Events of the Self 2010

Events of the Self 2010

Almost everything that makes Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity/ Contemporary African Photography from the Walther Collection so ripe for analysis is apparent from its very title.  For one thing, it is a relative rarity for an exhibition of contemporary African art to be doubly-framed as it were, not only in terms of thematic concerns, but also in terms of medium.  And while an exhibition of contemporary African photography is by no means a groundbreaking proposition, pointed interest in portraiture within the African context is relatively noteworthy.  Above and beyond the challenges posed to the notion of the self-contained, self-possessed, and self-knowing subject by western philosophy and critical theory of the 20th century, the question of portraiture is particularly fraught within the African context where battles over inclusion and self-determination are still being fought.

It seems somehow appropriate that an exhibition which grapples so expressly with the contemporary implications of portraiture should itself be steeped in the idiosyncrasies of the personal.   Drawn entirely from the private collection of a single German millionaire, Artur Walther, the exhibition was, in the words of its curator, Okwui Enwezor, "a metonym of desire."¹  (The politics of that desire are somewhat complicated by the revelation that this particular German millionaire made his money as the head of Worldwide Capital markets for Goldman Sachs.)  The selected photographs, 243 works by 32 artists, were quite literally housed in four residential buildings on a single block outside of Ulm, Germany, Walther's hometown.²  Gallery spaces were located inside his childhood home, his parent's retirement home, and his first investment property respectively.  This spatial framing of Events of the Self only further contributes to a sneaking suspicion that the "self" in question is more Walther than the photographers (or the photographed) on view.  Even Enwezor's location at the helm of the project, as a curator who is known for his strong vision and heavy hand in shaping the reception of works, underscores the peculiarly fore-fronted subjectivity of the exhibition.

Now the great surprise of Events of the Self, that which its title does not advertise, is the fact that these highlights from the last 50 years of African photography are exhibited alongside, and in many ways as theoretical frames for photographs from canonical German artists like August Sander and Bernd and Hilla Becher.  Despite the fact that many scholars of African art have embraced white artists of African origin, and despite the fact that black African artists are exhibited with increasing frequency alongside like-minded non-Africans, this may be one of the first instances of the post-war European cannon being appropriated for and folded into an exhibition on and fundamentally about Africa.  Though the Walther Collection was founded with the intention of compiling photography from the interwar German school of "new objectivity," it quickly expanded to include photo and video work from East Asia and from the African continent.  It is certainly a significant ideological shift, and one that highlights the increasing esteem in which African photography is held,³ for the inaugural exhibit of this collection to place the photographic achievements of African artists at center stage.

On the critical issue of ‘the portrait', while Events contains works from the expected photographers: Seydou Keita, Malik Sidibe, Samuel Fosso, Santu Mofokeng, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Rotimi Fane-Kayode and others, the specific pieces selected for exhibition seem to confound the very notion of portraiture itself.  Enwezor's exhibition was organized around three discursive frameworks: 'portraiture and social transition', 'typologies and taxonomies', and 'theatricality and figuration'.  Rather than approaching portraiture as an act of self-revelation he treats it in turn as socially embedded, highly performative, and as an expressive form which has as much to do with the disruption of the gaze as it has to do with looking, at least where the African subject is concerned.  Of particular interest in this regard are Mofokeng's  appropriated photographs of South Africa's black middle class at the turn of the 20th century, and the coiffure studies of Nigerian photographer J.D. Okhai Ojeikere.

It is perhaps too soon to know what the impact of this project will be, as its ideas have had less than a year to circulate.  Reviews of the exhibition have, to my knowledge, been largely positive, with some scholars, like Princeton's Chika Okeke-Agulu, predicting that the Waltham Collection will become "the research Mecca for scholars of African photography for years to come."  While I find the cross-cultural aspect of the exhibition thrilling, my primary concern is that, in an effort to highlight what he has called "parallel modernities," Enwezor has elided some of the most significant differences that inform the German and 'African' cultural contexts.  The exhibition's layout seems to suggest that, though separated by space, and in many cases also by time, great practitioners of photography have, throughout the medium's short history, arrived at similar aesthetic strategies.  Considering the exhibition's chosen emphasis on portraiture, such an implied formalist comparison could not be less appropriate.   For at the same time that Europe sought to shed the very notion of the subject, to declare it always already fractured in the wake of the second world war, Africa's colonial subjects were fighting for the recognition of their own subjectivities. 

On a closing note, as with his earlier involvement in the second Johannesburg biennial, Events of the Self finds Enwezor deeply engaged in the project of historicizing annotating and archiving the present.  The culmination of his considerable effort in this regard is the exhibition's staggering 448-page catalog, which includes critical essays from Deborah Willis, Kobena Mercer, Okeke-Agulu and several others.


1.  Events of the Self: Portraiture and Social Identity: Contemporary African Photography from The Walther Collection.  Edited by Okwui Enwezor.  [Burlafingen]: The Walther Collection; Göttingen: Steidl, 2010.  p23.
2.  The entire Walther Collection is, in fact, housed here.
3.  In large part thanks to the efforts of Enwezor himself.

-Imani Roach.

Afro Modern 2010

Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic 

Tate Liverpool 29 January – 25 April 2010

Conceived by Tanya Barson, now Curator of International Art at Tate Modern, curated by Tanya Barson and Peter Gorschlüter, Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Liverpool. Contributing writers, curators and artists: Petrine Archer, Robert Conduru, Huey Copeland, Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon, Gordon Parks, Romare Bearden, Renée Cox, Candace Breitz, Keith Piper, Manthia Diawara and Édouard Glissant, Courtney J. Martin and Kobena Mercer.

What does it mean to situate the site of Afro Modernity outside the African continent? To consider the contemporality and modalities of Africanness in its Diasporas? These are questions raised by the 2010 British exhibition Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic. Opened in Tate Liverpool, the exhibition aimed to bring into conversation multiple sites of the Black Atlantic, built upon the foundations of Paul Gilory’s 1993 work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Framed within the 20th century, the collection features more than 140 works by over 60 artists, including renown artists such as Romare Bearden and Gordon Parks as well as other more recent critically acclaimed figures such as Renée Cox and Keith Piper. The title of the exhibition refers to Cultural Studies circles of the 1990s and 2000s, referencing movements of Africans and journeys between Europe, the Caribbean South America and North America as well as across the African continent itself. The name also alludes to more contemporary networks formed across continents, with creative links and artistic alliances forged in efforts to articulate voices of African and Afro-modernity across the same bodies of water that transported so many Africans in the last 500 years.

Laudable reception of the exhibition seemed due in part to the seven-part chronological orientation of the collection, including works from quite early in the 20th century, as well as its rejection of a large, all-encompassing “Black Atlantic Theme" under which each artist would aim to situate her work. With selections of Black artists deemed “traditionally” African or Diasporic as well as of White artists denigrated due to an enchantment with primitivism, the show artfully positions unexpected voices of an “Afro Modernist” context in conversation with one another.

Notably visible are the works of Candace Breitz and Keith Piper, whose photographs of seemingly recognizable African historical realities are recontextualized with satiric overlays. Breitz’s photograph of a southern African woman seated gracefully nude strikes the viewer as jarring as her body is eerily plastered with a blinding white; this image as metacommentary calls attention to the sweeping anonymity of nude African women in National Geographic-esque photographs, while also drawing on historio-cultural rites wherein bodies are painted white to call forth energies of spiritual realms. Similarly, Piper seems to comment on historical revisions of African history in creating a work almost in likeness of a book cover entitled appropriately in Manifest Destiny form, “Go West Young Man.” Employing one of the most well recognized images from the TransAtlantic Slave Trade, “Stowage of the British Slave Ship ‘Brookes’ 1788,” Piper satirically inverts a narrative of African enslavement and victimization by invoking a rally to pioneers in the 18th and 19th centuries to explore (read: colonize and exploit) unknown Western frontiers of the United States.

Ghost Series #4

Candace Breitz 1994-96

Go West Young Man

Keith Piper 1987

The poignancy of older pieces is hardly overshadowed by more contemporary works however, as Romare Bearden’s “Blue Shade” collage of a “mammified” and nude Black woman stands tall amidst muddled cotton blossoms collection. Ample Black historical allegory is given due reverence with pieces such as Gordon Parks’ “The Emerging Man, Harlem.” The image marks a turning point in Black 20th century literature, with a new take on and reference to James Baldwin’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Blue Shade

Romare Bearden 1972

Emerging Man, Harlem

Gordon Parks 1952

The collection then, boasts altered media installation works (Breitz and Piper, for instance) as well as more traditional photography and collage of the 20^th century (Parks, Cox and Bearden). While certain components of the exhibition were deemed less innovative by most critics such as Jonathan Jones (particularly the 1960s collection)[1], the collection overall raises poignant questions about redefining Blackness, Africanness and modernity within contemporary artistic endeavors, staging a space for artists interested in dialogue of what it means to assert a title of “(Afro)Modern”, and aiming to link creative movements across waters.

River Queen, from Queen Nanny of the Maroons

Renée Cox 2004

-Kyrah M. Daniels

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[1] Jonathan Jones. “Afro Modern at Tate Liverpool: Voyage of rediscovery.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jan/29/afro-modern-tate-liverpool

Useful Dream 2010

A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010

            Curated by Simon Njami, “A Useful Dream: African Photography 1960-2010” traces 50 years of visual documentation in Africa. Originally from Cameroon, Njami currently resides in France and is an independent art critic and lecturer. The exhibition took place at the Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, Belgium in the summer of 2010. It celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the independence of 17 African countries. As it highlighted the role of photography in the years leading up to and after independence, its attention focused on the human figure.

            The exhibition sought to organize the tremendous amount of diversity which exists in Africa and trace its development from 1960-2010. The exhibition title “Useful Dream” arose from the idea that photography can be used as a metaphor of freedom and self-esteem. These ideas arose from the desire of now independent African nations to break free from the grips of colonialism. It spawned a sense of hope which these photographs dispelled by documenting harsh economic, political, and historical realities. During the colonial era, Africa was typically reduced to a series of exotic clichés. Since their respective countries’ independences, artists have taken it upon themselves to develop their own interpretations of their now free nations. Free from western influence, the exhibition sought to trace this transition from a cluster of colonies, to free nations, to a continent pursuing modernity and the global stage.

            The exhibition further opened Africa up to a global audience. Its location in Belgium was significant for a number of reasons. Belgium always had close ties to many African nations and the county was set to take over the presidency of the European Union. The World Cup in South Africa also occurred at around the same time as this exhibition attracting even more international attention on the continent.

Artists included Myriam Abdelaziz, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Mohamed Mo Amin, Cornélius Yao Augustt Azaglo, Sammy Baloji, Jodi Bieber, Mohamed Bourouissa, Nabil Boutros, Jean Depara, Tracey Derrick, Mohamed Dib, Calvin Dondo, Mohammed Abd El Rassoul Younis Khalil, Essop Brothers, Samuel Fosso, Bob Gosani, Mouna Karray, Philippe Koudjina, Ananias Leki Dago, Pierrot Men, Santu Mofokeng, Aïda Muluneh, Zwelethu Mtethwa, Musa Nxumalo, Eiileen Perrier, Ricardo Rangel, Zineb Sedira, Malick Sidibé, Ambroise Ngaimoko, Andrew Tshabangu, Nontsikelelo Veleko, and Patrick Wokmeni.

-Jeffrey Lee

The Poetics of Cloth 2008

The Poetics of Cloth: African Textiles / Recent Art (2008)
Grey Art Gallery at New York University

Curated by Lynn Gumpert, Director of the Grey Art Gallery. Written contributions by Lynn Gumpert, Jennifer S. Brown, Lydie Diakhaté, Janet Goldner, John Picton and Doran H. Ross. Artistic contributions by El Anatsui, Samuel Cophie, Sokari Douglass Camp, Atta Kwami, Grace Ndiritu, Nike Okundaye, Owusu-Ankomah, Yinka Shonibare, Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko, Rikkie Wemega-Kwawu and Sue Williamson.

The NYU exhibition Poetics of Cloth emerged in the 2000s as part of a movement which aimed to unsettle mythologies of African art history as comprised exclusively of sculptural works. Its sister collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Essential Art of African Textiles: Design without End, boasts many of the same artists, though African Textiles features more “traditional” 19th century works while Poetics of Cloth emphasizes contemporary artists’ use of fabrics in various media of art today. [1] Likely, these exhibitions’ collaborative articulation and reflection on such rich textile traditions signify the importance of Indigenous African craft and contemporary re-fashioning of the expressive medium. As Ghanaian born installation artist El Anatsui has observed: “The scope of meaning associated with cloth is so wide…. [It] is to the African what monuments are to Westerners.”[2] While perhaps a controversial assertion to equate the two vastly different productions, Anatsui’s parallel of tapestry and monument may serve a helpful model to understand varying aesthetic pillars of community.

Although Masai fabrics and West African kente cloths are often considered part of the narrative fabric of African and African American history, less historical attention has focused on conceptualizing textiles as more than cultural identity markers. As part of the effort to disrupt antique notions of African art as purely functionalist, fabric-inspired film and photography as well as installation works of Dutch wax prints were included in the exhibition, with contributions from collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and UCLA Fowler Museum.[3] Textile patterns were woven, dyed, printed and painted, and many critics noted that viewers could not overlook the prominence of “band” motifs often fashioned with weaving looms, which art critic Karen Rosenberg likens to the importance of the grid in Western paintings of postwar scenes. [4]

Multi-media pieces deemed particularly striking by reviewing critics were Sue Williamson’s “Pass the Parcel” and Grace Ndiritu’s “Still Life.” In a series of 21 collages, Williamson draws the viewer’s eyes to the traditional attire worn as evidence in the rape trial of President Jacob Zuma of the African National Congress. Testifying his innocence, Zuma drew upon examples of local cultural initiation rites, citing that as a Zulu warrior, such dress summoned his sexual advances and assault of the woman in question. [5] Such a difficult invocation by the wax-print garment warrants thoughtful reflection about the role of aesthetic legacies in African politics of identity today. Additionally, alongside renown photographers Malick Sidibé, Seydou Keïta, American-born artist Grace Ndiritu’s work holds its own with poignant film shorts regarding the politics of dress in silence. Encased in a room with four walls of textile imagery, the viewer watches the artist wrapping and unraveling her body in various lengths of fabrics, immersed in rich colours and detailed patterned cloth. The donning of “traditional” African print on a Diasporic body also raises possibility of a transnational aesthetic, framing the Pan-Africanist assertion of self in current cultural contexts.

The Nightingale

Grade Ndiritu 2003

Untitled [Olympia]

Seydou Keita 1950s?

Regrettably, raving critics evade questions about global dimensions of the exhibition. The consideration of clear parallels in Arabian, Asian and Indigenous American textiles might illuminate a universal reality in fabric’s employment as aesthetic and narrative body. Additionally, such a contextualizing frame in the exhibition would allow curators to emphasize distinguishing characteristics of African textiles in creation, production and encounters between artists and citizens in public sectors. Nevertheless, visionary in its multimedia engagements with African textiles, The Poetics of Cloth honors its name in expansively defining works of fabric as rich legacies of aesthetic adornment and ultimately reveals the contributions of textiles to complex modes of cultural re-fashioning on the African continent.

still shot from film

Rikki Wemega-Kwawu

Akosombo Textiles Limited 2007

Ancient Cloth VIII

El Anatsui 1993

-Kyrah M. Daniels


[1] Karen Rosenberg. “African Art, Modern and Traditional: Seductive Patterns From a Rich Palette,” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/arts/design/10text.html?pagewanted=print.
[2] http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/upcomingexh.html
[3] http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_new=26164&int_sec=2
[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/10/arts/design/10text.html
[5] http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_new=26164&int_sec=2

Flow 2008

            Flow, an exhibition of Harlem’s Studio Museum from 2008, was conceived by the curatorial team, lead by Thelma Golden, Christine Kim and Naomi Beckwith, as the third chapter of a line of inquiry that had begun in 2001 with the much commented upon Freestyle exhibit.  Along with 2005’s Frequency, Freestyle was largely responsible for ushering in the era of the so-called 'post-black' artist to American art discourse.  The term post-black was coined initially “to describe the work of young African-American artists who [were] ‘adamant about not being labeled as black artists, though their work was steeped, in fact, deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.’”¹

            Flow, then, was to do for African art what its older siblings had done for the African American context. To that end, Kim and Golden designed Flow to be an exhibit of the art of Africa’s youngest generation.  Each of the 20 artists represented in the museum’s relatively small main gallery were born after 1973, making the oldest of them 35 at the time of the shows opening. For several of the artists on view, including Lynette-Yiadom Boakye, Flow was the first major showing.  But more than youth, the Studio Museum’s team sought a certain post-African ethos—aesthetic practices that “reflect an attempt to express rather than define what it means or can mean to be an African artist today.”²

            A particular preoccupation of Christine Kim’s was the sheer mobility and trans-nationality of the contemporary African art world.  This preoccupation was reflected both in the willfully transient title of the exhibition itself, and in the selection of artists who are all simultaneously engaged in at least two and as many as five distinct global contexts.  In a rapturous moment of what is perhaps overstatement, Kim identifies “… a new generation of ‘cultural hybrids’ from Africa, not African citizens, but global citizens, from Africa and of the world.  Neither strictly African nor American nor African-American, the work seemed to reside in a sort of elsewhere or, perhaps more accurately, a nowhere space.”³

           In terms of shared formal themes and practices, all of the artists in Flow show a serious concern with the materiality of their work.  If there is anyplace where these artists can be said to investigate the conditions of their own 'African-ness,' it is at the level of materials.  In a strange way, this materialism locates them both more firmly within western contemporary art trends, and within a romanticized notion of Africa as a place where humanity is somehow closer to the land and to sensorial experience.  Might the Studio Museum have a vested interest in claiming a vision of contemporary Africa that suits African American narratives of the self as transient and displaced?  To what extent does it even make sense to talk about being post-African, and if displacement and in-between-ness become central organizing principles, why does the notion of Africa persist as relevant at all? What does it mean to exhibit the work of young African artists in America's most historical African American neighborhood (a neighborhood that was largely responsible for producing the pan-African consciousness in the first place)?

1.  Flow: the Studio Museum in Harlem.  Christine Y. Kim; [edited by Samir S. Patel].
 New York, N.Y. : Studio Museum in Harlem, c2008. p19.
2.  Flow: the Studio Museum in Harlem.  Christine Y. Kim; [edited by Samir S. Patel].
 New York, N.Y. : Studio Museum in Harlem, c2008. p21.
3.  Flow: the Studio Museum in Harlem.  Christine Y. Kim; [edited by Samir S. Patel].
 New York, N.Y. : Studio Museum in Harlem, c2008. p21.

-Imani Roach

There and Back 2006

There & Back: Africa

            Curated by Danielle Tilkin, “There & Back: Africa” was exhibited at La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Spain from March 31^st – June 11^th, 2006. It sought to compare and contrast works of artists who have emigrated and those who have stayed in the continent. The exhibition reevaluates what it means to be “African.”

            One of the exhibition’s major themes was how colonization trapped and stunted Africa’s growth. The catalogue highlights a quote from Boniface Mongo-Mboussa in Time for History which identifies a key problem the exhibition sought to answer. “Contemporary Africa is the fruit of colonization […] Colonization made us aware of this geographic entity we call Africa when it carved up the continent in Berlin in 1885.” Furthermore, the exhibition explores the dichotomy between past and present, tradition and contemporaneity during colonial, independence, and postcolonial periods. It looks at how different regions of Africa influence artists and the ongoing effects of globalization.

            There & Back attempted to rationalize Africa visually across borders and regions. In the end, it pushed a unifying image representing the new Africa and the whole new set of challenges it now faced post-colonialism.

The exhibition focuses on several generations of artists who have gained international recognition following the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in 1989. Artists include William Kentridge, Viyé Diba, Mustapha Dimé, Abdoulaye Konaté, Touhami Ennadre, Miguel Petchkovsky, Romuald Hazoumé, Mbongeni Richman Buthelezi, Ammar Bouras, Soly Cissé, Emeka Udemba, Modou Dieng, Moshekwa Langa, Frances Goodman, Marie Blanche Ouedraogo, Otobong Nkanga, Djibril Sy.

-Jeffrey Lee

Snap Judgements 2006

Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography

            Organized by Okuwi Enwezor, “Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography” was exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New York City from March 10^th – May 28^th, 2006. Born and raised in Calabar, Nigeria in 1963, he received his college degree in the United States and now currently splits time between New York and San Francisco. In 1997, Enwezor curated the second Johannesburg Biennale. He now serves as adjunct curator at the International Center of Photography.

            The exhibition sought to capture the rapid and enormous social and cultural shifts occurring all across the African continent. The purpose of the exhibition was to provide an alternative to “Afro-pessimism” which existed and continues to exist in global media reporting. Instead of reducing Africa to a set of images such as famine, disease, and warfare, the artists set out to examine the intricacies of daily life in Africa without sensationalism or romanticism. Broad themes include local responses to the international media and the touristic gaze, framing the African body, identity and postcolonial memory, urban sites, and machines and institutions of modernity.

            One review praised the exhibition when it was displayed at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art from March 1^st – May 25^th, 2008. The review stated that the exhibition was, “invigorating and frustrating, critically incisive and ethically complex, an experience that continues to oscillate between the profoundly satisfying and the profoundly unsettling.” It praised the exhibition’s artist and work choices and liked how it showcased many powerful, provocative works which viewers could easily relate to.

            The exhibition also allows photography to flex its full creative potential. It highlights the shift away from commercial studio portraiture and emphasizes conceptual, documentary, and fashion art. Many of the artists use photography as a tool to trace the arc of different realities coexisting in Africa. This emphasis further drove contemporary African art away from traditional mediums. Enwezor tried unifying Africa visually and illuminate its push towards modernity.

            Artists included Oladélé Adjiboyé Bamgboyé, Tracey Rose, Mohamed Camara, Doa Aly, Andrew Dosunmu, Nontsikelelo “Lolo” Veleko, Yto Barrada, Luis Basto, Omar D. (Daoud), Maha Maamoun, Lara Baladi, Lamina Naji, Theo Eshetu, Kay Hassan, Fatou Kandé Senghor, Zarina Bhimji, Otobong Nkanga, Hentje van der Merwe, Allan deSouza, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Ali Charaibi, Mikhael Subotzky Sada Tangara, Mamadou Gomis, Romuald Hazoumé, Zohra Bensemra, Moshekwa Langa, Michael Tsegaye, Jo Ratcliffe, Randa Shaath, James Muriuki, Boubacar Touré Mandémory, Guy Tillim, and Hala Elkoussy.

-Jeffrey Lee