Ndary Lô, Le Refus de Rosa Parks (Rosa Parks’s Refusal) (detail), 2005, mixed media, dimensions variable.
via Artforum, October 2006:
Near and Far
Robert Storr {excerpt}
JUST OPPOSITE DAKAR, off the coast of Senegal, lies the island of Gorée. A rocky mass with a small harbor at one end and high cliffs at the other, it has no natural springs and precious little vegetation. The sun shines hot. Despite these inhospitable conditions it is covered with colonial buildings of undeniable charm. Some are grand but derelict; many more are small but well kept. The majority, it seems, are the property of absentee owners who make seasonal visits. Artists also number among the inhabitants, notably the late Mustapha Dime, the creator of elegantly raw wood and metal sculptures, an example of which is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The rest make handicrafts and acrylics for the tourists who swarm to Gorée on ferries from the mainland. [...]
Dak'Art 2006, the seventh installment of the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art—this year's theme was "Africa: Agreements, Allusions, and Misunderstandings"—offered just such a vantage point to anyone willing and able to make the journey. Besides the artists, organizers, and local dignitaries, the majority of those on hand for the opening festivities and panel discussions belonged to the community of art professionals and collectors already focused on the contemporary African scene, but—no doubt due to the increase in Afrocentric exhibitions in recent years—these were numerous. That the event mattered within Africa itself was signaled by opening ceremonies that featured Senegal's president, Abdoulaye Wade, who gave a welcoming speech and participated in bestowing juried prizes on several of the artists. With multiple thematic essays and substantial space devoted to each of the participants, the thick exhibition catalogue also testified to the importance of the event's public profile to the powers that be. That the practical support available for the arts in Senegal falls far behind the prestige officially accorded the biennial was plain on opening day, when curatorial teams were still scrambling to install works in scattered spaces with only the barest necessities for the art's display and protection.
Nevertheless, the basic solidarity among organizers and participants (including frustrated artists whose videos weren't fully functional for the opening or whose work remained in crates after detours back and forth across the ocean due to airline and customs mix-ups) and between them and the expectant, generally patient spectators said much about the shared desire to foster such showcases until they receive the full sponsorship and attention they deserve. So too did the panels I was able to attend. They addressed the biennial’s theme with considerable candor and a minimum of friction, which, given the range of actual or potential misunderstandings among those speaking and listening, likewise attested to mutual trust. Among the challenges advanced was a proposal that, rather than continuing to be the "object" of study by outsiders, Africans should devote greater attention to social-scientific research of their own, including a new, table-turning anthropology of the West.
To say that the exhibition itself was a mixed bag is simply to say that it was true to its genre. In some ways the raggedness of the presentation made one more sympathetic to the unevenness of the work on view. That unevenness also highlighted differences in perspective among the eight curators who comprised the team headed by Abidjan-based Yacouba Konaté, as well as underscoring the staggered assimilation of contemporary ways of working across the continent. Some of the work was richly inflected by tradition, notably that of the venerable, formally inspired, and by turns lyric and witty Frédéric Bruly Bouabré of Ivory Coast. And some of it was awkwardly so, as if the artists were caught between a self-conscious desire to affirm their roots and an anxious will to give inherited forms and symbols a stylish look. But such transitional aesthetic misalliances are to be found in Latin America, in the South Pacific, and wherever indigenous cultures were glossed on the way to making new modernities. And if the results fail to convince, the seriousness of the enterprise does not.
The accent on roots as an explicit subject was clear in the installation by the prizewinning young Senegalese Ndary Lô. The main elements of his room were chains of bones and metal hanging from the ceiling (slavery of course is very much a part of African consciousness, though, as goes without saying, the vantage point and resonance are distinctive) and drawings of African and diasporic icons from Haile Selassie to Harriet Tubman, but the density of visual and historical information and the force of the artist’s draftsmanship were compelling beyond the obviousness of the work's basically hagiographic premise. Another prizewinner, Moroccan-born Mounir Fatmi, crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction and crossed into postmodernism as well. His installation centered on video footage of a recent interview with former Black Panther Party leader David Hilliard. Although the piece might be misread as latter-day Black Power agitprop, its poignancy had everything to do with the unabated fervor of the aging speaker, the youthful attentiveness of his interviewer, and the mythical afterlife in Africa of the Panthers' bitter experiment in transposing "third world" revolution to the "first world."
[read on...]
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