For a time, before an art school friend arrives to meet me, I am alone in the Kunst Palast. I wind my way up and down its spiral staircases. I pass up tea and muffins in the ground-level salon. I linger at clusterings of museum-goers that seem implacably familiar. I observe the mud cloth suits and the dreadlocks and the passings of cocoa buttercolored babies. And then, someone I do not know tells me that there is a cake-cutting ceremony downstairs. Though I have no idea what this is, I fold myself into the downward flow and head toward the event. Reflecting on it now, I recall vaguely a gazebo-like structure on the lobby floor, a woman sitting, a man… maybe a cake. Just beyond them, however… and this I remember well…is a man beating a drum. He wears a crossed textile band across his bare chest, a leopard-print sarong, and a headdress that seems a little bit Barbie a little bit KISS. He has an accompanist to his left who plays a keyboard attached to an Apple Powerbook. The second man wears a t-shirt and a lime green chiffon wrap above a leopard-print sarong identical to the drummer’s. Frenzied, their playing builds in intensity, the sweat flows, and the camera crews move ever closer. I have flashbacks to my first trip to Africa more than a decade before, when I was a hopeful tourist looking for “real” Africans in the “authentic villages” to which buses drive en route to safaris in East Africa’s game parks. Since my village days, I have paid directly and inadvertently (by virtue of registering in one tourist hotel or another), to see Maasai jump and Luo divine. This, however, is my first trip to Germany and my first German art opening.

Certainly, there is enough in this scene alone to merit its own analysis. In the context of this writing, however, the drummer and his ghosts are merely the backdrop against which I experience a show that aims to pose the question “What is contemporary African Art?” By virtue of my interest in the discursive propositions of contemporary art exhibitions, my response is simultaneously to the premise, to the scene, and to the dire spectacle of an exhibition that brings together 90 artists from 25 African countries and, according to its organizers, “provides the first-ever comprehensive overview of the variety of artistic positions both on the huge contradictory African continent, and within the African Diaspora.”¹

As it unfolds, both through an extensive catalog and through the space of the exhibition, the show reveals an intent not only to represent but to redefine Africa, to update its stake in diaspora, to challenge the justness of history, to test the reach of “the contemporary,” and to claim a space in the present. According to its curatorial statement,

Africa Remix sets about coming to terms with this question [What is contemporary African Art?], whose apparent banality belies the complex reality. For to this day, Africa remains an almost tragic prisoner of its past history. This is why its artistic productivity has hitherto been overwhelmingly regarded in terms of the reactionary stereotypes of Primitivism or the exotic, or else seen through the eyes of the ideologies of postcolonialism. …Africa Remix draws attention, in impressive fashion, to the flexibility of African art and its rapid assimilation of globally debated issues in the medium of art, and presents them through installations, the new media of photography and video, as well as through the classical genres of painting, drawing, and sculpture.²

On the first count, the exhibit’s discursive imperative is to reconcile the weighty legacy of primitiveness (as a frame that keeps African works at a permanent remove from the canons of Western art) with a contemporary artistic production engaged both in the “presentness”³ of Africa and with an international avant-garde. At the same time, its procedural imperative presses for a representativeness—across nations, educational backgrounds, media, and generations. Meanwhile, its institutional imperatives suggest that, more than merely being the massive proposition of a contemporary Africa, it is specifically a proposal of a contemporary Africa in and for Europe (for Düsseldorf, Paris and London) and finally, Tokyo. Amidst such a weighty agenda of address and redress, in his catalog essays, the show’s chief curator, Paris-based Cameroonian, Simon Njami,⁴ also holds tight to an idea of “real life” and “living culture,” to an emotive Africa that he will theorize in terms of “chaos,” “schizophrenia,” “scandalousness,” and “silence.” From the moment that I encounter the drummer near the door, stalked by a German press cameraman, I am anxious about the multiple and perhaps competing imperatives of Africa Remix.⁵

Sketch

As promised in the show’s statement, the works in the show span the gamut of media, from painting to sculpture and installation. There is a recurrent iconography throughout the show that makes reference both to a traditional Africanness—the African textile print, the tattered object, the small housing structure—and to a revised cultural geography—the crowded city, the American flag, the veil, the tabla, the weapon. Since most of the work is from the last 10 years and some of it was commissioned expressly for this show, there is an urgent presentness about the works overall. The show’s three categories—City & Land, Body & Soul, and Identity & History—reflect Njami’s proposal of an Africa that is at once distinct and part of a global circuit of bodies and ideas, that seeks both a validation in relation to a Western center of which it is constantly aware and that is valid in its own right, and that legitimates its history both in tandem with and outside of the narratives of Western art history.

City & Land focuses on both the show’s overall mandate to reflect a contemporary African urbanity and on the relationship of this urbanity to the “hut”-studded sidelines of dirt roads carved through lush greenways. He separates the “‘land” and the “cemented, tarmacked city” and posits the “return to the village” as a weekend restoration for the contemporary African who is driven into the city out of economic and other necessities. He suggests, with a predominance in this section of photography and installation, that these modes and text reflect the playful agility of the city experience. There is a documentary impulse to the predominant photography of this section, an almost aggressive proof of existence, a persistence of reality. Reminiscent of early social documentary photography, the works of Tracey Derrick, Luis Basto, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Sergio Santimano, Guy Tillim, and Ananias Leki Dago offer direct portraits of people and their environments or people at work. The photographs of Akinbode Akinbiyi and Santu Mofokeng engage directly with the landscape of the city, the wheat-paste advertisements, the high-rise buildings reflected in boutique windows, the orderly housing, while Pascale Marthine Tayou and Otobong Nkanga offer glimpses of the countryside, both abandoned and in response to the city. The city becomes spatialized in the sculpture-cum-photographs of Allan deSouza and the mini-city works of Bodys Kingelez. Wim Botha and Balthazar Faye present the city as a life-size terrain, the latter with the interactive lounge space, Music Bar for Africa Remix.

Body & Soul sets out to articulate a revised African corpus, “[T]he African body that we are focusing on in Africa Remix is multiple— Caucasian, Arab, & Negro.”⁶ There is, in this section, a movement between image management in the context of a renegotiation with an idea of the Other and direct engagements with the body through experiential and sensory environments. One version of the body is called directly to engage the strange geometric environments of Joel Andrianomearisoa, the water room of Bili Bidjocka, and Paulo Capela’s mixedmedia shrine to Che Guevara. In another version, the body of this section is a play with the physiognomic fascination that has always been involved in the engagement with “The African” in works like Eileen Perrier’s Grace, a series of C-prints that repeat three-quarter portraits of people of different races with the same gap between their two front teeth.

Identity & History, the third of these sections, is concerned primarily with reconstructing an idea of nation that responds both to the newness of nationhood in the African context but also to the inextricable link between the projects of nation-building and colonial histories. The “identity” that Njami proposes speaks both to collective and individual memory and experience. South African artist Jane Alexander’s room-sized installations of fantastic hybrid creatures engaged in strange versions of work and interaction are featured in this section alongside the drawings of Marlene Dumas and the more literal historical references of installation-based pieces like Andries Botha’s History Has An Aspect of Oversight in the Process of Progressive Blindness.

All Over (Remix)

There is something for everyone in this show, to be sure. I am taken primarily with its curatorial conceits. Take the concept of “remix,” for example. My first critical encounter with the notion of remix was years before Africa Remix with Kori Newkirk’s wall-size pomade helicopters in the piece All Over (Remix) (2001). Newkirk’s helicopters play against the title of the work to suggest a range of possibilities, from surveillance and militaristic intervention to mobility and wealth. “All over” could be everywhere (it’s happening all over), yet again (it’s happening all over again), or it could be an irreversible end (it’s all over). “Remix” brings the new out of the old, and implies coexistence. All Over (Remix) contends with the adaptation of a contemporary urban moment in which economic flows motivate everything from urban gentrification to the migratory conditions of labor. Newkirk’s piece was produced for Freestyle, a show whose breadth and stalwart commitment to variety bears some similarity to Africa Remix and that also drew its title from the lexicon of contemporary music. As it happens, Remix is also the working moniker of a Post-Latino survey exhibition in development in LA.

The remix does, indeed, seem to be happening all over, perhaps because the moment demands a reevaluation of the ways that we define subjects and their interdependencies. Its particular salience in this context seems three-fold. On the first count, in its reference to music, it invokes the pervasive influences of an international form that has historically been one of the most fluid products of Africa and its diasporas and, from jazz to hip hop, is well-theorized to be a significant influence on the lifestyles and aesthetics of “The West.” That it calls to mind most immediately the language of hip-hop also marks a primarily urban subjectivity, a hipness, and an insider savvy that contraposes what Njami describes as “an urban sophisticated art produced by Africans who are connected to the discourse of the contemporary international culture” against legacies of African exhibition like Jean Hubert-Martin’s very well-known Magiciens de la Terre, whose artists are described as “supreme in their spiritual homes but remote from the concerns of modernity.”⁷ On the second count, the “re” comes in as a contender to the “post,” in a moment that is fascinated with defining itself in relation to proximate histories. And, surely, this remix is engaged in a dialogue with postmodernism, postcolonialism, and post-primitivism, wrapped as they are in an intellectual agenda of both distance and mastery. But there is also a strange tension between the “re” and the “post”; where the “post” implies a break, the “re” claims a repetition. Perhaps it is not that they are fundamentally distinct but that the “re” points to the doubling effect of the “post,” the Russian doll-like effect, wherein one thing always lives inside the next, as the modern does inside the postmodern. Like “all over,” it implies a past and a future “again.” “Re” is perhaps our best metaphor for the contemporary moment, marking the presence of the old in the new, the fluidity of movement and influence, of appropriation, and of a reversioning of things we’ve heard before. The “mix” of remix should not go unnoticed, because as much as it refers to a musical proposition, it is also the history and anxiety of hybridity and miscegenation and cultural influence. That it is not just “reused” or “recycled” but “remixed” is key, as it marks an “again” that is defined expressly by an acknowledgment of combination and mutual influence. The remix is a demographic shuffle, a reversion of the order of things with the same basic elements

In the show, the sentiment of the old in the new is held up by a dominance of recyclia-based works that offer old materials new form and by the propositions of syncretic practice that cross the boundaries of Njami’s categorical divisions and pervade the ethos of the show. Works like Willie Bester’s For Those Left Behind create soldiers and weaponry out of recycled materials, while Goncalo Mabunda’s Eiffel Tower and Chair create both the monumental and the everyday out of recycled weapons. Yinka Shonibare’s Victorian Philanthropist’s Parlor made of his signature “African”⁸ textiles with sporting icons and Cheick Diallo’s Reading Room made out of recycled plastic and coffee tins comment on the underrecognized circuits of material culture. Joseph Francis Sumenge’s Les 9 Notables, El Anatsui’s massive quilt of liquor bottle caps, Sasa, Tito’s Plane, and Antonio Ole’s collaged architectural façade in Townshipwall No. 10 all deploy a strategy of making something new out of something old. These reversionings signal back to conditions of poverty that preclude the luxury of disposability, while they speak to specific legacies of war and postcoloniality. In the context of the show, however, it is difficult to recover the specificity of these interventions; they are, instead, in this context put to the service of an overall African aesthetic. And, while I suspect that it is in this consistency of form that Njami comes to find an African character, what he presents is an aesthetic of poverty and underdevelopment that, in its lack of contextual specificity, is no more indigenous to Kinshasa than to Tijuana.

The Global Native,⁹ Afro-LA, and Places without Borders

The remix of Africa Remix is perhaps, above all, a refashioning of place. It tests the limits of recognizability of national and regional location and aims to address what it describes as the artificial boundaries, both internally, between North and South, African and Arab and relationally, between Africa and its elsewheres. Its geographic revision proposes a crisis of newness for a continent that is frequently thought of as the epicenter of the world’s prehistory. In Njami’s account, there is simultaneously the destabilizing newness of the post-colonial African nation, with inhabitants that predate those nations, and a notion of national identity that provides the ground or the “old country,” if you will, for its infant diasporas. Alongside its commitment to claim a presence on the international scene, Africa Remix names and reclaims a recent diaspora with complex histories of passage in and out of Africa. So it goes that Afro-New Yorkers and Indian- Kenyan-Los Angelenos are included in the remixed Africa.

Most of the artists in the show that you may have heard of have a high “and” factor (as in lives and works in Paris and Tangier). The majority are African born. There are a handful of mainly after-1970s who were born offcontinent. They are the only ones in the catalog with marked national identities. For example, Eileen Perrier is described as “Ghanaian: Born in London, 1974,” as opposed to her African-born peers who would be described as simply “Born in Dakar, 1964.” But these very partial biographies can be misleading, say very little about the conditions or locations of the artists’ experience, and often leave out whole continents between “Born in Nigeria” and “lives and works in New York.”

More than marking a new diaspora, the Out-of-Africans mark a place in the economy of international art and point back to cultural critic and curator Olu Oguibe’s larger critiques about the nature of inclusion and exclusion in this economy. In Oguibe’s argument, it is shows not unlike this one that appear in ten year cycles to satisfy both the desire to refind lost parts of the world and to satisfy a growing imperative for inclusiveness.

On this level the game may take the form of minimal exhibition allocations for art that comes from a particular provenance or constituency. Such slots, it appears, are rationed over ten-year periods, and because the opportunity to display is so rare, it becomes the tendency to seek to remedy the situation by consigning all such work to humongous, inchoate, and badly conceived group or period exhibitions, after which heroic gestures institutions return to their regular, clinical programming, satisfied that they have paid their dues. In other words, every ten years over a designated season, there are huge African, Asian, or Latin American exhibitions after which the pained rhetoric of institutions becomes, Well, but we just had an African or Asian or Latin American show.¹⁰

It seems though, that contemporary Africa might be meeting something more than its ten-year marker in a show like Africa Remix, as the last three or four years have seen a flurry of contemporary attention to Africa, thanks, in part to Oguibe himself and his exhibition, Authentic/Ex-centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art in 2001’s Venice Biennale. Credit may also be due in part to the persistent influence of the trend in art and global economies. It could be that Africa is “hot” in a moment in which Okwui Enwezor’s presence and curatorial initiatives—both with Documenta and with his 2001 touring exhibition, The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994, that traveled from Munich, to Berlin, Chicago, and New York—have brought renewed attention to forgotten Africa. Add to those inIVA London’s Fault Lines: Contemporary African Arts and Shifting Landscapes (2003) and the specific reflections on diasporic and urban perspectives of Africas: The Artist and the City at Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona and Museum for African Art, New York’s Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora. Perhaps more than a trend, this upsurge in interest owes to the rise and persistence of a cohort of African critics and curators now coming of age in institutions worldwide, though it is surely influenced by other contemporary factors, from former President Clinton’s call to refocus efforts on Africa as a trade entity to a popular fascination with the incomprehensible apprehensions of difference that have fueled recent violence across the continent (in Rwanda and Sudan, for example).

To see it as an upsurge perhaps makes me optimistic where Oguibe’s view of the larger “culture game” is structural. He argues that the international art economy provides for a certain but fundamentally limited inclusion, both in the form of the periodic survey (which he might well expand to include a flurry of surveys) and in the uptake of what he describes as the few sanctioned “global natives” who mark the place of territories as large as continents in the global dialogue. These are artists with international recognition in the field of the “contemporary” that may be used, as circumstances dictate, to validate the myth of an egalitarian market. Their inclusion is conditioned on their acquiescence to constant references to origin. So it is essential that, if Njami has expanded the borders of Africa in a critical revision to include the Arab North and the multi-racial South, East and West, he has also redrawn lines of connection outside of Africa to its newest elsewheres—to an infant diaspora of global natives that is distinct both from the Atlantic diaspora of the Americas and from its colonial and immediate postcolonial aspirants to fraternité and Western education. This group, by virtue of its members’ education, mobility, and values, is poised to meet the criterion of “quality” in the present contemporary that is arguably driven primarily by a notion of conceptual sophistication. This shift away from the newness of form, refinement of craft, or political leaning that has dominated other moments in art history will exclude many of the artists and practices that Njami presents in his survey.

As a writer for an LA-based publication on contemporary art, I am curious about the overlaps between my own scene and the remix, the artists who’ve been swept up in a wave of West Coast US currency that, now, after seeing Africa Remix, I am pushed to somehow think of as African. Surely, it speaks to the circuits of contemporary movement that at least five of the ninety artists in Africa Remix have been shown in LA venues in the last year—Ghada Amer (Gagosian, 2004); Tracey Rose (The Project, 2005); Allan deSouza (Pomona College Museum of Art, 2004); Julie Mehretu (REDCAT, 2004); and Wangechi Mutu (Susanne Vielmetter Gallery, 2005).

These five artists, in my opinion, offer some of the strongest and most interesting work in the show, but they also raise questions about the possibility of Africanness. Tracey Rose is the only one actively producing in Africa, based out of Johannesburg, though she surely logs as many hours out of Africa as in. In Julie Mehretu’s exhibition history, she has been willing to identify and be with Ethiopia,¹¹ but any engagement that she might have with Ethiopia specifically, is flattened here in the interest of “Africa.” And I have to wonder if they agree to a context like Africa Remix because they somehow want to conceptually engage in a reimagining of Africa or because of the tyranny of the market and the credentialing power of the major institutions that have invested in this traveling continental show.

Reflecting the Post-Exotic

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the truth remains that exoticism of the most pristine kind shadows Western perspectives on non-Western modernity.¹²

In hybrid Africa-constructs, the importance of authenticity is questioned, in some cases in extremely subversive and satirical fashion, and attention is drawn to the different standpoints of inter-cultural dialogue, to the dichotomy of “exotic” continent and “civilized” Europe.¹³

Fernando Alvim’s piece, We Are All Post- Exotics, from which the title of this essay is drawn, is a rather straightforward, text-based work that includes two interventions on a clean white field. The first, in a simple, san-serif, white-on-white font, is the text “we are all post exotics,” with “post” emphasized in grey. The second, above and to the right of the text, is an eye-level small round mirror. Interestingly, when this piece is documented for the catalogue, all that is reflected in the mirror are markers of the museum itself. It reminds of us the context in which we hunt elusive “posts” and surely also of its intimate connection with the hunt for the exotic to which the hunt for the post-exotic provides only a mild addendum. As much as Njami looks to make an intervention that offers Africa a genealogical link to the modern and the contemporary, his remix also places us in proximate relation, by way of an ostensible post-negritude and post- (or maybe neo-) Pan-Africanism to negritude and Pan-Africanism.

Ultimately, Africa Remix is about a validation, but there is a tension here between a vie for authenticity and a vie for similarity. His effort to remake Africa to some extent fuels the myth of Africa as a consumable place and refuels a persistent fascination with having the vision or a glimpse of this fundamental elsewhere. If Njami’s principle intervention is into an Africa of apparent chaos, then there is maintained in his project the schizophrenia that he describes. One of the questions may be whether Njami’s reclamation project becomes just an elaborate means to satisfy the market’s desire for difference. If the show revives the exotic ostensibly in order to slay it once and for all, is the net effect a neo-exoticism that rebinds the figure of the nomad or Oguibe’s “global native” back to the phantasm of Africa? If the motivating logic of the exhibition is to present a new kind of Africa, one that is different than the one that you know, does it fail to raise the question of why and whether (beyond the geographical reality that he relies on to reclaim the North and the South) Africa exists as a category at all? While there is still a prevalent contingent that engages documentary photography and reappropriates “folk” materials and processes as a tacit demand for the recognition of an African humanity, much of the work in the exhibition implicitly or explicitly challenges the category of Africa or is simply disinterested in it. The exhibition as a whole, on the other hand, commits itself primarily to the reconstitution of Africa as a discursive object. This is perhaps partly the result of an avowedly outward focus that relies mostly on an idea of “made by Africa.”

[W]hat Africans have in common firstly is their relationship with the old colonial powers in Europe…it is this rather than a unified African aesthetic, that provides the rational for an exhibition organized for the benefit of constituencies outside the continent.¹⁴

If this review seems only marginally concerned with the works in the exhibition, this is a due reflection of the dominance of its rhetorical imperative. Indeed, it is somewhat difficult to sort individual works out of the enormity of the overall spectacle of the show or away from the leaden weight of its intentions. Perhaps tellingly, the works themselves are never described in the catalogue, nor are they elaborated in wall text. What is to be gleaned about the work must come from what is available internally in the work and from the intersection of this with a reference to a nation and the date of birth of the artist. Generally, there is an inescapable tension between a desire to contextualize the artists in the place of an exhibition and the reality of their practices, many of which don’t depend on Africanness. The lives of the artists included in the show are influenced by the fact of their being in multiple places. African immigrants do, of course, encounter and have to contend with perceptions of Africa, but to assume that there is something then intrinsically African about the way that they see or encounter the world is to project a frame that doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality or certainly not the totality of their experiences. This is a problem that, like most of the problematics of the show, long precedes the present currents of migration and consideration. By taking on Africa as a total category, Njami is immediately overcome by a bountiful inheritance that he cannot surmount, and his project is ultimately as deeply conflicted as the history of reception and interpretation of African art. There is a persistent search for difference in his call for inclusion, and Njami’s “scandalous” Africa may reflect, most of all, a desire common to subjects with histories of migration and displacement for a life closer to divinity than the one that most of us encounter in the postmodern city, the desire to have come from a “real” place (isn’t this, after all, the myth that has driven the Western fascination with elsewheres). It is a nearly invisible slight-of-hand that transforms this desire into a nostalgia that recreates an Africa not unlike the one that negritude once sought to validate from the vantage point of the metropol.

In Cairo or Kinshasa music spills out of bars onto pavements and no-one is surprised to see people dancing in the streets. Laughter and voices ring through the neighborhoods and children run down streets paying no heed to cars. Horns blare constantly. Life is lived outdoors, with no uncalled-for shame….¹⁵

This scene that Njami describes melds into my memory of the drummer, which is still the image that remains strongest in mind, along with my recollection of the benign horror of an awareness of how it shapes the gaze. Trapped inside this scene and in Alvim’s mirror, I am aware that I become another part of it; standing too close to the drummer, I reaffirm an Africa that I am only curious about from the outside, from the perspective of a diaspora separated by both time and circumstance from this particular scene. Caught in the multiple reflections, I feel trapped here (as I imagine are most of the works in this scene) by a desire that exceeds my reality, and I am acutely aware of the exotic that sits within the post-exotic. If we are all postexotic, then I am arrested both by the indeterminacy of this “we” and by the persistence of the desire to see something in this mirror.

Kianga Ford is an artist and doctoral candidate in the History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz. She is currently an Irvine Doctoral Fellow at Occidental College in Los Angeles.