“The Bag Is My Home”: Recycling “China Bags” in Contemporary African Art

African Modernism in America, 1947–1967

Cutting Edge of the Contemporary: KNUST, Accra, and the Ghanaian Contemporary Art Movement

Gifts from Our Elders: African Arts<i>and Visionary Art History</i>

Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

Made Visible: Contemporary South African Fashion and Identity curated by Kathryn Gunsch

African Vernacular Symbols of Black Intersex Children in Sinethemba Ngubane's Installations (2007-2016)

African Art Studies: Are They No Longer Taking the Paths Less Traveled?

This article extends and applies the concept ‘space invaders’ to the intersections between processes of social differentiation and international migration. Drawing on empirical research in London that combined an 18-month ethnography in places of leisure with 33 in-depth interviews with Brazilians, it focuses on how different Brazilians try to value themselves within the political environment of the United Kingdom that degrades and stigmatises the racialised, classed and legal category of ‘the migrant’, or ‘the space invader’. The article argues that the concept ‘space invaders’ makes visible the ways in which differences, rooted in the colonial and postcolonial history of Brazil, are reconstituted in new processes of social differentiation and racialisation when Brazilians move to London. This allows us to frame migratory experiences beyond generalising and homogenising representations.

David Nthubu Koloane (1938–2019)

The “Black Art” Renaissance:African Sculpture and Modernism Across Continents

This autobiographical reflection builds on Nirmal Puwar’s Space Invaders, where she frames women and people not racialised as white as ‘out of place’ and ‘out of space’ in white male spaces and places. For me disabled while Black, her work showed we may extend that conversation into how Critical Autism Studies, Disability Studies, and non/fiction publishing of autistic and otherwise disabled authors have been framed as white-only - those not white are seen as add-ons to the frame. Lack of ‘Black British’ disabled history, further lead me to write disability back into the history of the officially named yet stigmatising ‘Educationally Subnormal’ Scandal of the 1970s. It is also not difficult to see how ‘Educationally Subnormal’ [ESN] morphed into ableist term ‘Special Educational Needs’ [SEN]. The terminology is different but the underlying implications and inequalities remain the same. Going to school in Northants villages for near to the first fifteen years of my life, and playing cricket in those spaces for much longer, Puwar’s work may also point to the experiences of UK Black and Asian people who live and work in towns and the countryside - and in some cases may be able to trace their family history there going back many decades. My in-progress PhD research on Caribbean Northamptonshire Post-1945 takes that further in conversation with media, while I’ve also felt like a ‘space invader’ to much Black British media centralised on inner-cities - notably London. I found myself in Black characters appearing in rural period dramas, further to shows like Doctor Who and Merlin . From my rural schooling to disability and my questions of popular culture representations, these are all extended metaphors for the possibilities that we might all be space invaders in one context or another - even around people who look like us. This piece is a needed intervention showing there are a million and one ways to be human - just the mainstream is playing catchup, as per usual.

We Made It in Venice! But Then …? Reversing Notions of Center and Periphery

The spotted lanternfly, Lycorma delicatula (Hemiptera: Fulgoridae) (SLF), is a damaging invasive pest and generalist phloem feeder that has been found in 18 states in the United States. It has a complex multimodal communication system involving semiochemicals, emitted both from their honeydew and their bodies, and substrate-borne vibrations. Sensitive and effective traps for detection and survey are essential management tools, but no potent lures for SLF exist yet. We sought to test an alternative that relies on live-trapped SLF acting as lures to improve trap efficacy after the first SLF is captured. SLF circle traps were modified by replacing the commonly used plastic collection bag with a mesh bag pinned to the tree trunk. These allowed the trapped SLF to remain alive and generate signals through the mesh bag, thus leveraging their natural modes of communication to draw additional SLF into the traps. We compared mesh and plastic bags over three years targeting fourth instars and adults and found that prior to oviposition, circle traps with mesh bags captured significantly more fourth instar (70% mesh: 30% plastic) and adult SLF (59% mesh: 41% plastic) compared to plastic bags, but during oviposition time, the results were mixed.

can only recount the experience of Dak'Art through anecdotal impres sions. It is impossible to filter the powerful impact of the city of Dakar, the bumbling bureaucracy of Bien nale organizers, and the technical in competence of its installation, from a critical reading and analysis of the event. I do not consider this a negative experience per se, nor level it as crit icism. Sometimes things are what they are. Dak'Art, and the negotiation of its programs, is not a neutral affair and it does not function in a controlled environment. Everyday life in this contemporary urban city intrudes to provide a visceral, fragmented, and complex viewing experience, making a rewarding discovery of contemporary African art pro duction today. The disorganization of the Dak'Art Bien nale is legendary and, as far as I can ascer tain, not a single event in its history ever opened with all the works arrived and in stalled by the opening day. This year was no exception, and at the official opening on May 5, 2006, at the IFAN Musee d'art Africain, open crates were scattered everywhere, build ing and painting were frantically carrying on, and a number of artists' works were lying on the floor. This includes the installa tions of luminaries Frederic Bruly Bouabre and Abdoulaye Konate. I know of three art ists, Andrew Tshabangu, Robin Rhode, and Kudzanai Chiurai, whose work either had not arrived or was not installed when I left Dakar on May 10. Regardless of these distractions, many works at both WFAN and the Galerie National d'Art stood up to scrutiny. Works by Kori Newkirk (Diaspora/US) and Mounir Fatmi (Morocco) provided interesting if convergent perspectives. Newkirk's video projection Bixel is an almost irreverent choreography of a twirling and bobbing body, dressed in silver lame briefs and oozing glitter, born of a US-specific politics of race and sexuality. Fatmi's installation Getting out of History, in contrast, provided a searching outsider's documentary probe into the history of the Black Panther movement in the US. While it might be unfair to play these works against each other, the contextual collision cannot be ignored. At the same venue visitors were greet ed by a single-screen projection titled God Is Design by Adel Abdessemed (Algeria), an animation consisting of merging and morph ing graphic symbols, lines and shapes in a steady rhythm. While maintaining an or dered sequence, the work simultaneously questions this order, threatening to come apart at any moment. Another work down the hallway with a similarly critical view of religious iconography was Premonition of War (Scapegoat) by Wim Botha (South Africa). A compelling installation of seven large canvases (part of a monumental series) by Pelagie Gbaguidi (Rep. of Bn Members of this small and marginalized immigrant com munity provided personal mappings and an ecdotal descriptions of home, which Hobbs and Neustetter accessed to negotiate the city when they arrived, following and document ing idiosyncratic routes. These extraordinary documents and experiences were formed into a video installation and wall drawings. The project completes on its return to Jo hannesburg, where a presentation will be made to the Senegalese community to bring messages from home. It is a project that speaks eloquently about dislocation, but also about rich social engagements within for eign spaces. Another highlight in the Off was GawLab, a Dakar-based collective of cultur al agents and artists who presented a new media showcase at a popular restaurant and bar, Pen'Art Jazz Club. A collaboration be tween artists and software developers, the collective presented proposals new ways to explore the Internet as a tool art work, as well as ingenious ways of presenting such work publicly. Working from an Afri can vantage point, this groundbreaking initiative provides new platforms explo ration and experimentation. Attending the conference accompanying the main program, which was mostly con ducted in French, I had the nagging sense of receiving a watered-down version of things, with bad, fuzzy translations provid ed by the particularly poor language ser vices. However, that being said, seminal issues of contemporary art in Africa were much more rigorously discussed and debat ed than one would find in Southern Africa. I left with the distinct feeling of witnessing an extraordinary creative collision of critical minds and processes. And while difficulties with technical and bureaucratic delivery and the singular lingua franca might have brought an ironic twist to the theme of the exhibition, Africa: Agreements, Allusions and Misunderstandings, it is certain that Yacouba Konate, the chief curator, had achieved a complex and powerful realiza tion in the 7th Dak'Art Biennale of Contem porary African Art. K