Contemporary Art and the African Diaspora Symposium at the Tate Liverpool

Leo Tolstoy once observed that 'historians are like deaf people who go on answering questions that no one has asked them'. When curators, critics, art historians and artists gathered at the Tate Liverpool for a one-day symposium entitled 'Contemporary Art and the African Diaspora', however,   it seemed that instead of art history's oft-meandering, tangential answers, what emerged – in the numerous papers, panel discussions, and ernest conversation over trays of uninspiring sandwiches –  were several significant lines of enquiry. Here are some of the issues that were on the table…

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Diaspora, Transnationalism and 'African-related art practices'

From the first few speakers in the symposium, it soon emerged that there is a growing unease about the term 'diaspora' (and, by the end, speakers were amusingly stumbling over their sentences in an attempt to replace the problematised title with an alternative). For Dr Raimi Gbadamosi, an artist, writer and curator who is also on the editorial board of Third Text, the problem with 'diaspora' is that it is always circumscribed by the notion of 'origin' (and, in turn, some expectation of 'authenticity'). When does one stop being 'from' a place and get to just be 'in' a place, particularly given the travel, displacement and migration that is so much part of contemporary global relations? Gbadamosi's own artistic practice plays with these ideas of place, nation and authenticity through the creation of a 'Republic of the Diaspora', to which anyone can willingly belong (see  www.the-republic.net), be he or she 'white', 'black' or 'yellow', the (discursively loaded) colours of the Republic's flag.

The alternative nomenclature of the moment is 'transnationalism'. Avoiding the notion of dispersal from an origin, it attends not only to the flow of people through both willing and forced migration, but also to the movement of capital and ideas across vast geopolitical landscapes. Drawing on this globalised interrelation of people, capital and ideas, Dr David Dibosa, a senior lecturer at the University of the Arts London, highlighted the continued need for politically engaged art practices, pointing to how art is often critically mobile in a way that individual artists – given the current visa scenario – are not. Dibosa favours the term 'African-Related Art Practices' which, unlike 'transnationalism' does avoid any linguistic recursiveness to the beleagured construct of the nation state. But it's also, admittedly, a bit of a mouthful.

From Afromodern to Post-black

But if geographically-circumscribed terms are contested, so too are temporal ones: 'Afromodern', 'Altermodern', 'African Art' vs. 'Contemporary African Art', 'Postmodern', 'Postblack'... Dr Leon Wainwright, from Manchester Metropolitan University, argued that traditional patterns of narrating and imagining histories of modern and contemporary art tend to draw on a problematic temporal logic, often mapped onto geographical space (such that Africa is 'timed out' of art history).  

More recently, however, terms such as 'Post-black', coined by Robert Farris Thomson in his essay 'Afromodernism' (1991), have been suggested as a way of revealing and transcending the limitations of postmodernity's focus on the identity politics of 'race', gender and sexuality, which can become essentialising filters for engaging with art. Nevertheless, continued realities of both institutional and insidious racism across the globe – not to mention the rise in racialised nationalism in the UK and across Europe – have led many to criticise a term which (linguistically, if not conceptually) suggests that discourses of skin colour, and their inscribed power relations, are a thing of the past.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF 'BLOCKBUSTER' EXHIBITIONS IN CURATING INTERNATIONAL VIEWS OF AFRICA?

We are all complicit in 'curating Africa'

Keynote speaker Shaheen Merali, a curator and writer responsible for such exhibitions as 'The Black Atlantic: Dreams and Trauma, Moving Images and Promised Lands' and 'Re-Imagining Asia: One Thousand Years of Separation', talked of the challenges of 'curating continents', geographical designations he believes to be in 'existential crisis'. Looking mostly at the relationship between Africa and the Venice Biennale, including 'Authentic/ExCentric' and the African Pavilion of 2007, he highlighted the salient curatorial strategies of narrativity and lived experience. Most of his speech seemed cut-and-pasted from articles by Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe and Salah Hassan (he also quoted Gavin Jantjies and Marilyn Martin for good measure), who admittedly are more articulate than Merali was on the subject.

However, Merali did make the important point that everyone at the symposium was complicit in 'curating' the continent. Academics, critics, curators and artists all partake in producing, circulating and exchanging knowledges about Africa and its art. Dr Cheryl Finley, an associate professor at Cornell, in her discussion of teaching contemporary and diasporic art, mentioned how her curriculum draws on both landmark and current exhibitions, based on the conviction that 'exhibitions can lay the ground for new art histories to be written'.

The 'One Night Stand Syndrome'

In other discussions of 'blockbuster' shows, Roger Malbert (Senior Curator of Hayward Touring at the Southbank Centre, London, who co-curated 'Africa Remix' with Simon Njami, David Elliott and Jean-Hubert Martin) referred to them as instrumental in asserting the centrality of contemporary African artists within the context of international art practice. With reference to 'Africa Remix', he stressed how it significantly brought together Anglophone and Francophone scholarship, as well as North and sub-Saharan African art practices; both pairs of which historically tend towards schismatic participation in the production of contemporary African art and knowledges. As a result of trying to do 'too much', he admitted that these kinds of shows were often messily undisciplined and sent mixed messages, but that they nevertheless presented an important 'introductory anthology'.

Many other speakers picked up the notion of providing a diverse 'introduction' to contemporary African and disaporic art. Most criticised this superficial 'one night stand syndrome', in which everyone moved on the next morning without a deeper knowledge of their bedfellow. In response, a rallying call was made for more sustained initiatives, in which blockbuster exhibitions are not only accompanied by public events, educational programmes and discussion forums at the time, but are then followed up by more focussed and nuanced exhibitions on individual artists, thematic networks or specific localities. Dr Dimbosa also highlighted the way in which exhibitionary practice is moving away from any ideas of the unitary formation of African aesthetics to an emphasis on fragmentation, migration, dispersal and fluidity, which should be part of the curatorial strategy itself, for example in the multiple platforms of  Documenta XI.  

The Biennale Effect

With the proliferation of biennales across the globe, speakers pondered whether the 'biennale effect' is transforming, or homogenising, the way art is curated. While some saw biennales as a problematic example of globalising consumer trends in the contemporary art world, others spoke of how such exponents as Havana (for example, in its 2009 theme 'Integration and Resistance in the Globalization Era') and Sao Paolo are, in fact, appropriating, questioning and subverting the biennale structure itself, and using it as a platform to interrogate rather than reinforce prevailing modes of production and display.

As a whole, the symposium was an incredibly lively day, and it was great to see audience members (many of them students from various parts of England, as well as some local Liverpudlians) engaging with – and often challenging – the speakers. Ongoing dialogues around the important questions confronting the practice, curation and writing of art is integral to a vital cultural milieu; and Tate Liverpool, with its extensive programme of interrelated events and discussions in collaboration with the city itself, is doing a good job of catalysing and sustaining them.