply enamored with what he encountered whilst on the site-visit. Everything could potentially be a stimulus to spark off an artist’s creative work. It is superfluous for Okeke-Agulu to want to associate Anatsui with any identity debate, suggesting that Anatsui’s photos of his visit to Germany are a coded rebuttal to his critics who celebrate his residency in Africa, that he is a citizen of the world. 

 

Anatsui, to a large extent, has always engaged global issues – history, memory, consumerism, migration, transience and transformation – even though his work is wholly rooted in and about Africa.4 He has always had a universal outlook to life, and that is the hallmark of any serious artist. He did not have to go to Germany, present photos of his site-visit to “enter the debate about the identity of contemporary African artists,” as Okeke Agulu suggests. Anatsui is reported to have once said: “I don’t see anything wrong with exposure [to Western ideas and forms]… If one really has a strong personality, the danger of it being eroded is not very strong. Absorb influences, but be yourself. The influence might rather make you stronger… So I don’t close my eyes to influences outside, whether Africa or European.”5

 

Why would anybody now want to imperiously force any Globalized Identity Debate cloak upon Anatsui? He himself unequivocally state s that he prefers to stay in Africa and does not want to relocate to a Western metropolis.6 The African environ and history are the stimuli for his work. He has always been proud of his origin: “born, 1944 in Anyako, Ghana…” unlike many other successful African artists living in the West, who do not want to be associated with Africa, who find the “African” tag rather condescending and derogatory, for whatever reason, I do not know.

 

Okeke-Agulu’s cursory comment only feeds the growing perception of a grand scheme spearheaded by the Nigerian-born international curator and writer, Okwui Enwezor, and his cohort of disciples, Okeke-Agulu included, to shift the polarity of contemporary African art practice and discourse from Africa to the West. This strategy is obnoxious and evil and must be challenged and condemned in no uncertain terms. The Okwui Enwezor School paints a bleak picture of Africa, as if nothing worthwhile is happening on the continent. The School has developed a complex, bizarre philosophy based on the writings of V.Y. Mudimbe and Paul Gilroy. It suggests that Africa and African culture are imaginary concepts, a figment of the imagination, that no common African culture exists. It says that the real Africa is the African Diaspora, the Africa that has come in contact with the West.7 Based on this false and unfounded philosophy, all their curatorial work and writings on contemporary African art are skewed in favor of the few African artists domiciled in the West, in Europe or America, marginalizing the bulk of their counterparts who live and work on the African continent.

 

Even beginning artists, neophytes who are now cutting their teeth, but for the obvious fact that they live in the West, have been made overnight into superstars by Okwui Enwezor and his School. Meanwhile, some African contemporary masters, who have worked a lifetime and are in the dotage of their years, have been banished into total obscurity and oblivion, all for the simple reason that they live in Africa. This curatorial protocol adopted by Enwezor and his team, which privileges the Diaspora African artist to the neglect of the home-based one – and is now fast being adopted by other non-African curators and writers as well, because they see it as the status quo – is absolutely wrong and odious and must be resisted. Enwezor and his disciples must change from this protocol to look more closely into the mother continent, the sooner the better.

 

It is not with animosity that I interrogate Okwui Enwezor’s curatorial work. Some colleagues of mine, interestingly, all living abroad, have tried to restrain me from going ahead with my critique. Some have suggested that Enwezor has become so powerful that he could easily destroy me. Others see a criticism of Enwezor as an indirect attack on the whole establishment of contemporary African art, which, to them, has struggled so much to get to its present height and must be spared any reproach. This is even more the reason why Enwezor’s role in African art must be brought to close scrutiny. He has become the apotheosis synonymous with contemporary African art in the West, in fact, the sole advocate. Anything he spills out there, the art world would swallow whole-meal without question, because it comes from Okwui Enwezor.

 

 

 

I am proud I was one of the first to hail Okwui Enwezor as far back as 2003, when few people knew him on the African continent. In an international conference paper, I praised him as unmatched: “the non-pareil African Art Historian, Critic and Curator.”8 But he is beginning to go crooked. And I am only being a voice of the worried observers, the voiceless masses.

 

The undue focus Okwui Enwezor and his coterie pay to African Diaspora artists only smacks of selfish motivations and curatorial laziness. With Enwezor’s meteoric rise to the apogee of the curatorial world, could he and his team not go back home to Africa, to help build the necessary structures and platform for the advancement of contemporary art on the continent? But because of their continual stay in the West, they have instead had to create the erroneous impression to the world that there is not much art happening on the continent of Africa, that if you want authentic contemporary African art, just look to the West. Look to the African Diaspora, which, to them, is the real Africa. For one man’s selfishness to justify his continual stay in the West, to protect a hard-earned empire with himself as Curator-Supremo, a whole continent’s art must be marginalized and subjugated through self-satisfying, idiosyncratic strategies. This is preposterous!

 

It is easy to recycle the same old names. These artists live in the West, they have visibility and accessibility. It is expensive, of course, to undertake frequent field research into Africa, to visit all the countries on the continent to find out what is currently happening on the ground. African contemporary art is in a dynamic and complex flux, and it is difficult to keep pace. A survey book on contemporary African art written today will be outdated in three years, at most. The creative energy of the African continent is simply overwhelming and has not been documented or theorized enough. It is almost impossible to keep abreast with it. And that is exactly what I expect Enwezor and his team to attempt to do, but they prefer the easier pathway, which I call lazy curatorship, for want of a better expression – sitting comfortably in their studies in Europe and America, turning over the same old Western-based names, over and over again, in their representations of Africa.

 

First, Enwezor’s strategy eclipses and financially strangles artists based on the continent. They are kept from joining the global post-modernist discourse, their work dismissed as moribund. Many struggle to eke out a bare living from inadequate sales. In fact, the works of African artists living in Africa, apart from El Anatsui and one or two others, sell for a pittance. Meanwhile, those of their colleagues abroad, because of their constant exposure, visibility, circulation and discursiveness, assume a much greater market and cultural value. 

 

Secondly, the perception Enwezor disseminates of the West as center increases the brain-drain from Africa to the West. The young, budding artist who sees African artists living in the West as more successful than their counterparts on the continent would not see any future for himself/herself in Africa. He/She would pack bag-and-baggage and head to the West, depleting the continent further of its human resource.

 

Thirdly, Enwezor’s protocol marginalizes African art forms that do not fall into his School’s parochial definitions of Postmodernist art. He does not recognize that Postmodernism allows art from high and low cultures to co-exist in the same discursive space. We do not have to clone ourselves as Euro-Americans to be welcomed to the global discourse on art today. But that is exactly what Enwezor has done.

 

If Enwezor had, for instance, presented the native Sirigu (Ghana) wall painters as Africa’s contemporary artistic expression, with a discourse accompanying it, I believe the art world would have embraced and welcomed it. But for easy accessibility, Enwezor, who was living in the West at that time (and still does), preferred to settle on Western-based African artists, many of whom, in order to become acceptable in the West, had tailored their works to look like work by Western artists – mainly a preponderance of installation work and new-media, that is, technology art, video and photography. Lost was a golden opportunity to present African contemporary art as it truly was, as authentically reflected from the ground. So, Enwezor defensively has to engage in outrageous definitions of authenticity in relation to cultural production, who the African was and what African culture represented vis-à-vis global culture, to validate the work of artists in the Diaspora.

 

Enwezor should not delude himself that he has brought contemporary African art to a universalizing culture. With his renunciation of all that is traditionally African, he has rather succumbed to the Western hegemonic dominance. Instead of a true global culture that gives cognizance to various cultures in order to achieve a universal mono-culture, what we have today is still the Western-dominated art. From one art fair to the other, from São Paolo to Basel, from Istanbul to Cairo, we see the same work. The Western metropolises of London, New York, Paris, Barcelona and Berlin are still the major centers of world art, where all the decisions on global art are made. Enwezor has sold Africa short. 

 

Something in Enwezor has changed. Something has softened. He once offered piquant, scorching critiques in a very belligerent manner. In 1996, he said of Jean Pigozzi and his collection in the africa ’95 exhibition, that Pigozzi uses his money and connections to “legitimize and valorize many questionable artists (in his collection), pushing them to the world as the only ‘authentic’ artists from Africa.”9 Enwezor said that this silences debate and criticism, allying the art institutions with “what is basically a con game.”

 

Enwezor asked the curators, “Why do we never consider the achievements of those artists who at great professional cost and individual isolation have equally transfigured the borders constituting the notion of Africanity?”10 He questioned why the curators did not feature artists like Bili Bidjocka, Ike Ude, Yinka Shonibare, Olu Oguibe, Folake Shoga, Kendell Geers, António Ole, Oledele Bangboye, Lubaina Himid, and Ouattara, to name a few. All of whom, interestingly, live in the West. 

 

There is no gainsaying that Okwui Enwezor, with his chief collaborator at that time, Olu Oguibe, gallantly and relentlessly fought the art establishment, the Euro-American machinery, which was largely unreceptive to contemporary African art and practiced the policy of exclusion. He challenged vehemently, “Discussion is never elevated to a pitch that allows for even the most rudimentary debates around contemporary Africa’s post-colonial enunciation, theoretical strategies, and artistic practice.”11 But finally, the doors were perceptibly opened to allow Okwui Enwezor and his handpicked artists, mostly African Diaspora artists, access into the world of global critical discourse and the doors quickly shut again.

 

Most of the artists just mentioned and a few others Enwezor endorsed have gone on to become world-class artists with highly successful careers, whilst their colleagues back in Africa still operate on the fringes. Once Enwezor found himself in the comfort zone of the curatorial world riding the seat of power, he forgot that he had once knocked obstreperously on the doors of the Establishment to open up for African art. He had laid down his fire, his once peremptory knock, silent.  And he was now practicing the very act of exclusion – a thing he had once condemned – marginalizing a sector of contemporary Africa artists, in fact, nearly all those living and working on the mother continent of Africa today.

 

 

On a number of platforms and in his writings, the latest being his book co-authored with Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art Since 1980, Enwezor frames the genesis of contemporary African art within an historical time capsule from the 1980s to ’90s.12 In his critique of africa ’95 as well, he says that African artists, intellectuals, and writers “pressurized by totalitarian regimes have either fled into exile or have been silenced by censorship.”13 Younger artists “are no longer indebted to a vision of pan-Africanism” and “have joined the exodus.” The outward flow of talent, he says, means that “a great many African artists…are no longer resident on the continent. This is a major shift, reversing much of the pioneering work undertaken in the 50s and 60s.”14 

 

Enwezor presupposes that the African artists’ migration to the West is what gave birth to contemporary African art, predicating its global entry, reception and recognition. There are serious factual inaccuracies in his assertions. Unlike the Second World War – which drove most of the twentieth century avant-garde artists to New York from Paris, making New York the new world capital of art – the exodus which took place from Africa because of the strangulating economic conditions, dictatorial regimes, The World Bank/ IMF’s infamous Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP), etc., did not shift in any way the production of art from Africa to the West, warranting the current marginalization of contemporary art on the continent.

 

Yes, there was a mass migration to the West in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, most of them economic refugees, but, interestingly, the majority of creative practitioners of art stayed behind or quickly returned home, during this dark epoch in Africa’s post-colonial history. Just a handful of African artists actually joined the exodus, understandably, because contemporary African creativity met with very poor reception in the West at the time. Enwezor himself describes the misery and rejection the African artist or writer in the West faced in his review of africa ’95. I ask him, how could the “gutted whore-house” of yesterday overnight become the golden theater for the playing out of contemporary Africa art? 15 What has changed?

 

During the entire period Enwezor frames as the exodus of African artists to the West, hundreds more African artists practiced their craft on the African continent than in the Diaspora. I refer Enwezor to a small publication, a lexicon on contemporary African art, titled, L’Art Africain Contemporain (Contemporary African Art: Guide), published in 1992 and again in 1996, edited by Nicole Guez.16 The book reveals that artists working on the continent far outnumbered those abroad. In the section on Nigeria, only twenty-four of over two hundred listed lived in the West at the time. Under my country, Ghana, the artists enumerated in the directory as living at home, such as Ablade Glover and Ato Delaquis, are still the leading, actively practicing figures today. 

The very-well-known Nigerian-born artists currently in circulation – Sokari Douglas Camp, OBE, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Odili Donald Odita, and Chris Ofili – were all born or lived outside of Nigeria starting from childhood. They were not part of any exodus in the ’80s. So, who were the African artists who moved to the West at that time and changed the terrain of practice and discourse on contemporary African art, making the African Diaspora the World Capital of “contemporary African art”?

 

The empirical and verifiable evidence from Guez’s Contemporary African Art: Guide suggests that there were no mass movements by African artists and art writers to the West in the ’80s and ’90s, that what Okwui Enwezor has always described as the exodus is a misinformation, exaggeration and figment of his own imagination. He had to weave a seemingly credible story to validate his undue fixation with African Diaspora artists, and his own continual stay in the West. 

Only in the last few years has the number of young African artists migrating to the West stepped up – apparently because they do not see any bright prospects for themselves in Africa. Why? Obviously, because of the politics of exclusion being perpetuated by Enwezor and his school. “To be visible and valued, my brother (sister), you have got to move to the West,” is the maxim today.

Yet Enwezor and his disciples should know that we all could not go live in the West. Many of us continue to live in Africa by choice.

I must say, African artists living in Africa are enraged and incensed by Enwezor’s African Diaspora bias. They see it as a diabolical strategy against them, calculated to undermine their efforts in Africa and hamstring their growth. So, instead of working in unison for the common good of Africa, African artists in Africa now see themselves pitched in an unholy confrontation against their counterparts abroad: the local versus the Diaspora. This development must be nipped in the bud.

 

Since Enwezor has the clout to organize mega-shows, it greatly behooves him as well to quickly redress this lopsided status quo through new shows and publications focusing on artists on the continent. He would be correcting the negative perception he is creating or has created in the minds of African artists in Africa, and be saving his own badly tarnished image and legacy as well. Enwezor and his team must look for the necessary funding and embark on frequent curatorial trips to Africa. It is the only way to know what is going on, on the ground. As the Igbo (Nigerian) adage goes, “You cannot stand at one place to watch a masquerade.” If you are removed from the ever-changing flux of contemporary African art, you will definitely miss out on a lot. Enwezor cannot be confined to his base in the US and, recently, Europe and claim to know what “Contemporary African Art” really is. 

 

I would not mind if Enwezor were to define the kind of contemporary African art he propagates as “Contemporary African Diaspora Art,” “Contemporary African Art in the Diaspora,” “Contemporary African Art Abroad” or “Contemporary African Art in the West (USA or Europe).” But to define contemporary African art as that which dispenses completely with the art of the African continent and its colonial and post-colonial history, and which is situated wholly in the West, is a distortion of history, an aberration of the truth and a travesty of justice to the African. Enwezor’s enunciation that “Africa is nowhere, Africa is everywhere” should be challenged to the hilt. How could defining contemporary African art preclude the geographical boundary and terrain of the mother African continent as a vital arena for the production of art?

 

Earlier definitions of contemporary African art have always recognized the presence of the African Diaspora as an essential component of the African continent (along with Guez’s guide, book surveys such as Kojo Fosu’s Twentieth Century Art of Africa and Jean Kennedy’s New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change).17 But the focus was always on African artists in Africa. Enwezor’s theoretical definition of contemporary African art turns its back to all that has gone on artistically on the African continent. It centers the contemporaneity of African art practice and thought in the Western metropolis, buttressed by the philosophies of Paul Gilroy and V.Y. Mudimbe.18 It is outrageous and bogus, to say the least, and should be rejected outright.

 

Yes, the African Diaspora, no doubt, is important. It has contributed in many ways to the motherland, particularly in the remittances of often-scarce foreign exchange back home to shore up ailing economies. It is, however, only an adjunct. The African Diaspora can never supplant or subjugate the motherland. If, indeed, the real Africa is the Diaspora, then we might as well sell the whole African continent and go live in the West. There will be no need to continue building good governance, a market economy, rule of law, art galleries, museums and all the modern-day amenities and infrastructure for comfortable living, as you find in the West.

Africa’s post-colonial story of migration and its attendant identity politics is just another chapter in the epic story of Africa. This chapter only makes the Africa saga more interesting. It can, however, not be used alone, as the entirety of the African postmodernist experience, as the sole pillar if you have to recount the African story. A chapter in the book cannot be used to replace the entire book. But that is exactly what Okwui Enwezor has done with his curatorial strategies and theoretical discursiveness of contemporary African art, which relocates contemporary African art practice to the West, hence his undue fixation with Africa Diaspora artists. This is only part of the African post-colonial and contemporary story, and not the totality of it. Okwui Enwezor should equally be, if not more, interested in how the globalization and post-modernist ethos have impacted directly on artistic development and production on the continent of Africa. He should also strive to globalize the local, that is, bring the work of artists based on the continent to the attention of the world. The example of El Anatsui actually encapsulates the ingenuity and creative energy which proliferates and abounds on the continent. There are more El Anatsuis, Yinka Shonibares, William Kentridges, Marlene Dumases, Wengechi Mutus and Julie Mehrutis.

 

We are living in a highly globalized village now. It does not really matter where you live today to function effectively. As an artist, you do not have to be living in a Western metropolis to be engaged in globalism. At the touch of a button in my hand, I can have a phone conversation with every corner of the world. At every moment in time, through satellite TV, I am abreast with what is happening around the world. I sit in my studio in Takoradi, Ghana and I see instantaneously an event which is unfolding across the world. Through the internet, I am further put closely in touch with the rest of the world. I can communicate instantly across time and space, and can follow closely all the happenings on the global art front. Unfortunately, this is where the tools of globalization stop for the African artist.

 

The utopia of globalization which Enwezor postulates presumes egalitarianism, with the free movement of people and goods around the globe. But the reality of the situation as exists now debars the African access to that free movement and full participation in the globalization process. Visa procurement alone to a Western country for an African is a harrowing experience, to say the least. Apart from the many requisite demands and very vigorous and sometimes humiliating procedures applicants are subjected to, astronomical visa fees are taken from applicants only to be refused the visa; the visa fee is never returned. 

 

This almost amounts to a rip-off, not to mention the endless, winding, labyrinthine queues in the scorching sun, which El Anatsui so well captured in his famous installation Visa Queue19. Okwui Enwezor, the high-priest of Globalization and open borders himself, recounts how, ironically, he was once refused an entry visa to Italy by the New York Italian Consulate, ostensibly because of his African name, even though he was carrying an American passport.20 He had already been named the Artistic Director for the Johannesburg Art Biennale and was in the process of putting the show together.

 

Unless and until the visa policy of Western countries towards Africans is changed, Africans cannot be considered to be full participants in the homogenization of cultures in the globalization process.

To conclude, I would say, I do not hold anything against my colleagues living and working in the West. Their achievement and success is my joy and pride. But theirs will not be complete until it is linked with the total success of their colleagues back home. African artists in Africa must be given equal international exposure and value placed on their work like their counterparts abroad. The spotlight must be brought to bear on them, too. Then African art could be said to have truly arrived at the New Golden Age. As of now, the seeming success contemporary African art is enjoying is only a charade, and could evaporate before our eyes tomorrow. 

 

 

• Central Africa
  • Cameroon
  • Central African Republic
  • Chad
  • Congo
  • Congo, (DRC)
  • Equatorial Guinea
  • Gabon
  • Sao Tome & Principe
  • Central Africa

• Eastern Africa
  • Burundi
  • Comoros
  • Djibouti
  • Eritrea
  • Ethiopia
  • Kenya
  • Madagascar
  • Mauritius
  • Mayotte
  • Réunion
  • Rwanda
  • Seychelles
  • Somalia
  • Sudan
  • Tanzania
  • Uganda
  • Eastern Africa

• Northern Africa
  • Algeria
  • Egypt
  • Libyan Arab Jamahiriya
  • Morocco
  • Tunisia
  • Western Sahara
  • Northern Africa

• Southern Africa
  • Angola
  • Botswana
  • Guinea-Bissau
  • Lesotho
  • Malawi
  • Mozambique
  • Namibia
  • South Africa
  • Swaziland
  • Zambia
  • Zimbabwe
  • Southern Africa

• Western Africa
  • Benin
  • Burkina Faso
  • Cape Verde
  • Côte d'Ivoire
  • Gambia
  • Ghana
  • Guinea
  • Liberia
  • Mali
  • Mauritania
  • Niger
  • Nigeria
  • Saint Helena
  • Senegal
  • Sierra Leone
  • Togo
  • Western Africa

• International
  • International
  • International

Title: Home Again
Name: Emmanuel Nkuranga
Country: Rwanda
Medium: Mixed Media
Size: 110 cm X 93 cm
Click here to view

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