A Global Africa at Dak'art 7

Abstract

n the grounds of the faded gran deur of the Art Deco building of the Musee de la Place Soweto is an enfilade of stable-like spaces. One of these is an unfinished open beamed structure with a strut di viding it visually into two areas. The floor is rough and marked. It is a space outside of the main venues designated for the Biennale and thus on the periphery. One of the Dak'Art artists, Claudia Cristovao, selected this space, which was largely ignored by other exhibitors, to show her multiple channel video installation Fata Morgana or The Mirage, where people who were bom in but left as children dur ing the years of independence from colonial rule were asked to describe their memories and projections. An imaginary country emerges from these stories, not any one country but one global Africa as real in each person's mind as it is impos sible to find on any map. Surrounding five small, intimate screens recording the indi vidual interviews is a large projection of a Namibian ghost town-a community built during the diamond rush and desert ed almost immediately by the prospectors searching for a more promising area. This town is slowly being swallowed by the col ored desert sands, which stand for the shift ing sands of memory and the projections of the interviewees who speak in Portuguese with French subtitles. After the grand prize-giving ceremony, where Christovao was recipient of one of the major prizes, I was approached by an Eng lish-speaking fellow South curator who had trouble understanding the piece. It then became apparent that we, as members of the jury, were mainly Francophone and therefore the Portuguese and French used in the interview structure was clear. However this use of language (prevalent in the many multimedia pieces) set up barriers for many viewers. For me, this incident was key in the context of this biennale, whose theme was Afrique: Entendues, sous-entendus et malenten dus, officially and loosely translated in the catalogue as Africa: Agreements, Allusions, and Misunderstandings. The notion of an African contemporary art is as problem atic as the notion of an identity. In this age of globalization there is now a bi ennale style of art. Many of the exhibitors are familiar names on the international bien nale circuit whether it be in Venice, Istanbul, Valencia or Cairo. The overall theme focus ing on the continent has inherent problems. is a complex and large continent with fifty-odd countries, where languages and cultural practices are many and chan nels of communication are generally poor. Until recently, a person who wanted to trav el from South to Dakar had to fly to Europe and then back again to Africa. That in itself was a symbolic journey, where to discover one's own continent meant doing so via Europe. Maybe it is still a bit like that-many African exhibitors are resi dents of France, Holland, and the US, while most of their work is involved in examin ing issues of identity and the histories which they are trying to recuperate. At least a third of the exhibits of Dak'Art 2006 were digital ly based, flying in the face of the stereotypes of that are still held by many of the prominent Westem collectors and curators who visited the Biennale hoping to capture some of the romanticism demon strated by many of the exhibiting artists. This romanticism was manifested by the in corporation of elements such as recycled ma terials, soil surrounding the exhibits, print fabrics, and references to traditional art forms or materials-practices that have successfully and calculatedly brought many artists into the international arena. El Anatsui's work was an outstanding ex ample of departure from these stereotypes, his use of aluminum bottle tops and copper wire raising these materials to the level of a transformative experience. His painstaking method of stitching together the discarded pliable bottle tops, piece by piece, produced a large-scale theatrical object that folds and unfolds like a curtain, claiming a dramatic space and asserting a dominant position. The artwork suggests West traditions of sewing opulent cloth into ritual garments which, when worn in particular ceremonies, linked the living and dead. The sense of scale, drama, and history in this work cre ated a spiritual experience from a twenty first century city's debris. To return to the overall theme, for me the whole of the show did not equal the sum of its parts. The structure of a biennale can be problematic in that the idea of mul tiple venues is designed primarily for a general rather than a curated show. The Venice Biennale was originally con ceived as a symbol of the carving up of Eu rope into nation states, and the idea of discrete national pavilions persisted for many years. Biennales now often serve as tools for the promotion of cultural tourism and occur in cities where art is moribund between such events. The idea of the exhibition itself as a work of art is one that has gained currency in the last few years, but is often neglected in international shows about art that have suffered from the survey syndrome. The Dakar Biennale, being a large-scale show about art in Africa, lost the oppor tunity to make a studied and coherent state ment. Works seemed to be placed without consideration of the relationships between them, and thus the opportunity to set up dialogues and visual connections was lost. Due mainly to problems with funding, many curators and artworks arrived in a haphazard manner, often at the eleventh hour, creating a situation in which spaces, instead of being planned and prescribed, were chosen by those who either happened to arrive on the turf first or who shouted the loudest. Dak'Art 7 succeeded, then, primarily as an event and only secondarily as a curated exhibition. This is, after all, the most sus tainable biennale on the continent, and one that provides a unique space for the com ing together of art and its assess ment. It brings the world to rather than bringing to the world. a