16th ACASA Triennial Symposium on African Art
Arts Council of the African Studies Association (ACASA)
Hosted by Brooklyn Museum
Brooklyn, New York
SCHEDULE OF SESSIONS WITH ABSTRACTS
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 (Museum Day)
Opening Remarks (9:15 – 9:30)
Session 1 (9:30 – 11:15 AM)
1.1 Mining the Series: Establishing Art Historical Contexts for African Art.
Convener: Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, Baltimore Museum of Art, [email protected]
This panel will present recent scholarship that uses the concept of the “series” as a
method for investigating individual artworks. The field has productively established the
fragmentary nature of African art as it is displayed in Euro-American collections, but it is
also useful to contextualize art objects within a series, whether defined by artist, period,
patron, current collection, or object type. Comparisons within a series can provide new
information that sharpens knowledge of individual artworks, artist’s careers, or the
influence of patronage. Both “traditional” and “contemporary” art will be discussed.
Presenters:
Kota Quota: How Digital Tools Can Help Assess and Discover New
Information
Frederic Cloth
Yale-van Rijn Archive
[email protected]
The Aku Queen Victoria Portrait Figures: Reassessing Krio/Saro (EuroAfrican) Material Culture
Zachary Kingdon
World Museum, Liverpool
[email protected]
Patterns of Authorship: Finding Series within the Benin Bronze Plaque
Corpus
Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch
Sorting Benin’s Neglected Bronze “Loop Figures”
Barbara Blackmun
San Diego Mesa College (Emerita)
[email protected]
Session 2 (11:30 – 1:30 PM)
2.1 ROUNDTABLE: New Directions in the Display and Interpretation of African
Art. Convener: Kevin D. Dumouchelle, Brooklyn Museum,
[email protected]
The last several years have witnessed the announcement or opening of a significant
number of new exhibition spaces and strategies for the display of permanent collections
of African art in museums around the world. This roundtable will aim to present and
critically engage with a number of these recent experiences. How, for example, are
European ethnographic museums adjusting and interpreting histories of colonial-era
collecting and ethnographic display for 21st century audiences? How are curators in
encyclopedic museums challenged to interpret African art in relation to other
collections? What new interpretative concepts and practices are emerging from these
projects, and how might they inform both future museum projects and the writing and
teaching of African art history and related disciplines?
Additional Participants:
Kathleen Bickford Berzock
Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University
[email protected]
Anne-Marie Bouttiaux
Royal Museum for Central Africa
[email protected]
Jan-Lodewijk Grootaers
Minneapolis Institute of Arts
[email protected]
Anitra Nettleton
Centre for the Creative Arts of Africa, University of the Witwatersrand
[email protected]
Barbara Plankensteiner
Weltmuseum Wien
[email protected]
BREAK FOR LUNCH (1:30 – 2:45 PM)
LUNCH SESSION, 1:30–2:45 pm
Beaux-Arts Court.
POSTER SESSION: Current Practice in Museum Labels for African Art. Organized
by Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, Baltimore Museum of Art, [email protected]
Conference participants working in museums will post labels currently used in their
galleries to allow for comparison between institutions. Labels will be uploaded to the
ACASA website for future reference.
Session 3 (3:00 – 4:45 PM)
3.1 ROUNDTABLE: African Art and the University Museum: Challenges and Goals
in the 21st Century. Convener: Matthew Francis Rarey, University of Wisconsin–
Madison, [email protected]
This roundtable will seek to think critically about the challenges and goals of permanent
displays of the arts of Africa at university museums across the United States. In such
spaces, the research and teaching goals of the university necessarily inform curatorial
decisions. Yet African objects and displays may be uniquely positioned to answer
questions applicable across the entire museum. As such, this roundtable will take up the
following questions: How does the presence of African art impact the university and its
museums? What is the relationship between current scholarship, practices of collecting
and display, and teaching and social engagement? And how are these challenges
informed by histories of African objects and contemporary displays?
Additional Participants:
Allyson Purpura
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[email protected]
Rebecca M. Nagy
Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville
[email protected]
Marla C. Berns
Fowler Museum at UCLA
[email protected]
Discussant:
Henry Drewal
University of Wisconsin–Madison
[email protected]
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Session 4 (9:15 – 11:00 AM)
4.1 South African Photobooks: A Continuously Changing Narrative. Convener:
Michael Godby, University of Cape Town, [email protected]
Originally comprising hand-printed, tipped-in photographs of seemingly arbitrary
scenery, the South African photobook soon came to celebrate the colonial achievement
in civilization and industry. Around the middle of the twentieth century, photographers,
still marginalized by the art world, turned to the photobook as a vehicle for artistic
expression on given themes—of landscape, for example—and others, notably Black
photographers, used it for expressly political ends. Currently, South African
photographers, confident of their position in the art world, use the form routinely as part
of their artistic expression. This panel will explore case studies from these three
chapters of South African photobook history.
Presenters:
The Royal Edinburgh Album of Cape Photographs, 1867
Michael Godby
The Royal Edinburgh Album of Cape Photographs was first presented to Queen
Victoria’s second son Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, during his second visit to
Cape Town and, with permission, published in London in 1868. The photographs
were made by the Rev William Curtis and were described at the time as “the
most complete set of views of Cape scenery in photography by an adept gifted
with an artist eye”. This paper collects what little is known of Rev Curtis and
examines the achievements of his amateur “artist eye” in the context of early
commercial photographic albums of Cape scenery.
Reissuing the Narrative: David Goldblatt’s On the Mines 1973/2012
Amy Halliday
ArtThrob: Contemporary South African Art
[email protected]
In March 1968, Optima – the magazine of the Anglo American corporation –
published ‘The Witwatersrand: A Time and Tailings’, a photo essay by David
Goldblatt with text by Nadine Gordimer. The essay would go on to become the
first of three sections in Goldblatt’s inaugural photobook, On the Mines (1973). If
‘Tailings’ nostalgically documented the mine dumps, waste water lakes and
industrial detritus that gave form to the Witwatersrand of Goldblatt's
childhood, On the Mines also tracked other tales of South Africa structured by the
mines: the dangerous subterranean world of shaftsinking, and the deeply
unequal relationships played out above the surface, figured through portraits of
‘mining men’. The reissue of On the Mines in 2012 by international publishing
house STEIDL, just months after the tragedy at the Lonmin platinum mines,
prompts questions of continuity and change in the national narrative around
mining and labour relations. By bookending his career to date, this re-issuing with an “expanded view” in which several images are added, omitted,
resequenced, appear in colour, or are otherwise altered – also captures the
traces and tailings of Goldblatt’s aesthetic, personal and professional trajectory
A Tale of Two Cities: Luanda in the Photobooks of Jo Ractliffe and Michael
MacGarry
Liese van der Watt
University of Johannesburg
[email protected]
This paper will look at the different narratives that emerge from two contemporary
photobooks on the same subject, the city of Luanda in Angola. In Jo Ractliffe’s
Terreno Occupado (2008), the artist explores an ongoing interest in liminality,
transience and notions of absence by examining urban Luanda in a series of
contemplative black-and-white photos. Michael MacGarry’s The Republic of
Luanda (2011) constructs a seemingly different story of the same city through
colour photos of a bustling, if ambivalent urban space. A comparison of these
two photo essays reveals the curatorial drive inherent in the mechanism of the
photobook.
Blinding the Truth: Mikhael Subotzky’s “Retinal Shift”
Federico Freschi
University of Johannesburg
[email protected]
As winner of the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award for 2012, Mikhael
Subotzky produced a large-scale project entitled ‘Retinal Shift’. Underlying this
project, and the photobook accompanying it, is an interrogation of the role of the
documentary photographer as passive recorder, whose subjectivity is ostensibly
sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. Ironically, Subotzky was blinded at the
moment that his retinas – the title images of the project – were photographed.
This resonated powerfully with the photographer, serving as a reminder of our
‘blindness’ in relation to the photograph: repeated exposure to a seemingly
endless parade of images of human suffering and degradation renders us
immune to them; the initial shock wears off, as Susan Sontag reminds us, as
quickly as pornography’s arousal. In this paper I consider how Subotzky uses
the medium of the photobook to points to the fragility of the notion of the
photograph as document, and the vulnerability of the meaning of visual
‘evidence’.
4.2 African Art and Postcolonial Cultural Politics. Convener: Sarah Van Beurden,
Ohio State University, [email protected]
This panel will explore the role of the arts in postcolonial cultural politics in sub-Saharan
Africa. Although they often have colonial roots, museums, art schools, workshops, and
other cultural institutions were—directly or indirectly—involved with the construction of
postcolonial cultural agendas. Participants included artists but also curators, scholars,
teachers and government officials. How did they interpret their role as cultural agents or
brokers of a postcolonial condition? Did the colonial roots of many African cultural
institutions shape their postcolonial agendas? The cultural practices that interest this
panel include artistic, educational, and curatorial practices, but also political and
commercials strategies (in the form of African art galleries, for example).
Presenters:
Imagining the post-colonial and post-genocidal Rwandan nation in the
National Museum of Rwanda, Butare
Laura De Becker
Wits Art Museum, University of the Witwatersrand
[email protected]
This paper focuses on the history of one particular institution: the National
Museum of Rwanda in Butare. Created between 1987 and 1989 by the Belgian
architect Lode Van Pee, funded by the Belgian government and gifted by King
Baudoin of Belgium to then Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarima , this
museum was specifically designed to house the ever-expanding collection of the
National Institute for Scientific Research, in itself a research body rooted in the
colonial past. The museum opened its doors at a time when so-called ‘ethnic’
tensions between Hutu, Tutsi and Twa within the country were increasingly
gaining political significance, making the depiction of ethnicity within its
exhibitions an interesting point for research. The infrastructure and collection of
the NMR were largely spared in 1994, though many of its staff members perished
or were involved with the genocidal violence. In post-1994 Rwanda, the
museum’s collections and exhibitions were reinterpreted to reflect the current
governmental stance of national unity and identity. This paper therefore intends
to address the transitions that this museum and its objects have undergone and
to discuss the social and political implications of this transformation, in a postcolonial and post-genocidal context.
Interventions: Postcolonial Cultural Practices at the University of Ife-Ife,
Nigeria (1965-1975)
Janine Sytsma
University of Wisconsin–Madison
[email protected]
This paper underscores the critical role played by the University of Ife in the
development of modern Nigerian art. The university offered its first Fine Arts
courses in 1969, and as elsewhere in Nigeria, these courses were based loosely
on British models. However, they were uniquely offered within the Institute of
African Studies, and taught by Research Fellows, who were engaged in research
in Yoruba art. As a result the courses had a Yoruba orientation from the
beginning. Students developed a modern Yoruba studio practice, which gained
wide expression with the establishment of the Department of Fine Arts in 1976.
The Zairian Institute for National Museums, the Mobutu Regime, and the
Nationalization of Traditional Culture (1970-1982)
Sarah Van Beurden
This paper explores the role of cultural heritage – particularly in the form of
traditional art- in the process of Congolese decolonization and in the
construction of postcolonial cultural sovereignty by the Mobutu regime. Locating
it within the Mobutu regime’s cultural politics of authenticity, I will investigate both
the national and international role of the postcolonial Institute for National
Museums. Did it help shape a “truly African museology,” as the International
Council of Museums hoped, or did its entanglement in colonial structures of
knowledge and representation, as well as in the increasingly authoritarian
tendencies of the Mobutu regime prevent it from fulfilling that mission?
Discussant:
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
University of California, Santa Barbara
[email protected]
4.3 Artistry in Industry: New Research on African Manufactured Textiles.
Conveners: Amanda Gilvin, Mount Holyoke College, [email protected] and
MacKenzie Moon Ryan, Rollins College, [email protected]
Industrially manufactured textiles serve as trade commodities, cherished garments,
wealth storage, and affectionate gifts across the continent of Africa and in the African
Diaspora. Individuals and families shape their lives through participation in the design,
production, and sale of these fabrics, but research on mass-produced textiles often
overlooks the role of people who contribute their specific knowledge and expertise in
production. The papers that comprise this panel will negotiate the space that links
artistry with industry in the creation of manufactured textiles.
Presenters:
Gossamer to a Beaver: Establishing Authenticity in East African Textile
Imports From Oman, ca. 1800-1900
Sarah Fee
Royal Ontario Museum
[email protected]
This paper examines how striped cotton-and-silk cloth from Oman in southern
Arabia, for close to a century (c. 1800-1900), became established as the
authentic luxury “brand” in East Africa (writ large). It then examines subsequent
attempts by industrial nations -- India, Germany, Britain, and the US -- to imitate
the cloth, and the reasons for their (initial) failure. It is argued that Omani
producers forestalled industrial competitors through hand skills and a versatile
supply of materials, e.g. ornamental weaves and a range of durable dyes. It ends
with a discussion of African handweavers’ own attempts to imitate the cloth
locally and the semantics of terms such as “imitation” and “appropriation.”
The Social Space of Looms: Labor, Artistry, and Design in the Tunisian
Textile Industries of the Parti Socialiste Dusturien
Jessica Gerschultz
University of Kansas
[email protected]
This paper will explore the parameters of female artisanal labor and creativity
within two state-supported institutions in postcolonial Tunisia. While women
employed by the National Office of the Artisanat wove and painted handmade
textiles, factory laborers issued mass-manufactured products for the National
Textiles Office. Yet, some female designers navigated between these industries,
just as both sites for women’s loom work were conscripted into broader social
ideologies promoted by the governing Parti Socialiste Dusturien (PSD). In
examining these intersections, it becomes possible to discern the artistry
involved with the creation and distribution of Tunisian textiles during the 1960s.
The Hirji and Peera Families: Kanga Textile Designers and Traders with
Global Links in the Colonial Era
MacKenzie Moon Ryan
This paper examines the role of two textile-trading family businesses in Dar es
Salaam and Zanzibar during the colonial period. The Hirji and Peera families
were involved in the design, commission, importation, and sale of the
manufactured and printed textiles, kanga, from the turn of the twentieth century
until the late 1960s in what is today Tanzania. Through an examination of kanga
textile designs, correspondence, photographs, advertisements, interviews, and
import records, this paper illuminates the contribution of these textile-trading
families of Indian-descent to the history of kanga in the colonial period.
Bringing Fabrics to Life: Akosombo Textiles Limited of Ghana.
Stephan Miescher
University of California, Santa Barbara
[email protected]
In 1967 the Hong-Kong entrepreneur Cha Chi Ming launched a textile factory
below the hydroelectric dam at Akosombo in Ghana. Over the next forty years,
Akosombo Textiles Ltd. (ATL) advanced from a fledging enterprise to a
household name. Although foreign owned, ATL has managed to become a
national icon of Ghanaian modernity. The paper explores this paradox by tracing
ATL marketing campaigns. The paper foregrounds people who participated in
work processes linking personal artistry with industrial production and
commercial marketing. The paper argues that the public perception of ATL is
connected with aspirations of modernity and nation building in Ghana.
Fashion Forward: African Wax-Print and the Aesthetic Turn to Fashion
Olajumoke Warritay
Cornell University
[email protected]
To maintain international competitiveness Vlisco, the premier African wax-print ,
strategically re-branded itself as a fashion house in 2010. The Dutch company’s
actions served to expand its economic power and cultural influence in West and
Central Africa. Focusing on Ghana, I highlight two significant transformations
related to Vlisco’s turn to fashion: first, a demographic shift in target consumers
from ‘mommies’ to fashionistas and, second, a local shift from industrial to
creative production. I argue that Vlisco has re-inscribed its power in ‘traditional’
dress practices while simultaneously encouraging counter-hegemonic fashion
possibilities.
4.4 ROUNDTABLE: Africa/China. Conveners: Gemma Rodrigues, Fowler Museum at
UCLA, [email protected] and Ruth Simbao, Rhodes University,
[email protected]
Africa’s relationship with China is often viewed as double-edged and has become a
space of contention both in the academy and mainstream discourses. Is it a curse or a
cure? Re- or de-colonization? What of new questions of race and racism, migration, and
miscegenation? The roundtable explores Africa and China’s evolving relationship as
mediated through visual culture, including film, contemporary art, photography, mapmaking, and political ephemera. We will approach this from multiple disciplinary and
temporal standpoints, paying particular attention to the historical and multifaceted
nature of China’s ongoing ties to Africa, from Ming dynasty trade routes, to nineteenthcentury labor migration, to mid-century liberation struggles.
Additional Participants:
Duncan McEachern Yoon
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
Lebogang Rasethaba,
Independent filmmaker, Johannesburg
[email protected]
Michelle Yun
Asia Society
[email protected]
Allen Roberts
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
4.5 Architecture and Landscape in Africa: Real and Imaginary Spaces in the Past
and Present. Convener: Randall Bird, University of the Witwatersrand,
[email protected]
In recent years, there has been an emergence of interest among scholars in the
relationship between architecture and the physical and conceptual shaping of the
landscape in Africa. This panel will feature papers that address, but are not limited to,
the following topics: the relationship between African architecture and landscape;
landscape heritage in Africa; the incorporation of concerns for environmental
sustainability into African architectural and landscape design; and the physical and
imaginary aspects of the African landscape and architecture. Papers will focus on
historical and contemporary topics and may also originate from the author’s own design
work and/or exhibitions.
Presenters:
Dialogues of Place through Place-Making in Indigenous communities: A
Deep-History Study of Wonderwerk Cave as Place
Sechaba Maape
University of the Witwatersrand
[email protected]
Dynamics of Domestic Architectural Production in Southern Cameroon:
Spatial Structuring, Social Representations and Functions of Works of Art
in the Beti Cultural Area
Martin Elouga
University of Yaounde I
[email protected]
In the Beti area, architectural production is secular. Despite its diversity and
richness, but equally the progressive and irreversible disappearance of certain
endogenous forms and styles, few scientific studies have been devoted to it. Yet,
architectural production has shaped and structured space, thereby giving an
identity to the Beti group. The symbolism of architectural elements and
representations that surround them seem decisive in determining their functions.
This paper attempts to highlight the changes in the structure of space brought
about by architectural production and the meaning given to these areas in the
course of history in the Beti cultural universe.
New Saro Holy Lands: Buildings and Revised Autobiographies in the
Transformation of Lagos’ Urban Landscape (1894-1913)
Adedoyin Teriba
Princeton University
[email protected]
Decorum and Drapery: Mediating ‘Africa’ through Materiality at the South
African Embassies in Addis Ababa and Berlin
Jonathan Noble
University of the Witwatersrand
[email protected]
This paper elaborates upon an idea of tectonic memory, as introduced by the
19th century theorist of architecture Gottfried Semper, and applies it to the
interpretation of the new South African embassy in Addis Ababa. Semper’s
thought provides an imaginative way to theorize issues of memory and identity,
themes that may be captured, architecturally speaking, via the phenomenon of
‘stoffwechsel’ (i.e. material transformation). The paper discusses architect
Mphethi Morojele’s conceptual/spatial design for the building with reference to
Ethiopian rock churches, and artist Usha Seejarim’s decorative design for the
large sunscreens of the exterior with reference to San rock art.
4.6 ROUNDTABLE: Focus on Benin—Recent Research. Convener: Jean M. Borgatti,
[email protected]
The focus of this panel will be recent scholarship on Art in Benin (Nigeria) as well as by
scholars associated with the University of Benin, in order to give them a forum with
international exposure to express their scholarly concerns. Given problems of access to
international material and limited exposure to active discussions with scholars of African
art working outside Nigeria, their focus will be local, on issues and art practice within
Nigeria. This local focus will reveal work that is being done in African universities, which
is not well-known or understood in the West.
Additional Participants:
Bronze Work From Benin City – Market Realities and Civic Identity
Frank Ugiomoh
University of Port Harcourt
[email protected]
Interrogating the Co-Relationship Between Idealism in Benin’s Historical
Art and Contemporary Sculpture
Nics O. Ubogu
University of Port Harcourt
[email protected]
Woodcarving in Benin Today: The Impact of Training on the Style of Four
Artists: Jerry Owie, Sunday Owie, E.O. Effionayi, and Enofe Omozuwa
Efemena I. Ononeme
University of Benin
[email protected]
Benin ‘Things of The River’: The Art of Margaret Omoragbon and Rose
Igbinoba
John Ogene
University of Benin
[email protected]
Metal Gates of Benin City: Fences of Fancy or Fear?
Freeborn Odiboh
University of Benin
[email protected]
Session 5 (11:15 – 1:00 PM)
5.1 African Diasporas/Photography. Convener: Kris Juncker, De Montfort University,
[email protected]
The discourse on Africa’s many diasporas, both inside and outside of the continent, is
complicated. However, the artists and accounts presented in this panel will reveal how
photography offers means to critically engage such movements across geographic
boundaries. Taking advantage of problems in the theorization of African diasporic
expression as well as issues in theorizing photography, artists creatively offer audience
new perspectives on diasporic identity. Photographic representations engage ideas of
the diaspora and challenge long-held paradigms of strict regional cultural identification,
asking audiences not only to consider the individuals appearing in the photograph, but
those not featured in the image.
Presenters:
Contemporary Photography in Southern Africa: Theorizing Formative
Realism
Raél Jero Salley
University of Cape Town
[email protected]
In this paper I make two claims: first, analysis of contemporary artworks from
South Africa can help understand the social ordering of people’s lives; and
second, formative realism may be a useful concept for looking at artworks about
any number of things, ranging from material and ideological spaces of the ‘self’ to
dominant social realities. My argument is shaped by encounters with distinct
artworks by the artists Hasan and Husan Essop, pictures in which political,
economic and ideological tensions are both present and productive.
Perceiving the Foreign: Images of African Diasporic Identities by Thandile
Zwelibanzi and Ade Adekola
Jessica Williams
University of Maryland, College Park
[email protected]
Looking to two recently created series, this paper explores the ways in which
photography has been employed by contemporary African artists to problematize
the formation and perception of inter- and intra-continental African diasporic
identities. Both artists’ works, I propose, suggest that while we may inhabit
globally “imagined worlds” and not simply “imagined communities” these worlds
are ultimately formulated from one’s experiences or imaginings of particular
localities which are, as Arjun Appadurai has written, “inherently fragile” and
constantly being remade. Important to this discussion is the role that the
imagination plays in constituting both diasporic public spheres and the identities
that legally and illegally populate them.
The Harlem Rooftop of Diasporic Practice: One Photograph, Many Worlds
Emilie Boone
Northwestern University
[email protected]
In an August 1924 photograph the Dahomean activist Kojo Tovalou Houénou
appears between the Pan African leader Marcus Garvey and his associate
George Marke. Taken by the studio photographer James Van Der Zee for the
occasion of the United Negro Improvement Association’s convention, the
photograph represents a triangulation of three different diasporic worlds. In this
presentation, I consider how we might interpret this photograph, its aesthetic
arrangement and the reason and context of its production, as an important tool in
understanding the relationship between the construction of Africa, its diaspora
and the practice of photography during the early twentieth century.
The Performative Photograph in Conversation with Maria Magdalena
Campos-Pons
Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons with Kristine Juncker
Independent Artist; School of the Museum of Fine Arts
[email protected]
Traversing analysis of the artist’s biography, artwork and theoretical
perspectives, this conversation will examine the critical relationships between the
camera, the photographic print and Campos-Pon’s performative work. We will
discuss Campo-Pon’s early encounters with photography and how, in the United
States, she increasingly began to rely upon both performance and photography
as primary media. Moreover, we will consider Campos-Pons reactions to
contemporary artists who explore similar methodologies. In what ways does the
work of Campos-Pons reflect an important Post-modern movement to document
links to personal histories as well as shared cultural pasts?
Discussant:
Elisabeth L. Cameron
University of California, Santa Cruz
[email protected]
5.2 ROUNDTABLE: The Lower Niger Bronzes: A Review. Convener: Philip M. Peek,
Drew University, [email protected]
Southern Nigerian arts have always been highlighted by the exceptional copper-alloy
lost-wax castings from Igbo-Ukwu, Ife, and Benin City, but there are also lesserknown—though highly compelling—cast objects grouped under the rubric of “Lower
Niger Bronzes” that have received little critical comparative study. A review of these
works, including bells, humanoid figures, and ritual objects, will answer a variety of
questions about the history and arts of southern Nigeria. By bringing together scholars
with relevant expertise this roundtable will address some of these questions with an eye
towards future exhibitions and publications.
Additional Participants:
Kathy Curnow
Cleveland State University
[email protected]
Perkins Foss
Pennsylvania State University
[email protected]
Christine Kreamer
National Museum of African Art
[email protected]
Nancy Neaher Mass
Independent Scholar
[email protected]
Daniel Mato
University of Calgary
[email protected]
John Picton
SOAS, University of London (Emeritus)
[email protected]
5.3 ROUNDTABLE: Global Threads: Africa’s Textile Trade in Historical
Perspective. Conveners: Genevieve Hill-Thomas, Independent Scholar,
[email protected] and Stephanie Beck Cohen, Indiana University Bloomington,
[email protected]
This roundtable will explore Africa’s historical position in the global textile trade.
Focusing on intercontinental and trans-oceanic networks, this roundtable will elucidate
cross-cultural cooperation in the design, production, and exchange of woven art. These
papers will re-examine textile histories to explore new methods of analyses, and will
address the following topics: How can the study of cloth be used to uncover complex
and vibrant historical views of Africa’s role in global trade? Likewise, how can
scholarship move beyond center-periphery and global north/south analyses? Lastly,
how can we characterize the interplay between aesthetics and economics within Early
Modern and Modern global textile networks?
Additional Participants:
A Re-Examination and Revolution of a Nigerian Woven Textile for Global
Textile Trade-Case Study of the Tiv Cloth
Umana Ginigeme Nnochiri
Cross River University of Technology
[email protected]
Historical evidence points to the existence of woven fabrics in Nigeria especially
in the Niger Delta, Yoruba, Benue, and Northern parts of Nigeria. The array of
fabrics produced by traditional looms were functional for both wear and utility
purposes until the advent of Europeans and entrant of foreign factory prints
which gradually became preferred causing a decline in demand for woven
fabrics, especially as the printed fabrics came in bright beautiful colors and
assorted designs, with some copying designs of woven fabrics. This paper
intends to re-examine the history of the tiv cloth, its similarities with other African
fabrics, cultural collaborations and co-operations in the design and production
methodologies, interplay of aesthetics, and revolutionary measures to increase
its viability for contemporary global textile trade.
African Textile Design Diasporas and Industrial Textile Trade
Elisha P. Renne
University of Michigan
[email protected]
Nineteenth and 20th century European traders collected West African handwoven
textiles as models for cloth manufactured in Europe and then marketed to West
Africans. Some West African textiles were also taken to India where their
patterns were reproduced, while Indian textiles sold in southern Nigeria were
transformed into cut-thread pelete bite cloths. In the mid-20th century, Nigerians
working at Kaduna mills used European wax print textiles as templates for their
own designs. These design dynamics have continued into the 21st century, with
Nigerian designs being sent to Chinese manufacturers, underscoring the
diasporic dimensions of manufacture, design, and trade associated with West
African textile markets.
A Spidery Web: Global Textile Connections of 18th-century Danish Trade
between India, Guinea and Europe.
Vibe Maria Martens
European University Institute/University of Copenhagen, Denmark
[email protected]
A Quilt on Three Continents: Liberian Coffee, Trade, and Textiles in
London, Chicago, and Atlanta 1892-1895
Stephanie Beck Cohen
This paper examines Martha Ricks’ nineteenth-century Coffee Tree quilt, both a
gift to Queen Victoria and a part of the Liberian exhibit at the Chicago World’s
Columbian Exposition (1893), and its later copy at the Atlanta Cotton States and
International Exposition (1895). The roundtable talk will visually analyze the quilt,
discuss its maker and her social network, and the broader political and economic
exhibition context. Finally, I will propose further research questions for examining
nineteenth-century women’s material culture, and presentation quilts as
diplomatic gifts more broadly between the nineteenth century and present.
Global Trade of 19th-century Textiles on the Gold and Slave Coast
Marika Kraamer
De Montfort University/Leicester Arts and Museum Service
[email protected]
A Beautifully Complex Network: “Exotic” European Export Cloth in 19th
Century African and American Markets
Genevieve Hill-Thomas
While much attention has been paid to the export of European-created wax cloth
to Africa, less scholarly inquiry has been given to similar textiles exported to
America prior to the Civil War. From early Javanese batik and Indian-inspired
chintz, a taste for bright, colorfast cottons was shared not only by Africans, but
also by Americans. This complex network of export illuminates the fact that
historical preferences for certain textile aesthetics are closely linked with politics
and the allure of the “exotic” - making the tastes of the American colonies and
later the United States closer to Africa than we typically think.
5.4 Africa Eastward. Convener: Gary van Wyk, Queens Community College Art
Gallery/Axis Gallery, [email protected]
This panel will examine historical and contemporary links between Africa and the Indian
Ocean Rim and Asia, especially ties reflected in visual culture. A eurocentric
historiography of African Studies skews constructions of Africa by viewing Africa
through Western encounters, but alternate epistemologies (e.g. Chinese, Arabic,
African) reflect historical African relationships with regions to the east. Today, with
globalization, new cultural and artistic links are being lived, forged, reflected—and
represented by contemporary artists. Re-interpretations of historical links can be
instrumental in cementing new relationships between Africa and partners to the east.
Presenters:
Not Katanga Business: Sammy Baloji’s Kolwezi Series
Dominique Malaquais
Institut des Mondes Africains, CNRS
[email protected]
In 2009-2010, Sammy Baloji traveled to Kolwezi to develop a project centered on
Chinese enterprises in Katanga. The resulting images are radically different, in
both content and form, from those to which photographers and filmmakers alike
have accustomed us over the past decade and a half. They tell a complex story
of China’s presence in Africa that does away with key tropes of triumphalism and
pathos, replacing these with nuanced expressions of loss, longing, and
agency. Clichés and preconceptions fall away, paving the way for a richly
variegated reading of emerging economic, social, and symbolic landscapes.
Spirit-Scapes of the Indian Ocean World: Reorienting “Africa” through
Transcultural Devotional Practices
Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
The Indian Ocean World has long been a nexus of inter-cultural negotiation and
transaction, complicating directional biases of African Studies. Applying Arjun
Appadurai's concepts of “process geographies” and “-scapes,” this paper
presents migrations of things and people as evidence of new orientations and
spiritual practices, while considering how powerfully affecting the mobility of
spirits and saints has been to forging identities, connections to place, and new
paradigms for understanding diaspora. A case study will present an inspired
Mauritian artist who has built a striking sea-side pilgrimage site through which he
expresses Asian/African spiritual transversalities, elucidated through dreams and
reincarnation.
“World on the Horizon:” Exhibiting the Arts of the Swahili Coast and
Western Indian Ocean
Allyson Purpura
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[email protected]
This paper presents research under way for an exhibition being co-organized by
Allyson Purpura and Prita Meier on the arts of the Swahili coast and western
Indian Ocean world. Enriched by centuries of interconnectivity and exchange
between Asia and Africa, Indian Ocean social formations work against the fiction
of autonomous and discrete nations and continents, and the disciplining of art
historical knowledge that is their legacy. By approaching both historical and
contemporary arts of the region through the lenses of mobility and networks of
encounter, this paper will argue that transoceanic spaces and their hinterlands
have great critical potential for de-centering imperial, cartographic and
museological frameworks that have long kept Asia and Africa apart – and “in
place.”
Holocaust in the Indian Ocean: Jewish Exile in Mauritius and the Exotic
Other of Africa
Kirk Sides
University of California, Los Angeles/Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies
[email protected]
This paper traces the relatively unknown history of nearly two thousand Eastern
European Jews detained on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius during WWII. I
look at the work of two artists aboard this transport to Mauritius, Peretz Beda
Mayer and Fritz Haendel, whose collections of drawings and woodcuts document
daily life during four months aboard a ship transport as well as the subsequent
four years spent in a Mauritian prison camp. In giving artistic voice to what is
otherwise an aporia in Jewish, Mauritian and African history, these artists
articulate a Southern Hemispheric experience of the European Holocaust.
Cementing Ties: The Map, the Found Fragment, the Gene
Gary van Wyk
As China develops deepening ties with African countries, Chinese cartography,
manuscripts, artifacts, and even Chinese genetic traces are being mobilized
within narratives that represent Chinese ties with Africa as older, deeper, and
more egalitarian than the relations Europeans developed with Africans. With
particular emphasis on South Africa and East Africa, this paper considers how
such representations help legitimize shifts in configurations of power and
patronage.
5.5 African Architecture and the West. Convener: Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard
University, [email protected]
From global trade to colonial interventions to world fairs to the broader legacy of early
empire interventions, the architectures of Africa and the West have long intersected.
This panel will explore a range of issues framed around the interrelationship between
African architecture and the West, addressing not only issues of history but also
questions of how associated research questions are framed and help us to understand
both sides of this engagement. In addition to examining specific contexts in which
related issues come into play, the papers on this panel will also address some of the
deeper issues of how and why architecture figures so prominently in associated
exchanges.
Presenters:
Porcelain as Exotic Ornament: The “Global” Surface of Swahili Coast
Architecture
Prita Meier
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
[email protected]
The Medical Complex at Befelatanana: Medicine and Public Health in
French Colonial Madagascar
Randall Bird
University of Witwatersrand
[email protected]
King Njoya’s Palaces and German Style Architecture in Cameroon
Mark Dike DeLancey
DePaul University
[email protected]
Architecture, Modernity, and the Image of Africa at German Colonial
Exhibitions
Itohan Osayimwese
Brown University
[email protected]
Architecture, Africa, at the 1958 Brussels World Fair
Suzanne Preston Blier
5.6 Contestation, Conflict, and Environmental Issues: Contemporary Art and
Photographs on the Niger Delta. Convener: Tobenna Okwuosa, Niger Delta
University, [email protected]
Well-known Niger Delta artists—such as Sokari Douglas Camp, George Osodi, and
Bright Ugochukwu Eke—along with many students of fine arts and art history in the
region’s universities have created work on the problems and crises of oil exploration
within the matrix of the postcolonial and neoliberal order.
Presenters:
Emblematics of the Niger Delta: Focus on Students’ Projects/Dissertations
Harrie Bazunu
Delta State University, Abraka
[email protected]
Oil exploration and exploitation activities and the attendant fallouts have created
new images/imageries that have become recurring decimals and emblems in
Niger Delta Visual discourses. These fallouts, which have created environmental
problems in the region, have been given visual problematization by students of
visual arts in the region’s tertiary institutions. With a view to finding out the signs,
symbols and meanings in the visuals, and the directions to which they may point,
this paper adopts object-centered method of art historical study, in-depth
interviews/library sources to semiotically assess the students’ perception of the
Niger Delta environment through their projects/dissertations.
Art, Politics, and the Environment in Zina Saro-Wiwa’s Port Harcourt
Project
Amy Powell
Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston
[email protected]
In 2013, artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa began production on new works
about the Niger Delta. From a studio and exhibition space that she is establishing
in the former Port Harcourt offices of her father, the late writer and human rights
activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, the artist is becoming increasingly involved with Ogoni
communities, researching their pre-colonial cosmologies, dance and
performance traditions, and present-day urban subcultures, as well as her
father’s poetry and literature. This paper will report on the work in progress and
consider its context in socially-engaged contemporary art, the intersection of
ecopolitics and contemporary art, and ecocriticism.
Environmental Infraction and the Locusts of the Niger Delta
Timipre Willis Amah
Niger Delta University
[email protected]
The economic value of crude oil and the environmental and human devaluation,
which oil prospecting has brought about in the Nigeria’s Niger Delta region has
resulted in many negative vices and activities by the organized syndicates of
armed youths. But it is apparent that their actions are anti-environment and antihuman. This paper focuses on my documentary photographs on the clandestine
and illegal acts of refining crude oil in different localities in Bayelsa State. The
images emphasize the human impact on our fragile environment as they
elucidate our relationship to nature, and further visualize the violence on the
ecosystem.
The Burden of Oil and the Neoliberal Order: Contemporary Niger Delta
Photographs as Grisly Testimonial
Tobenna Okwuosa
Niger Delta University
[email protected]
For more than 50 years, oil and gas prospecting, extraction, and refining have
been going on in the Niger Delta with no significant economic benefits and
infrastructural development. The burden and challenges of survival in the Niger
Delta have been complicated by the neoliberal economic policy of the Nigerian
government. The conditions of oil extraction (with its environmental
consequences) and the deregulation of petroleum products have been
challenged through peaceful and violent protests. This paper uses photographs
by George Osodi, Ed Kashi, and Timipre Willis Amah to construct a grisly
narrative of the Nigeria’s Niger Delta region.
Discussant:
Frank Ugiomoh
University of Port Harcourt
[email protected]
BREAK FOR LUNCH (1:00 – 2:45 PM)
LUNCH SESSION, 1:00–1:55 pm
Cantor Auditorium. FILM SCREENING: Market Imaginary (2012). 53 minutes. Directed by Joanna
Grabski, Denison University, [email protected]
Documentary film featuring Senegalese artists, including Viyé Diba, Ndary Lo, Cheikh Ndiaye, Fally Sene Sow, and
Abdoulaye Ndoye. Dialogue in Wolof, French, and English. Subtitles in English. DVD distributed by Indiana University
Press.
LUNCH SESSION, 2:00–2:45 pm
Cantor Auditorium. TECHNOLO GY PRESENTATION: Exploring African Art and Architecture
through WorldMap / AfricaMap.
Presenter: Suzanne Preston Blier, Harvard University, [email protected]
WorldMap is a free online resource that brings together the best available mapping on the continent (and the world)
using the GIS technology also found in platforms such as Google Earth, Bing, and MapQuest. The site also allows
users to create and publish their own unique mapping projects, embedded images, video, and text. This live
demonstration will show, among other things, how one can upload and copy plans or maps from any source (from
field note drawings to historic maps) and export mapping data from the site.
Session 6 (3:00 – 4:45 PM)
6.1 Africa and the Moving Image. Convener: Amy Powell, Blaffer Art Museum,
University of Houston, [email protected]
This panel seeks to frame an African history of the moving image dating from multiple
origins to the present. Soliciting artists, filmmakers, curators, art and film historians, and
historians of science, panelists will consider: the ways Africa has been imagined
through magic lantern, optical toys, cinema, and contemporary film and video
installation; questions of form alongside questions of history and theory; current issues
in African cinema; contemporary artworks that use “dead” moving image technologies in
new ways; and analysis of cinematic ways of seeing across a range of media.
Comparative, interdisciplinary, and trans-historical case studies will be encouraged.
Presenters:
Back to the Future: Imaginations of Africa in Video Films from Tanzania
Claudia Böehme
University of Leipzig
[email protected]
Since the development of a Tanzanian video film industry young artists are able
to present their vision of the world. These created imaginary spaces are most
visual in the genre of filamu za kiasili (heritage films). In this paper I will show
how these “visual geographies” of Africa are produced and received and how the
film makers aim at educating society through a performance of an “African
identity”. With its high popularity, video film succeeded in bringing the imagination
of an African history and identity home to African audiences and is such crucial to
the understanding of cinemas from Africa.
Black Skin, White Snow: Abderrahmane Sissako’s Octobre (1993) and the
End of the Peoples’ Friendship
Kate Cowcher
Stanford University
[email protected]
Abderrahmane Sissako’s short film Octobre narrates a love affair between an
African man and a Russian woman in early post-Soviet Moscow. It offers a poetic
yet disquieting insight into the souring of domestic relations between the former
Soviet Union and the ‘Third World’ it had once cherished. This paper juxtaposes
the rejection and resentment at the heart of Octobre’s tragic love story with
Sissako’s academic fascination with historic Russian filmmaking and its formal
innovations. Employing a range of techniques, Sissako uses Octobre to convey
the complexity of Russia’s shifting racial and artistic relations in the immediate
aftermath of the Cold War. Indeed, Octobre stands as a monument not just to a
seminal moment in social and political history, but to the Soviet foundations of
independent African cinema.
A Peculiar Family Album, 2012
Amina Menia
Independent Artist
[email protected]
From 1953 to 1957, the Deputy-Mayor of Algiers Jacques Chevallier appointed
Fernand Pouillon to undertake social housing for the benefit of poor Algerians.
With this ambitious building program, Chevallier was planning to reduce the
blatant inequalities between Europeans and the indigenous population. At the
same time as the launch of this “housing battle,” another battle breaks out, a far
more fierce one: the Algerian War for Independence. Using found footage
realized by Chevallier's collaborator, Menia’s film depicts the making of what
would transform the face of the capital city and explores the key sequence in the
architectural, social, and political history of Algiers.
6.2 ROUNDTABLE: Performance and Transformation. Convener: Aimée Bessire,
Bates College, [email protected]
Performance and masquerade open the possibilities for transformation. This roundtable
will consider the power of performance to shift physical and metaphysical perceptions
through disguise and ritual. We will consider the performative actions of two distinct yet
sometimes complementary traditions: masking the body and healing practices. How do
masquerade and disguise transform performer and spectator? How is performance
integrated into healing practices? Participants will present on healing in Tanzania and
on contemporary artists who use disguise to provoke and disrupt reality. Oscar
Mokeme, Ugo Oji of Oba, Nigeria, will discuss his spiritual practice during the
roundtable and perform a masquerade during the Triennial.
Participants/Presenters:
Electrocultures: Masks, New Media and Contemporary Transformations
Erika Dalya Massaquoi and Pamela Z. McClusky
Seattle Art Museum
[email protected]; [email protected]
Singing the Way to ‘Rock Mentally Universe’: Healing Transformation
through Performance
Aimée Bessire
Oscar Mokeme
African Center for the Sacred Arts
[email protected]
Simon Ottenberg
University of Washington
[email protected]
6.3 Rethinking Methodology of African Art for Productive Knowledge. Convener:
Osa D Egonwa, Delta State University, Abraka, [email protected]
Eclectic methods danced in the west to study African art history do not derive from the
contextual epistemology of African art and, as such, they only moderately unearth
inherent truths. Frequently, western scholarship wrongly views the heterogeneity of
African Art as defying Western concepts. A more revealing method might synthesize art
and historical principles of African descent for more productive interrogations. This
panel will explore alternative methodological approaches.
Presenters:
Rethinking Methodology of African Art History for Productive Knowledge
Osa D. Egonwa
An Art Historical Approach to the Work of Those Who Call Themselves
“Artists:” Creativity in Ile – Ife
Shirabe Ogata
The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, Japan
[email protected]
Working Towards an Authentic African Art Historiography
Cliff Nwanna
Nnamdi Azikiwe University
[email protected]
Rethinking South African Art History
Jillian Carman
Wits School of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand
[email protected]
Discussant:
Blossom Enamhe
Cross River University of Technology
[email protected]
6.4 ROUNDTABLE: African Christian Arts: New Fields Opening. Conveners:
Nicholas J. Bridger, Ohlone College, [email protected], and John Picton, SOAS,
University of London (Emeritus), [email protected]
While Africa’s Christian demographic has exploded during the 20th century, little notice
has been taken of this tectonic cultural shift, including that in the arts. Following a
groundbreaking Kevin Carroll Conference on African Christian Art in 2012, new
research by art scholars from across the continent has begun to surface. This
roundtable will continue the opening up of the study of the Christian art of African
peoples, especially of the process by which art is adapted to local cultures, and invites
papers concerning areas or topics whose religious art is little known or studied.
Additional Participants:
Church Architecture After the Missionaries Leave in Kasai Occidental, DRC
Elisabeth Cameron
University of California, Santa Cruz
[email protected]
From Yorubaland to County Down: The Kevin Carroll Collection of Yoruba
Christian Art (Northern Ireland)
Catie Cadge-Moore
DeAnza College
[email protected]
Indigenous Images and Liturgy: The Splendour of Nigerian Catholicism
Chinyere Ndubuisi
Yaba College of Technology
[email protected]
Francis Musangogwantamu: The Bridge Between Missionary Art and
Younger Artist Generations
Margaret Nagawa
Independent Artist
[email protected]
Indigenized Christian art of Zambian painter Emmanuel Nsama
Andrew Mulenga
Independent Journalist
[email protected]
Engelbert Mveng, an Artist/Curator in Cassock
Annette Schemmel
Free University of Berlin
[email protected]
Discussant:
Rowland Abiodun
Amherst College
[email protected]
6.5 Layered Object: Contemporary Approaches to Built Form in Africa. Convener:
Michelle M. Apotsos, Williams College
This panel will examine how collaborations and contestations between architectural
traditions and modern realities are inscribing new layers of identity onto the
contemporary built environment in Africa. It will examine how these negotiations
complicate established readings of architectural form and how the various stakeholders
in this process, ranging from inhabitants and preservationists to tourists and
government entities, manipulate interpretations of architectural structures, complexes,
and landscapes towards making them an amalgam of classic forms and contemporary
agendas.
Presenters:
The Tangibility of Nostalgia: Zanzibar Stone Town as a Site of Intangible
Heritage
Amanda H. Hellman
Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University
[email protected]
When UNESCO declared Zanzibar Stone Town—a diverse, growing, and everchanging town—a tangible World Heritage site, conservation efforts inevitably
resulted in urban renewal projects. Unlike many communities, which welcome
change, Stone Town’s primary tourist attraction is its fixed historical feel. In 2003,
UNESCO acknowledged that intangible heritage defines culture and heritage in
an equal, albeit different, way as tangible heritage. This paper explores the idea
of Stone Town as place of intangible heritage rather than tangible heritage and
suggests that UNESCO uses nostalgia to suspend heritage and create a linear
and static history for this site.
Post-colonial Identity and Architectural Preservation: The Royal Palace of
Dahomey
Lynne Ellsworth Larsen
University of Iowa
[email protected]
This paper investigates issues of identity and architectural preservation of
Abomey’s pre-colonial royal architecture in its post-colonial context (1960present). As earthen structures, palace buildings are in constant flux of
deterioration and repair. Post-colonial restoration efforts have largely been
funded by foreign entities whose philosophies of conservation conflict, to a
certain degree, with the preservation priorities of the Beninois. This paper
explores the cultural divide in the understanding of what “preservation” means by
examining the royal spaces as tourist destinations, as sites of religious
ceremonies and, for the central Royal Palace of Dahomey, as an UNESCO
World Heritage site.
‘Never Expect Power Always’: The Impact of National Electric Supply and
Foreign Markets on Lagosian Houses
Itohan I. Osayimwese
Brown University
[email protected]
By the 1970s, the Nigerian National Electric Power Authority’s (NEPA)
interminable power outages had sparked the new moniker, “Never Expect Power
Always.” Private generators and other sources replaced conventional power
generation. This strategy has had socioeconomic implications since generators
are luxury items that contribute significantly to imports. Generators also have
design and environmental ramifications due to their spatial requirements, lowered
levels of illumination, and polluting by-products. In this paper, I argue that
Lagosian architecture’s responses to infrastructural inefficiencies offer new
insights on links between domestic, national, and global spaces of production
and consumption, and individual, national, and international agendas.
Constructing Culture in Northern Ghana: Modernity and the Larabanga
Mosque
Michelle M. Apotsos
This paper explores how architecture articulates shifts in cultural identity through
its reality as a layered object. As a historic marker of Islam and a cultural symbol
of the community, the ancient mosque of Larabanga in Northern Ghana has
recently assumed additional careers as a tourist attraction and a heritage symbol.
This paper will examine the tensions that have resulted from collisions between
these disparate realities, and explore how the mosque has been altered
physically and interpretively in order to remain in tune with its current socio-
cultural moment and to move effectively, if occasionally uneasily, between these
layers of identity.
Discussant:
Peter Probst
Tufts University
[email protected]
Friday, March 21, 2014
Session 7 (9:15 – 11:00 AM)
7.1 Moments of Artistic Articulation in African Cities: Between Politics and
Imagination (Part 1 of 2). Fiona Siegenthaler, University of Basel,
[email protected]
Recently, African cities have been the place of art practices that are event-like and
processual rather than object-based and that aim at socio-political change. These
socially informed and politically engaged artistic articulations involve and address
diverse publics in the process. This panel will be interested in this very moment of
articulation in African cities that is both, artistic and political: How is it (in)formed, what
actors does it involve, and what is exactly its modus? The panel will present research in
art practices and articulations that address both the political and the social.
Presenters:
Moments of Artistic Articulation in African Cities: Between Politics and
Imagination
Fiona Siegenthaler
African cities are centers for both, artistic practice and cooperation, and for
politically informed debates and engagement. Many artists negotiate social and
political challenges in genres and methods familiar to the art world, but often
aiming at a particular local audience and aesthetics. These complex interactions
also lead to novel forms of public aesthetics in the urban sphere. The introduction
to this panel asks what practices they involve, and to what extent they reflect an
aesthetics particular to African cities in the context of transnational and global art
production.
Nai Ni Who Festival: Exploring Urban Identity, Place and Social
(Re)Construction in Nairobi
Joy Mboya
GoDown Arts Center, Nairobi
[email protected]
Despite the inception of Nairobi as an urban area over 100 years ago, the lived
experience of Africans in the city, all along, has remained either on the periphery
or in the interstices of formal city development. The GoDown Arts Centre, Kenya,
initiated an exploration of identity and belonging in Nairobi through a 12-week city
wide festival titled Nai Ni Who, (or Who is Nairobi?). The paper shares the
conceptualization process and the experiential framework developed to probe the
issue, the actors involved, and some insights gleaned about Nairobi’s presentday portrait and implications for city planning and citizen participation.
Impilo Mapantsula: A Manual of Movements and Styles to Survive the
Hostile World of the Township
Daniela Goeller
University of Johannesburg
[email protected]
Isipantsula is a prominent South African popular culture, originating in the 1970s
and incorporating language, dress-code, music and dance. The youth found their
pride in competitions where elegance and originality of dress is combined with
strictly encoded and virtuoso dance-movements. The streets of the townships
were the stage where to transform the fears and joys of everyday life into a
creative and inventive lifestyle and to express the spirit of survival and
brotherhood. Impilo Mapantsula is about documenting the living legacy of a
vibrant and fascinating street- culture that has shaped the identity of generations
of young people in South Africa.
Sanctifying Senegal: A Study of the Muridiyya and the Visual
Transformation of Public Space
John Lovejoy
Western Washington University
[email protected]
In Dakar, artists belonging to the mystical order of the Muridiyya refurbish the
walls of the city with murals depicting Amadu Bamba, the order’s founder. An
exploration of the visual culture of the Muridiyya, this essay argues that
representations of Bamba – as disseminators of his divine blessings, as well as
expressions of localized historical memories – inform the experience of public
space, investing it with new socio- religious significance. In a process similar to
the order’s early appropriation of French-dominated lands, public space becomes
daar al-Murid, considered sacred and conceptually separate from other spaces in
which Bamba's spiritual energy cannot be felt.
7.2 ROUNDTABLE: Temporal Dialogues: Historicizing Cross River Art. Conveners:
Jordan Fenton, Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University,
[email protected] and Eli Bentor, Appalachian State University,
[email protected]
The complexity of constructing Cross River art historical narratives reflects the region’s
long and layered history of interactions. The forces of global and regional trade,
migration, and ethnic diversity fostered a relentless dialogue of artistic and cultural
complexity. As a result until recently this multiethnic region—where each locality has its
own distinct configuration of a broader cultural practice and institution (such as the Ekpe
society)—escaped rigorous art histories in favor of broader, region-wide constructions
fraught with oversimplification. This panel will forge a dialogue between specific
locations and/or groups’ art historical narratives and a wider yet nuanced art history of
the region.
Additional Participants:
The Materiality of Concrete in Sculptural Expressions of Modernity in Ugep,
Southeastern Nigeria
Gitti Salami
Pacific Northwest College of Art
[email protected]
The Interplay of Visual and Performing Arts in Moninkim Maiden Dance of
Cross River State, Nigeria
Bojor Enamhe
Cross River University of Technology
[email protected]
Calabar Carnival: Performing Local History
Amanda Carlson
University of Hartford
[email protected]
Cross River Art: The Influence of Cultural Dialogue on the Ekpe Tradition
Emekpe Okokon-Ita Omon
Cross River State University of Technology
[email protected]
Memorializing the Fathers of Old Calabar: The Funerary Installations of
Ekpenyong Bassy Nsa
Jordan A. Fenton
History vs. Memory in Aro Performance: Heterotopia in Aro Ikeji Festival
Eli Bentor
7.3 Controversial Visual Culture in Africa: The Politics of Displeasure and
Censorship. Conveners: Brenda Schmahmann, University of Johannesburg,
[email protected] and Karen von Veh, University of Johannesburg, [email protected]
Panelists will explore controversies that have arisen in response to works of art,
exhibitions or other examples of visual culture from anywhere in Africa. It will feature
papers that examine strong or controversial responses to examples of visual culture in
light of competing values and ideals in the societies in which the objects or images
concerned were produced or displayed. It will also feature invite papers that, where
relevant, examine endeavors to proscribe works of art, imagery or exhibitions and which
thus consider issues around censorship and its implications.
Presenters:
Depictions of Trauma and the “Innocent Eye:” Some Tensions Surrounding
the Commemoration of Pain and Suffering from the Apartheid Past
Kim Miller
Wheaton College
[email protected]
W.J.T Mitchell has said that there is no such thing as an “innocent eye,” because
our vision is always the product of prior discourse, knowledge and experience.
This paper will consider Mitchell’s claim in relation to a controversy that ensued
as a result of South African artist Kagiso Pat Mautloa’s attempt to commemorate
experiences of political detainees, and the subsequent censoring of his proposed
design. To what extent must viewers bear witness to, or uphold, memories of
traumatic pasts? This paper will address tensions in representing trauma and
suffering in the public sphere, and issues that arise from such tensions.
Pleasure and Displeasure: Brett Murray’s The Spear and the Firestorm It
Ignited
Steven C. Dubin
Columbia University
[email protected]
In May, 2012, South Africa was whipped into a frenzy over a painting by Brett
Murray. The Spear, executed in social realist style, depicted President Jacob
Zuma with his genitals exposed. It triggered the most heated debate in the postapartheid era over artistic freedom and responsibility, and the intersection with
the constitutional guarantee of an individual’s right to dignity. The debate
reflected Michel Foucault's observation about “perpetual spirals of power and
pleasure” and also highlighted Mary Douglas’s concept of “natural categories.”
Moreover, this controversy will be contextualized by exploring the politics of
diversion and the social construction of acceptability.
Dressing the “Undressed”
Andrew Mulenga
Independent Journalist
[email protected]
It is customary in many of Zambia’s ethnic groupings for nubile maidens to bare
their breasts during traditional rite-of-passage ceremonies. While it might
therefore be supposed that Zambians are accustomed to the sight, this is not
entirely the case. In 2001, Nsofwa Bowa, subsequently well-known but then a
young sculptor eager to launch his career, made a series of concrete statues of
females which he installed around the lawns of a city roundabout. Nude from the
waist up, the figures caused a controversy which resulted in a demand for their
demolition. This paper includes an exploration of the controversy and an
investigation of what became of the statues.
Religion and Social Critique: Two Irreverent Cartoons at the University of
Cape Town
Brenda Schmahmann
In 2009, two cartoons published in a so-called ‘rag’ magazine at the University of
Cape Town, one by a student and another by an award-winning cartoonist,
caused an uproar in terms of their perspectives on fundamentalist Christian
beliefs. While endeavouring to ensure freedom of expression, the South African
constitution’s Bill of Rights indicates that this does not extend to advocating
‘hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion’. But, as this incident
indicates, uncertainties about what constitutes hate speech can mean that
cartoons such as these are potentially vulnerable to suppression – indeed as
much so as they would have been under apartheid, when regulations existed to
outlaw ‘blasphemous’ imagery.
The Sacred as Secular: Responses to Transgressive Christian Imagery in a
South African Context
Karen von Veh
In South Africa Christianity has a history of underpinning Nationalist state policies
that reinforced the censorship laws and largely informed Afrikaner dominance
under apartheid. The artists to be discussed in this paper parody Christian
imagery to disturb complacent viewing and encourage critical engagement with
implications that may not be apparent in the original context, particularly those
relating to the historic misappropriation of Christianity as a language of power
and the narrow interpretation of male and female identity promoted by Christian
role models. This paper considers reasons for strong public reactions to these
images in the contemporary, largely secular world of state politics and public
opinion.
7.4 Art in North Africa: Contemporary Trends in Recent Scholarship. Conveners:
Cynthia Becker, Boston University, [email protected] and Jessica Winegar,
Northwestern University, [email protected]
In the last decade, exciting new work has emerged on traditional, modern, and
contemporary art in North Africa—a region once seen as existing on the periphery of
African art studies. The textbook A History of Art in Africa includes sections on art of the
Sahara and the Maghreb as well as Egypt. Several conferences, monographs and
dissertations on North African art pay attention to sub-Saharan links, both historical and
contemporary. In 2012, a special of edition of Critical Interventions explored the idea of
Africanity and North Africa. In the last decade, links between North African and subSaharan artists have grown significantly as a result of biennales, gallery initiatives, and
grassroots collectives. This panel will feature scholars working in the region of northern
Africa, from Morocco to Egypt, to critically address current issues, including: artistic links
between North Africa, Europe and sub-Saharan Africa; the influence of pan-Arab and
pan-African ideologies on North African art; artists complicating what is meant by
“Islamic” and “Middle Eastern” and “African” art; artists grappling with ethnic and
religious divisions, as well as issues of race.
Presenters:
Morphing Modernisms: Representing Women, Cultural Identity and Class in
Modern Egyptian Art, 1933-1973
Lara Ayad
Boston University
[email protected]
Many scholars have interpreted African and Arab artists’ appropriations of
Western modernisms as derivative. I argue that the Egyptian avant-garde of the
interwar and Cold War periods deliberately merged indigenous pre-Islamic arts,
depictions of female peasants and city-dwellers, and fine art education in order to
address two distinct concerns of Egyptian modernity: cultural identity and class
divisions. Paintings of Egyptian women not only shaped adaptations of
Pharaonic, Coptic, and European aesthetics, they also served as useful tools to
grapple with economic crisis, changing gender roles, and ethnic marginalization
in a predominantly Muslim society wresting itself from British colonial control.
Early Decorative Programs of the École de Tunis and Artistic Networks in
the 1950s
Jessica Gerschultz
University of Kansas
[email protected]
This paper interrogates the historical underpinnings of École de Tunis decorative
programs, which were designed between 1950-1978 during two iterations of the
so-called 1% law. Initiated under the French Protectorate and reinstated in 1962,
this law allocated 1% of a civic building’s construction budget towards the
commission and installation of “modern” art. In both periods, prominent École de
Tunis artists directed these orders. I argue that the guidelines, commissions, and
networks of artistic exchange enacted by a Protectorate committee in 1950
created a framework for the subsequent reconfiguration of École styles, technical
processes, and conceptual approaches in the postcolonial period.
Theorizing States of Exception: Historically-Contingent Media and Algerian
Cultural Production
Amanda Rogers
University of Wisconsin–Madison
[email protected]
This paper investigates emergent specificities of Algerian political history in
contemporary art and culture, and theorizes the act of viewing as conditioned by
territorially-bounded politico-historical contingencies through the lens of Algerian
exceptionalism in the so-called “Arab Spring.” State security rapidly quashed
sporadic riots; despite attempts at mobilization, a deeply dissatisfied citizenship
nonetheless failed to revolt en masse. 2011’s political quiescence is best
understood, in part, through a grounded understanding of unique
representational conventions, perceptions of geopolitical alliances and media
skepticism rooted in the nation-state’s foundational symbolic mythologies.
A New Contemporary Islamic Art in Egypt
Jessica Winegar
This paper examines new attempts to create a category of “contemporary Islamic
visual art” in Egypt in the context of broader calls for “purposeful art” within the
Islamic Revival. It argues that secular and religious regimes of value both
intertwine and diverge in such projects, especially in their relationship to state
and private sector institutions, to historical and modernist notions of art, and to
social class formation. Through an in-depth examination of the continuities and
shifts in the execution of art works and of how the process of art-making is
conceived, the paper shows the similarities and differences between this new
category of art and those that came before it.
Discussant:
Cynthia Becker
7.5 Collecting, Archives, and Display in West Africa. Conveners: Charles Gore,
SOAS, University of London, [email protected], and David Pratten, Oxford University,
[email protected]
“Collecting” is usually embedded in Eurocentric trajectories of display, most notably the
museum and gallery. It is imbricated in the deployments of the archive that stores, reorders and hierarchies in the production of value. This panel will focus on localized
practices within West Africa to consider how assemblages and displays are
conceptualized and deployed to offer other modes of collecting and archiving to offer
alternative paradigms. The panel will focus on West Africa, locally and within the
Atlantic and other wider networks, and also address present-day circumstances,
including the shift to new media that offer innovative discursive possibilities.
Presenters:
Art, Power and Public: M.D.W. Jeffreys and the Masking Traditions of Old
Calabar Province
David Pratten
Sub-Saharan Animation: The Internet as a Living Digital Archive
Paula Callus
Bournemouth University
[email protected]
A Refiguring of African American Artists in West Africa
Noah Jemison with Luke Houston
Independent Artist; SOAS, University of London
[email protected]
Making the Archive: Intertextuality and the Early West African
Photographer
Charles Gore
7.6 ROUNDTABLE: Focus On Benin—Recent Graduate Student Research.
Convener: Michael A.O. Omoighe, University of Benin, [email protected]
The focus of this panel will be recent scholarship by graduate students from Nigerian
universities on art in Benin, in order to give them a forum with international exposure.
Given problems of access to international material and limited exposure to active
discussions with scholars of African art working outside Nigeria, their focus will be local,
on issues and art practice within Nigeria. This local focus will reveal work that is being
done in African universities, which is not well-known or understood in the West.
Additional Participants:
Benin Royal Art: Evolution or Revolution?
Titilayo Omoighe
Yaba College of Technology
[email protected]
Evolution in the University of Benin Art School: From Solomon Irein
Wangboje to Freeborn Oziengbe Odiboh
Michael A.O. Omoighe
The Plight of Benin City’s Art Market
Etim Ekenyong
Etim Paste Research Studio
[email protected]
Waste to Wealth: Material Exploration for Casting in Fine Art, University of
Benin
John Oshoke Anabui
National Museum, Benin City
[email protected]
Session 8 (11:15 AM – 1:00 PM)
8.1 Moments of Artistic Articulation in African Cities: Between Politics and
Imagination (Part 2 of 2). Convener: Fiona Siegenthaler, University of Basel,
[email protected]
Recently, African cities have been the place of art practices that are event-like and
processual rather than object-based and that aim at socio-political change. These
socially informed and politically engaged artistic articulations involve and address
diverse publics in the process. This panel is interested in this very moment of
articulation in African cities that is both, artistic and political: How is it (in)formed, what
actors does it involve, and what is exactly its modus? The panel will present papers
based on research in such art practices and articulations that address both the political
and the social.
Presenters:
Douala: The Social, Political, and Artistic Value of Public Art
Iolanda Pensa
University of Applied Sciences / Arts of Southern Switzerland
[email protected]
Since 1991 Douala in Cameroon has been at the centre of a growing number of
public art productions, which have been engaging, through time, a wide network
of Cameroonian and international artists, thinkers, institutions and groups. The
innovative work implemented in the city have targeted around twelve
neighborhoods and have created object-based, performative and process-based
public artworks triggered and framed by art events and workshops (among which
Bessengue City, Scénographies Urbaines, Ars&Urbis and SUD Salon Urbain de
Douala). The city of Douala is a relevant case study of socially and politically
interested art practices in Africa.
Beyond the Activist Position: Artists and Political Articulation in Stateless
Spaces
Till Förster
University of Basel
[email protected]
Most African artists work in cities under state domination and relate to state
governance when they criticise or praise urban politics. But how do such
articulations look like when there is no state? How do artists situate themselves
in public spaces when the grand dichotomy of state and society does no longer
make sense? These questions are analysed in this paper. It looks at Korhogo, a
city under rebel domination. It shows how Safarim Maison, an association of
artists who were engaging in various media from sculpture through painting to
radio shows, addressed urban politics and tried to influence it.
Artists in Revolutionary Cairo, 2011-2013
Monica Blackmun Visonà
University of Kentucky
[email protected]
Drawn to Liberation Square (Midan al-Tahrir) in the heart of Cairo, Egyptian
artists participated in the extraordinary eighteen days of continual protests that
followed January 25, 2011. Professional artists joined other protestors of all ages
and all backgrounds and at least one was killed - Ahmed Bassiouni was shot by
a sniper in the midst of a performance in the square. Interviews conducted in July
and August of 2013 recorded how art and artists moved through the contested
public spaces of Cairo, both physically (in the streets) and virtually (on social
media), during this time of social and political upheaval.
The Space of Things: Urban Fragments and Disjuncture in the Work of Dineo
Seshee Bopape
Lynne Cooney
Boston University
[email protected]
South African artist Dineo Seshee Bopape is representative of a growing number
of Johannesburg-based artists who situate their artistic identities and practice
within a continually shifting urban milieu, drawing simultaneously upon local
contexts and global discourses. For Bopape, the urban is not simply something
to be represented. Rather, it is an arena within which to act and to engage with
the ephemeral, informal, and fragmentary processes of space-making. Working
across multiple media, Bopape creates subtly subversive installations that
reproduce the material, socio- political, and cultural dimensions of this South
African city, proposing a complexity and fluidity of urban geographies and
identities.
8.2 Investors, Auction Houses, Art Dealers, Critics, and Curators: Creating
Relevance and Value in Contemporary Nigerian Art in the 21st-century. Convenor:
Francine Kola-Bankole, Independent Scholar, [email protected]
Investors, curators, auction houses, the occasional art historian, writer/critics have
changed the ways in which contemporary Nigerian art has entered the global market,
significantly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. What changed? How did the
discourse change, or has it? Ultimately who is behind the new surge of acceptance of
contemporary Nigerian art? If this surge is solely for financial gain, how then does the
rest of the art market respond? Should the art historian take a close look at the artist
and not context—do traditional forms of art remain the major litmus test of relevance?
Presenters:
The Lagos Art World since the 2000s - Collecting Practice and Market
Consciousness: Preliminary Observations
Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi
Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College
[email protected]
Critical Disengagements: Dystrophic Regime in the Nigerian Culture Space
Dele Jegede
Miami University
[email protected]
The impact of Auction houses, Galleries, Dealers in Positioning African and
Nigerian Art in the 21st-century
K. Chellaram
ArtHouse Contemporary Ltd
[email protected]
Disparate Realities, Contentious Confluences: Financial Paradigms,
Western Intellect Relevancy within Contemporary Nigerian Art
Francine Kola-Bankole
Rowan-Cabarrus Community College
[email protected]
Discussants:
Nana Sonoki
ArtHouse Contemporary Ltd
[email protected]
Christopher B. Steiner
Connecticut College
[email protected]
8.3 ROUNDTABLE: Global Zulu. Conveners: Lisa Brittan, Axis Gallery,
[email protected] and Gary van Wyk, Queens Community College Art Gallery/Axis
Gallery, [email protected]
This roundtable will present the conceptual framework of the “Global Zulu” exhibition
and publication project, curated by Lisa Brittan and Gary van Wyk. “Global Zulu” is a
trans-historical, multidisciplinary, cross-cultural project that investigates what “Zulu”
means and has meant to both insiders and outsiders, and how this is reflected in a
range of visual representations, including Zulu cultural objects; images in engravings,
photographs, and mass media; film; museum displays and public spectacles;
contemporary art; and commodities. The roundtable will showcase contributions by
participating scholars, and will invites dialog and discussion with colleagues in African
Arts.
Additional Participants:
Siemon Allen
Virginia Commonwealth University
[email protected]
Catherine Elliot
University of East Anglia/British Museum
[email protected]
Sandra Klopper
University of Cape Town
[email protected]
Hlonipa Mokoena
Columbia University
[email protected]
Dingani Mthethwa
Virginia Commonwealth University
[email protected]
8.4 Trans-Saharan Trade in the Age of Empires: Expansion and Reverberations.
Convener: Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art,
Northwestern University, [email protected]
This panel will be devoted to the far-reaching artistic and cultural legacy of trade across
the Sahara Desert. For millennia, trans-Saharan connections have influenced the
development of art forms by fostering the movement of commodities, ideas, materials
and people. The panel will focus on the most intense period of trans-Saharan trade from
the 9th–16th centuries, as well as the continuing legacy of trade networks on artistic
forms, iconography, techniques, and cultural practices into the present.
Presenters:
Monetary Cultures: Import and Local Production of Coinage in Medieval
West Africa
Sam Nixon
University of East Anglia
[email protected]
Unlike most parts of the medieval Islamic world, West Africa did not develop a
large series of local dynastic coinages nor a strong coin-based economy using
imported coinage. This said, from around the 9th-10th centuries AD limited
importation and local production of coinage occurred. This review of this
evidence includes exploring the unorthodox nature of West African coinage, as
well as investigating how coinage was incorporated within local cultures of
exchange and display. This story provides a good example of how object classes
were given new meaning within trans-Saharan exchange, and how economic
systems were altered or only partially transferred.
The Horse and Rider in the Age of Trans-Saharan Trade: An Image with
Local Roots and Cross-Regional Influences
Kathleen Bickford Berzock
Horse and rider figures have been found from Bankoni (Mali) to Igbo Ukwu
(Nigeria). These sites and their associated works overlap with the period of
intensive trans-Saharan trade, spanning from the 8th through the 15th century.
Some scholars interpret the development of the horse and rider image in this
period as reflecting external influences, based on the notion that horses were
imported to West Africa across the Sahara. However, others suggest that a
breed of horse was established in West Africa prior to the 8th century. In this
paper I analyze horse and rider figures in light of this debate.
Trans-Saharan Trade at the Crossroads: North African Jewelry
Kristyne Loughran
Independent Scholar
[email protected]
The trans-Saharan trade left a wide-ranging legacy of artistic, cultural and
material exchanges and communication. By concentrating on jewelry forms from
the Maghreb (both Amazigh and metropolitan), and the materials and
technologies used to produce them, this paper will analyze the reverberations of
the trans-Saharan trade from its widest angle. In considering these jewelry styles
I wish to determine what the objects tell us about these cultural links, and how
they become part of a body of evidence that goes beyond the boundaries of
geographical settings and cultural and religious beliefs. They add new
significance to the dialogue of aesthetic processes at trade crossroads.
Trans-Saharan Trade and Transcultural Engagement in the Development of
Ghana’s Glass Beadmaking Arts
Suzanne Gott
University of British Columbia Okanagan
[email protected]
This presentation examines the impact of trans-Saharan trade in the
development of west Africa’s glass beadmaking technologies, particularly
Ghana’s powder-glass beadmaking arts. Trans-Saharan trade served as a
source for new glass bead forms and raw materials in the form of glass beads
and scrap. Trans-Saharan and interregional trade centers also attracted skilled
artisans, serving as sites for the transmission and development of new glass
beadmaking technologies. I conclude by exploring late 20th- and early 21stcentury innovations in Ghanaian glass beadmaking fueled by contemporary
beadmakers’ creativity and initiative, and by determined efforts to maintain the
vitality of Ghana’s unique bead heritage.
Material Biographies: Saharan Trade and the Lives of Objects in 14th- and
15th-century West Africa
Ray Silverman
University of Michigan
[email protected]
This paper considers cuprous metal vessels (bowls, basins, ewers) produced in
northeast Africa and Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries that were transported
to a number of sites in central Ghana and northern Nigeria. How and why were
these objects carried across the Sahara? What roles did these objects play in
their societies of origin and what were the new meanings ascribed to them in the
West African communities into which they were integrated? Finally, thinking
about the mutability of meaning, how might we understand these items as
discursive “objects of knowledge” connecting peoples from different times and
different places?
8.5 Seeking Sacred Ground: African Sacred Sites in the Americas. Conveners:
Robin Poynor, University of Florida, [email protected] and Susan Cooksey, Samuel P.
Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, [email protected]
Africans and their descendants living in the Americas have re-appropriated various
types of environments, transforming them into sacred places. This panel will address
the processes of defining such spaces within the context of ethnic identity, religious
beliefs, and aesthetic concepts originating in Africa. It will also seek to elucidate the
histories of these sacred places and practices, and objects associated with them. This
panel will encourage cross disciplinary approaches in considering how Africans have
used and continue to use natural forms, objects, architecture, and images to demarcate
sacred ground.
Presenters:
Re-Articulating Entangled Pasts at the St. Peter Street Cemetery, New
Orleans, Louisiana
D. Ryan Gray
University of New Orleans
In 1984 and again in 2011, archaeologists investigated human burials from the
site of the St. Peter Street Cemetery, one of New Orleans’ first formal
cemeteries. The remains recovered likely represent both enslaved and free
people of color from the city’s Colonial era. This paper presents a discussion of
objects found with these individuals as a means to reconstruct the complex
cultural entanglements between Africa, Native America, and Europe in the
Atlantic World of the eighteenth century. Such evidence allows a more nuanced
understanding of how identities were transformed in the New World, even as
transoceanic links were maintained.
From Symbols to Shrines: Linking West African Religions to a South
Carolina Slave Village.
Nicole Isenbarger and Andrew Agha
Archeological Research Collective, Inc. and Charles Towne Landing State
Historic Site
Archaeologists interpret the past by studying how material culture is patterned in
space, which in turn allows us to see what people did and where they did it.
Culture and society influence our actions; religion is an entity that influences our
lives. This paper explores the ways in which enslaved Africans organized the
space around them and how spirituality influenced their decisions. We focus on
Colonoware, the handmade, low fired earthenware they made and used for
foodways and medicinal/religious needs, to understand how enslaved Africans
crafted important places within the plantation landscape at Dean Hall Plantation,
Charleston, South Carolina.
African Resources, African American Burials, and Problems of
Interpretation
Grey Gundaker
College of William & Mary
Scholars and activists have long debated the significance of African history and
cultures for African American life and art in the United States. Cemeteries and
burials have been key loci for these debates. This paper re-visits certain African
American burials which appear to show emblematic signs of the African
dimension of the American past. It asks how such burials have been interpreted
and theorized, and how their contents cue multiple trajectories of significance.
Overall the paper suggests that, following W.E.B. Du Bois, Africa in the mix is a
given, but one which increases, not reduces, complexity.
Re-Africanization as Manifested in an Obatala Shrine in Northern Florida
Robin Poynor
Inspiration for re-Africanization arrives in North America in different ways over
time, stimulating new ways of defining sacred space and spiritual practices. This
paper explores how one shrine in North Florida began as a continuation of the
Orisha/Voodoo tradition from Oyotunji, South Carolina, and evolved in response
to the builder’s initiation in Oshogbo, Nigeria, and subsequent visits from Chief
Elebuibon, who mentors a large contingent of African Americans who visit
Oshogbo for instruction and invite him to the United States for initiations,
consultations and instruction. Such ritual spaces are the results of an intentional
looking to Africa as “the source.”
BREAK FOR LUNCH (1:00 – 2:45)
LUNCH SESSION, 1:00–2:40 pm
Cantor Auditorium.
FILM SCREENING: IN/FLUX #2 (2013). 100 minutes. Directed by Dominique
Malaquais
and Silke Schmickl
IN/FLUX is a series of three DVDs centering on experimental film and video from the
African world. The works included in the second volume address the dual theme of
urban history and memory. They consider ways in which past and present intersect in
the city, interrogating, destabilizing and at times radically shifting perceptions of one
another. Includes interviews with artists Zineb Sedira, Theo Eshetu, Bofa da Cara,
Sammy Baloji, Aryan Kaganof, Fayçal Baghriche, Nina Barnett, and Berni Searle.
Dialogue in English, Arabic, French. Subtitles in English. Distributed by Lowave, Paris.
LUNCH SESSION, 1:30–2:15 pm
Board Room. TECHNOLO GY PRESENTATION: Searching by “Image” through the
World Wide Web: Applications in the Domain of Traditional African Sculpture.
Presenter: Paul Nieuwenhuysen, Vrije Universiteit Brussel,
[email protected]
Searching for images on the world wide web allows us to find relevant images, as well
as the document and context in which each of these images occur. This presentation
reports on an investigation of systems that allow us to search through image, free of
charge, not by submitting a query in the form of text, but by the more recent and less
well-known method in which even the query consists of an existent image file. The
subject domain of the tests is traditional African sculpture. The results and conclusions
lead to recommendations for applications.
Session 9 (3:00 – 4:45)
9.1 A Sense of Place: Urban Contexts and the African Artist. Conveners: Jordan
Fenton, Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University,
[email protected] and Amy Schwartzott, Coastal Carolina University,
[email protected]
This panel will highlight connections between African artists and urban centers that
inspire or provoke their work. Complexities include artistic media, economics, identity
politics, generational tension, geo-political conditions and globalization. Our central aim
is to engage with the ways in which the multivalent complexities of the city shape
individual and collective artistic sensibilities.
Presenters:
The Graffiti Arts Movement in Dakar
Leslie W. Rabine
University of California, Davis (Emerita)
[email protected]
Actively engaged at the global crossroads of economic inequality and artistic
prowess, the graffiti artists of Dakar create an urban street art scene that moves
journalists and African graffers to call Dakar “the paradise of graffiti.” Graffiti art
in Dakar has been, since the 1990s, legitimate and welcomed as a force to
cleanse and beautify the disintegrating and unsanitary spaces of the city.
Whether doing organized collective events or spontaneous solos, each artist
aims to influence the population through an aesthetic “rebellion against academic
writing” and an “ethic” wherein “an artist cannot break the ties with his people.”
Photographs of Home: Omar Chennafi’s “Invisible Fes”
Michelle H. Craig
International Journal of Islamic Architecture
[email protected]
Omar Chennafi’s 2012 “Invisible Fes” series sought to reignite pride in Fez,
Morocco via the public display of photographs. His images transformed
residential streetscapes into exhibition spaces accessible to all passersby.
Photographs of interiors in the city’s historic quarter were installed on exterior
doors; the exhibitory gateways destabilized the boundary between public and
private space and promoted discourse on the meaning of traditional buildings for
their inhabitants or users. Encounters with Chennafi’s installations encouraged
viewers to examine the photographs and their subjects, recognize their
unexpected intimacy and consider the relationships connecting place, history and
tradition.
Specters in the City: Kiluanji Kia Henda and Luanda Past and Present
Rachel Nelson
University of California, Santa Cruz
[email protected]
In Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda’s project Fight the Power, 2011, the artist
stages and photographs performances on empty pedestals that loom in parks
and on street corners throughout Luanda. These pedestals once held the
monuments and statuary erected to celebrate colonial powers. Now, they remain
empty and emblematic. In this project, the psychological and socio-political
legacies of coercive rule are traced through these visual remnants of past power
structures. In a time of rapid economic growth and development in Luanda, Kia
Henda’s project attends to the specters of the past that mar this present booming
cityscape.
Addis Art: The Urban Evolution of the Modern and Contemporary Ethiopian
Artists Zerihun Yetmgeta and the Netsa Group
Kristen Windmuller-Luna
Princeton University
[email protected]
Addis Ababa has been the locus of modern and contemporary Ethiopian art since
the early twentieth century. Home to the country’s sole art school, commercial
and alternative art galleries, and an increasingly interested public, the city
supports a network of artists who draw both inspiration and opportunity from their
environment. Incorporating recent research and interviews with painter,
printmaker, and professor Zerihun Yetmgeta and the artists of the Netsa Art
Village, this paper considers the evolution of the practical and motivating roles of
the city of Addis Ababa in the lives of its artists.
What’s Old is New—Recyclia as Media: A Case Study of Three
Contemporary Artists in Maputo
Amy Schwarzott
Recycling is not new in the context of African cultures, yet its recent surge as a
popular medium is illustrated by its widespread use in contemporary
Mozambican art specifically. This paper investigates three artists working in
Maputo who use recycled materials as media to illuminate important
environmental, political, social, and economic issues, as I explore how and why
these artists use recyclia to create distinctly Mozambican art. These artists come
from vastly different backgrounds, yet all choose to create art from recycled
materials. Each of these artists recycles literally and conceptually, as they create
evocative art that deconstructs Mozambican history.
9.2 Uhuru @ 50: The emergence of contemporary visual arts in Kenya since
Independence. Convener: Elsbeth Court, SOAS, University of London,
[email protected]
This panel will address the uneven development of contemporary visual arts in Kenya
on the nation’s 50th anniversary of freedom: Uhuru. After an extended neo-colonial, if
elitist, phase with minimal cultural independence, the last two decades have brought
tremendous growth and enhancement in gallery-based art (in commercial and public
spaces), craft traditions, the heritage sector, public art, collective/social art projects, new
media – often generating free and compelling expressions of “Kenyan-ness.”
Development is a dynamic process that involves efficacious networking between art
worlds in Kenya and beyond. Networking may modify the ongoing asymmetry of the
Kenya imaginary and the project of symbolic nationhood that is the responsibility of
state institutions.
Presenters:
Art in Kenya @ 50: Convener Introduction
Elsbeth Court
Representations of Nationalism in the Displays of the National Museums of
Kenya, with Focus on the Nairobi National Museum
Lagat Kiprop
Nairobi National Museum/University of East Anglia
[email protected]
The National Museums of Kenya has used its collections, displays and public
programs to represent nationalism in various ways. This paper begins with
historical ethnographic collections, their constitution and whether they were truly
representative of the nation. Then, it focuses on how the new permanent
displays for ethnography Cycles of Life represent cultures in ways that promote
nationalism. The second focus is the new History of Kenya gallery which
presents a national narrative; of interest is how it interprets nationalism. The third
focus is the use of art as a medium to represent nationalism in temporary
exhibitions, such as Kenya Burning (re 2007-8 post-election violence) and
outdoor art installations.
Political Independence, Personal Independence: An Art-Historical
Perspective on Contemporary Kenyan Art and the Avant-Gardes
Pierre-Nicolas Bounakoff
Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies
[email protected]
What does independence mean for an artist, in Kenya, today? Independence
from the former colonial power? From the global art world? From overwhelming
discourses and ideologies? Financial independence from one class of patrons or
another? The contemporary art scene in Nairobi can be connected to the past
debates around artists who found themselves confronted with similar
interrogations, especially the New York avant-garde in the 1930's and 1940's,
underlining parallel ideas of personal and political independence, integrating the
innovations taking place in Kenya today into the larger fresco of artistic endeavor.
Contemporary Art and Art Studies in Kenya
Kwame Amoah Labi
University of Ghana
[email protected]
The issue of missing critical studies of art by indigenous Kenyan scholars is
problematic, especially with the quantity and dynamics of art-making in the country.
Presently, Kenyan art focuses on its contribution to development through
engagement with industry and the community projects; attention to research is
minimal. Thus, scholars of art studies are predominantly non-Kenyan as indicated
in Elsbeth Court’s comprehensive bibliography, mostly of 1964 post-Uhuru
literature. The vacuum is beginning to be filled with local initiatives such as Kimani
Njogu’s Jahazi, a journal about the arts; catalogs and seminar papers. This paper
aims to enrich the discourse by spotlighting the need for inclusive and systematic
research.
Discussant:
Joy Mboya
GoDown Arts Center, Nairobi
[email protected]
9.3 Revisiting “Resistance” Art in the African Context. Conveners: Juliette Leeb-du
Toit, University of Johannesburg, [email protected] and Anitra Nettleton, Centre
for the Creative Arts of Africa, University of the Witwatersrand,
[email protected]
This panel will seek to explore the ways in which artists in Africa, under both colonialism
and the contemporary condition of coloniality (Mignolo), developed forms of resistance
art through their engagement with modernity. Their production of artworks in a number
of modernist modes confounded colonial attempts to remainder them as backward.
Their disregard for ‘contemporary’ art market conditions that rendered them as
irrelevant to, or derivative of, mainstream modernist developments, could be argued to
have constituted subversive strategies for defining an African modernity. The papers
selected will interrogate broadly conceived modes of resistance, mounted through a
variety of works made by artists in South Africa, at different times in the last 100 yearsfrom colonialism through apartheid to democracy.
Presenters:
Reframing Parameters of Resistance: The Embrace of Pre-Conceptual and
Process Creativity in the Work of Select South African Artists
Juliette Leeb-du Toit
University of Johannesburg,
[email protected]
Many Black artists developed idiosyncratic iconographies resulting from
increasing self-scrutiny, referencing their urban and rural realities and/or plight.
But besides the celebrated themes of township art and abjection, several wrested
themselves from such idioms by centering on late modernist-inspired processdriven and precognitive art-making. I consider how artist Mmakgabo Helen Sebidi
and David Koloane were exposed to creativity located in Sufism and precognitive
subjectivity mediated by Bill Ainslie. In Sebidi’s oeuvre this will be linked to
African Feminism, while Koloane’s will be contextualized within a context of
modernity and self- realization in meditative process-driven creativity that
attaches to psychoanalytic perceptions of recuperative selfhood.
Michael Zondi: Dissent as a Creative Process
Kirsten Nieser
University of KwaZulu-Natal
[email protected]
The South African sculptor Michael Zondi used his creativity both to authenticate
himself as a person, and to generate visions of an African modernity. His
resourcefulness guided a process that expressed his dissent vis-à-vis
‘theologised’ racial segregation and state intransigence. The wide referencing of
his figurative work, from his own culture, to Western philosophical paradigms,
reveals more than mere vehement rejection of victimhood described by Achille
Mbembe as the “nativist” view of the African colonial past. By means of his own
Socratic parrhesia, of boldly speaking the truth – Zondi fostered trans-cultural
communication and reconciliation.
The Necessity of Subversive Acts: A Socio-historical Review of the
Expression of “Rebellion” in the Works of KwaZulu-Natal Indigenous
Praise-poets and Artists
Yvonne Winters
University of KwaZulu-Natal
[email protected]
Modernism, Modernity and Resistance: Sidney Kumalo and the Canon of
Resistance Art in South Africa.
Anitra Nettleton
Sidney Kumalo was the most famous black artist of his generation in South
Africa. His pioneering work as a sculptor trained at the Polly Street Recreation
Centre is what is most discussed. Kumalo’s work from 1970 to 1980 remains
under-researched and seldom considered, probably because his work does not
fit the canonical notion of resistance art. Yet, as I will argue in this paper, Kumalo
was one of the few black South African modernists who plumbed the depths of
African traditions, both in relation to folklore and sculptural form, to produce
works that challenged the hegemony of western aesthetic concerns in late
modernism.
9.4 Tents: Users as Makers in Nomadic Architecture. Conveners: Risham Majeed,
Columbia University, [email protected] and Susan Vogel, Qatar Museums Authority,
[email protected]
This panel will examine portable dwellings created in the world’s largest and most
inhospitable desert region, the Sahara, and the adjacent desert of Eastern Africa. We
will consider the fully nomadic tent as a work of architecture, an aesthetic installation,
and a marvel of efficient, environmentally adaptive design. Papers will focus on recent
advances in the study of these structures and their changing status as nomadic desert
dwellings and museum exhibits. Presentations will address the tent after
sedentarization, post-feminist discussions of the tent as architecture by women, new
approaches to the study and museum presentation of tents as objects, and an
examination of African nomadic structures and their engineering with respect to wind,
heat, mobility, and available resources.
Presenters:
Changing Gendered Spaces and the Semiotics of Nomadic Memory and
Forgetting in Tuareg Sedentarization and Urbanization
Susan Rasmussen
University of Houston
[email protected]
This paper explores concepts of gendered space expressed in built form and
architectonics. It will critically engage studies in anthropology and African Studies
(Bourdieu 1977; Prussin 1995; Wood 1999) of these spaces in relation to
socioeconomic and symbolic contexts. There is analysis of continuities and
transformations in Tuareg residential patterns and built forms in their Saharan
milieu, from rural nomadic to more sedentarized and urban settings. The paper
analyzes the impact of these changes upon gender constructs and how
gendered spaces in settled and urban settings alternately obliterate and
commemorate important longstanding gender constructs central to Tuareg
cultural identity, when animated by practices of both remembering and forgetting.
“Women’s Work:” Labelle Prussin’s African Nomadic Architecture in a
post-Feminist Age
Risham Majeed
Tents were not recognized as architecture, much less architecture by women,
until the 1970s. Several factors contributed to this neglect, most of which are
intertwined with the biases of Western architectural theory originating in the
nineteenth century. Labelle Prussin’s pioneering work was among the first to
celebrate the active, generative role of women as the builders, designers and
engineers of nomadic architecture. This paper will situate Prussin’s work within
the broad intellectual context in which it arose. It will then analyze her arguments,
especially regarding the role of feminist theory, and evaluate the impact they
have had on scholarship in a post-feminist age.
The Architecture of Saharan Tents
Samuel Roche
University of Miami School of Architecture
[email protected]
This paper will discuss Tuareg, Bedouin and Rendille tents as works of
architecture—that is, as buildings that carry and convey cultural ideas in addition
to meeting a practical requirement for shelter. How are these tents supported, put
together, and transported? How are the spaces they create organized for
everyday use? Where are the opportunities for enriching form? Can we find
shared attitudes to structure, ornament, and program? Finally, do these shared
attitudes have any implications for current architectural practice? How can these
portable structures, with their seemingly straightforward construction, minimal
adornment, and flexible programming, inform a design culture that prizes these
same qualities?
Saharan Tents in Museums
Susan Vogel
Nomadic Tuareg and Bedouin tent dwellings have been exhibited widely in
world’s fairs and ethnographic museums for over a century while gradually
becoming extremely rare as dwellings for fully nomadic communities. Tents that
were inhabited in the desert and considered as ethnographic objects in museums
are turning into symbols of ethnic heritage in the Sahara, and historic artifacts
akin to furnished rooms in museums. Acknowledging that the tents are changing
in form and shifting conceptual categories deals the curator a new pack of issues
and options. Tents in museums and nomads in towns echo the equally gradual
transition of classical African sculptures from living practice to exhibition cases.
Discussant:
Steven Nelson
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
9.5 Performing Personalities in Africa. Convener: Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Emory
University, [email protected]
In his generative publication, “I Am Not Myself,” Herbert M. Cole posits that full-body
coverings often result in “spirit-associated transformations, which cancel or obliterate
the wearer’s personality, even his humanity” (1985: 16). More recently, Patrick
McNaughton (2008) analyzes masquerade performances as reflections of individuals’
personalities and their effective agency, framing masquerades as events that highlight
rather than obliterate individuals and their humanity. This panel will explore spaces
between annulling and celebrating individual personalities. Papers presented on this
panel will offer focused examinations of a single event or performance genre to explore
how individuals shape the creation, execution, or reception of masquerades.
Presenters:
Ambiguous Agency: An Ontological Comparison of Dan/Mau Stilt Mask
Practice in Cote d'Ivoire and the US
Daniel B. Reed
Indiana University
[email protected]
In western Côte d'Ivoire, Dan and Mau practitioners of sacred stilt masquerades
assert that a performing masked figure is not a human, but a manifest spirit. But
Dan and Mau know that a person is behind the mask, and often know who that
person is. Identifying a mask performer publically, however, would be sacrilege.
Ivorian immigrant mask performers modify this custom, highlighting their personal
agency as they peddle their performances as labor in the competitive
marketplace. In the press and in promotional materials, performers make their
names known, though a subtle ambiguous agency persists in their performance
practices.
‘It’s a Photo in Wood’: Controversy and Human Agency in K. André
Sanon’s Portrait Masks
Lisa Homann
University of Pennsylvania
[email protected]
In 1996, a new Bobo masquerade tradition emerged in Bobo-Dioulasso, Burkina
Faso. Artist Kuymené André Sanon invented the "portrait mask" when he carved
a headpiece to honor a deceased friend. Referencing a photograph, he created a
naturalistic image. Rather than a typical "thing from the bush," the headpiece
clearly imaged a specific person, giving audiences the opportunity to celebrate
the individual. By redefining the mask as an image of the deceased, portrait
masks resonate with audiences and underscore individual agency. Yet, the
features making them wildly popular—celebrating individuals visually identifiable
by their physiognomic likeness—are the same ones that make them
controversial.
Letting the Mask Slip: Exception, Fame, and the Gongoli in Sierra Leone
Samuel M. Anderson
University of California Los Angeles
[email protected]
Bald, bulbous, bug-eyed, and boorish, the grotesque Gongoli exemplifies
principles of antisocial aesthetic inversion by satirizing local values, even going
as far as subverting the anonymity so elemental to his fellow masked spirits’
vaunted status. Despite his transgressions, he stands among the most beloved
figures of Sierra Leone’s rich performance traditions. Gongoli’s popularity hinges
on his irreverence for fundamental laws of masked dance, laws that also regulate
the balance between individual agency and communal responsibility. This paper
explores these codes of difference and celebrity by following Siloh, an
itinerant Gongoli performer whose onstage success is indivisible from his
offstage character.
Seeing the Unseeing Audience: Women and Power Association
Masquerades on the Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier”
Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi
Leaders of present-day komo and kono power association chapters in western
Burkina Faso are usually—but not always—male specialists who invest in
masquerade performances and materials-dense assemblages. Komo and kono
leaders restrict access to their arts, prohibiting most women from seeing their
performances and assemblages. Women may lock themselves in darkened
rooms when komo and kono masqueraders perform. Yet, women also participate
in, contribute to, and even define the organizations generally considered the
purview of men and the institutions’ arts. Individual women and men engage with
and contribute to purportedly male-dominated organizations and, in the process,
shape gendered identities.
Discussant:
Patrick McNaughton
Indiana University
[email protected]
9.6 Crossings: Collaborations and Transregional Influences. Convener: Robert
Nicholls, University of the Virgin Islands, [email protected]
This panel will theoretically reflect on the relation between culture and space in a nonterrestrial context and will also consider re-contextualization from one discourse to
another as a tool for new meanings. The Indian Ocean is a contact zone for
transcultural memory and transregional discourses between South Asia and Southeast
Africa, and Indian Ocean; ideas may be found in the works of South African visuals
artists. West African ritual art dynamically enhances Caribbean performance, is
modified by multicultural influences of modern media and globalization, and reappears
in Barcelona. Contemporary art is re-contextualized in the long term collaboration
between Malian and American artists working together as colleagues and partners.
Presenters:
“I nice, thank you merci:” An Artistic Collaboration
Janet Goldner
Independent Scholar and Artist
[email protected]
The Metaphor That is Meant: Play and Non-play Among Atlantic Rim
Masquerades
Robert Nicholls
Peter Minshal Mas Man: From Africa, Trinidad to Barcelona
John Nunley
Independent Scholar
[email protected]
Study the Indian Ocean: An Approach for the Visual Arts in South Africa?
Sandra Börngen
Frankfurt University
[email protected]
Out of the Western Archive: Early 20th-century Photographs of Women
from Rural Sierra Leone as Sources for Local History
Nanina Guyer
University of Basel
[email protected]
Saturday, March 22, 2013
Session 10 (9:15 – 11:00 AM)
10.1 The Senses of the Medium: What is the Medium? (Part 1 of 2). Conveners: Till
Förster, University of Basel, [email protected] and John Peffer, Ramapo College,
[email protected]
Media place images into the world, transmit images across space/time and translate
them into cultural forms. Media—whether sculpture, dance, music, or photographic
print—are carriers of images and are themselves carriers of meaning. Art historians
often describe the meaning of images and their social context but neglect to address the
significance of the media upon which the sensuous experience of images depends. This
double-session panel will address the significance of “medium” in African and Diaspora
cultures. Part I will explore the movement of image-ideas through different states of
embodiment in various media, and the implications in the social and political realms
resulting from the creation and transmission of new types of picture-objects. How is the
medium understood or defined in each case?
Presenters:
From Skin to Skin: Video Light in Postcolonial Jamaica
Krista Thompson
Northwestern University
[email protected]
Since the late 1980s, videographers wielding large video cameras crowned with
a bright white light have become fixtures in Jamaica’s urban dancehalls. Dancers
will often compete to be in the undiffused light of the video-cameras, known
locally as “video light.” My paper explores how the blinding and sublime effect of
video light, which produces physiological sensations or afterimages in the bodies
of dancehall participants, has become its own form of dematerialized image
produced through videographic technologies. The recent rise in the practice of
skin bleaching among dancehall participants presents another way the visual
technology of video light has become embodied.
Media Primitivism at the Dawn of Late Capitalism: Diamang’s Flagrantes da
Vida na Lunda (1958)
Delinda Collier
School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC)
[email protected]
This paper considers a photograph in a book called Snapshots of Life in Lunda
published in 1958 by the Diamond Company of Angola [Diamang]. The highly
retouched photograph performs a separation of the modernist optical
unconscious and the analog, sensuous existence of the native. Together with the
book, the photo nearly totally conflates the media-driven displacement of the
human sensorium and geographical displacement of late capitalism and
decolonization. The effects on the nervous system that Marshall McLuhan saw
occurring with global technological mediation is aligned with the reconfiguration
of “Africa” as energy potential and raw material to render financial products, here
exemplified by Diamang’s diamonds.
Competing Technologies: Glass Painting and Photography in 20th-century
Senegal
Giulia Paoletti
Columbia University
[email protected]
This paper considers the interferences – both theoretical and formal - between
two media- photography and glass painting - whose histories coincided between
the 1930s and 60s in Senegal. Following the 1908 French ban on the import of
Islamic imageries into Senegal, glass painting (suwer) became the most effective
medium to reproduce precisely those religious prints that could no longer be
found on the market. Gradually, surwer’s natural and islamic motifs decorated
photos and by the 1950s, glass painters took over the whole picture plane
painting copies of portraits by famous Dakarois photographers such as Mama
Casset. In a short time span and for a short time, the two media – painting and
photography – coincided and competed.
After Work, After Colonialism: Gardening, Photography and the Arts of
Retirement in Western Kenya
Liam Buckley
James Madison University
[email protected]
This paper focuses on the home-making of four retired men in the Kakamega
District of Kenya who worked as servants and drivers in late colonial and early
independence administrative buildings. The homes are eye-catching because of
their tidy lawns and flowers. One home is known for the photographs embedded
around the front door. The decorative style is based on two forms of visual
expression: gardening and photography. This aesthetic draws on the visual and
evaluative skills that the men aquired before their retirement. It merges building
techniques associated with village-life with the sensibilities developed in urban
colonial/postcolonial work places.
Discussant:
Till Förster
10.2 Reconsidering the Grassfields. Conveners: Jonathan Fine, Princeton University,
[email protected] and Mark DeLancey, DePaul University, [email protected]
Because of its history as a crossroads where indigenous, Islamic, and different colonial
regimes have met, the Cameroon Grassfields has been an extraordinarily productive
site for creating knowledge about African art and architecture. Yet how the history and
historiography of the Grassfields have shaped knowledge about Africa has remained
largely unexplored. This panel will consider these relations through specific examples
drawn from the colonial and postcolonial eras.
Presenters:
Collecting Practices in Bandjoun, Cameroon: Thinking about Collection as
a Research Paradigm
Ivan Bargna
Milano Bicocca University
[email protected]
Collecting is not a western prerogative but a bundle of different trans-cultural
practices of shaping and representing reality: an always locally diversified form of
concrete thinking operating through things. The case of Bandjoun shows a
variety of collecting practices through which individuals, groups, and authorities,
attempt to position themselves strategically in a changing world. The creation of
visualscapes and related narratives offer them the means to precariously arrange
past and present, private and public, politics and market, “traditional” culture and
global art. Bandjoun offers us the possibility to rethink “collection” as a paradigm
in ethnographic research and field practices.
The Invention of Images in the Bamum Kingdom, 1895-1940
Jonathan Fine
The significance of the invention of dessins bamum has been largely obscured.
The compositions have come to be understood primarily as general
representations or reflections of Bamum history and culture, unmoored from the
specific circumstances surrounding their invention or as an assertion of Bamum
independence vis a vis the French colonial authorities. But placing them back in
historical context is crucial to understanding their content and also their
characteristics as a genre. I contend that the invention of dessins bamum
represents particular artistic interventions in specific crises that confronted the
Bamum kingdom in the 1920s and 1930s ,
Made in Foumban: African Art and Narratives in the Marketplace
Silvia Forni
Royal Ontario Museum
[email protected]
For over two centuries, Foumban has been an important hub of art production
and circulation. Recent years have been characterized by a notable growth in the
art market activity of this center, which today is the main African art destination in
Cameroon. This paper analyzes some developments in art production and trade
in the Foumban market place. In particular, I look at Foumban as a paradigmatic
locus of concrete actualization of the abstract notion of African art. This broad,
problematic, exogenous category takes new life and meaning in the narratives
and practices of Cameroonian artists, traders, consumers and collectors.
Reconsidering Patrimonialization in the Bamun Kingdom (1920-2013): A
Theoretical Perspective
Alexandra Galitzine
Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
[email protected]
The heritage process has generally been studied in the Bamun kingdom in
relation to the personality of King Njoya, at the intersection of politics (German
and French colonial contexts) and art (local and western effects of the invention
of a "bamun art"). These perspectives tend to differentiate narratives and
visual/material productions, isolating writing from drawing, mapmaking,
photography, and the production of objects and architecture. In this paper, I
would like to review the processes of patrimonialization and provide a
comprehensive reading of the construction of a possible bamun "heritage
consciousness," between local initiatives (individual, public) and broader external
models.
Shaping Narratives: Inventing Tradition and Community Response in
Grassfields Museums
Erica Jones
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
Museums have long been a part of the cultural landscape in the Cameroon
Grassfields. Overwhelmingly these museums are used to invent tradition and
history, and this paper will address how these concepts are being invented and
to what end. Examining the perspective of organizers, visitors, and local
members of the kingdoms shows how they are important indicators of the role of
traditional art and culture in contemporary society and how local power structures
view the contemporary roles of art, kingship, and heritage in their daily lives.
10.3 Objects and Stories: Exploring Colonial Contexts. Convener: Victoria L.
Rovine, University of Florida, [email protected]
The papers on this panel will employ a deliberately narrow focus: each is centered on a
single object or a pair of related objects, which the author explores as a window onto
the complex interactions between African and European cultures in the context of
colonial governance. These objects were shaped by the desires and interpretations of
artists, patrons, scholars, collectors, and officials on both sides of the colonial
encounter. By focusing on singular objects rather than genres, these papers will
investigate the meanings and motivations of artistic expressions in the relationships
between Africans and Europeans at specific nodes across the history of colonial-era
encounters.
Presenters:
Portraits of Hubris: The Ongoing Histories of a Congolese Nkisi and a
Belgian Watercolor
Allen F. Roberts
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
An nkisi sculpture seized in 1884 from the “sanguinary potentate” Lusinga by the
Belgian Emile Storms did not depict the man himself. Instead, its iconography
suggested qualities to which the Congolese warlord aspired, while the figure
directed the agency of matrilineal ancestors to address his personal and
communal ambitions. Despite evident aesthetic differences, Lusinga’s nkisi may
be compared to a posthumous watercolor of Storms by James Thiriar that
portrays the “Emperor of Tanganyika,” as contemporary press derisorily dubbed
him, in all his cocky splendor. Such mimetic hubris reflects the men’s deadly pasde-deux as colonial conquest of the Congo began.
Assembled “Zulu” Headrests from the 1970s: Reconfiguring the Art of
Carving at the Mai Mai Migrant Workers’ Market in Johannesburg
Sandra Klopper
University of Cape Town
[email protected]
In the early 1970s, a migrant from the Msinga area of present-day KwaZulu-Natal
began to assemble headrests from a variety of industrial off-cuts, selling them as
wedding gifts to other Johannesburg-based migrants from the same rural district.
In at least one example, he secured carefully selected newspaper cuttings
behind transparent sections of Perspex, among them scenes of coastal
landscapes and urban entertainment. In this paper I focus on two of these highly
idiosyncratic headrests, exploring the likely significance of their form and
iconography for their original patrons. But I also pose questions about their
afterlife: assembled artefact entering a secondary market dedicated to the
celebration of ‘authentic’, monoxylic carvings.
King Msiri’s Departing Gift to Rev. Frederick Stanley Arnot, 1888: A Luba
Staff at the Cleveland Museum of Art
Constantine Petridis
Cleveland Museum of Art
[email protected]
Aside from being deeply sacred objects with curative and protective efficacy,
Luba staffs of office wield considerable socio-political power. Their complex
narrative iconographies constitute “memory maps” that serve to legitimize
authority. About a century before it surfaced at a New York auction in 1987, the
Cleveland Museum of Art’s Luba staff would have been owned by the famous
Yeke warlord Msiri, founder in the 1850s of the kingdom of Garenganze, an
important state southwest of Lake Tanganyika. This paper offers a reading of the
object’s “life history” against the backdrop of Luba royal culture as a source of
glamour and prestige.
A Weaver from Banamba: French Colonial Expositions and the Selection of
Artists from the Soudan Français
Victoria L. Rovine
In November 1936, Nanima Fomanta, a weaver from Banamba, 150 kilometers
north of Bamako, wrote to the Gouverneur du Soudan to request that his name
be added to the list of artisans traveling to Paris for the 1937 Exposition
Internationale. Fomanta enclosed three samples of his weaving, each in a wholly
distinct and unusual style; he was not selected for the event. Meanwhile, in
Bamako, the director of the Maison des Artisans focused on selecting “authentic”
artisans, even as he designed and commissioned new forms. This paper takes
the weaver’s samples and a desk designed for the office of the Gouverneur as
points of departure to explore the deployment of visual arts to represent the
French Soudan.
Discussant:
Barbara Plankensteiner
Weltmuseum Wien
[email protected]
10.4 Artistic Practice and Patronage. Convener: Katharina Greven, Bayreuth
International Graduate School of African Studies, [email protected], and Alexander
Opper, University of Johannesburg, [email protected]
This panel will combine case studies of how patterns of art patronage and concepts of
identity have shaped and continue to influence the production and consumption of
certain art forms in Nigeria and South Africa.
Presenters:
Images of European Art Patrons in Africa: A Turn toward Self-staging and
Mediation
Katharina Greven
In Africa a new form of art patrons appeared at the time of independence. These
people actively shaped their immediate environment and promoted a subjective
image of Africa, a “Phantasy Africa”. By founding art schools, organizing
workshops, building houses, collecting art and artifacts, and creating images in
the widest sense, they generated a specific cultural scene. The overall image
that the patrons produced, the “Phantasy Africa”, the self-staging and their role
as mediators can be demonstrated in detail through an iconological approach.
This is substantiated by an exemplary analysis of three photographs from the
estate of the art patron Ulli Beier, who lived and worked in Nigeria from in the
1950s and 1960s.
Art Patronage, Promotion, and Publication: A Focus on Omooba Yemisi
Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF)
Tobenna Okwuosa
Niger Delta University
[email protected]
The modern/contemporary art scene in Nigeria has been experiencing significant
growth in local patronage, promotion, research, and publication. Prince (Engr.)
Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon is widely believed to have the largest
collection of Nigerian art. Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation
(OYASAF) is a non-profit and self funded foundation with strong commitment in
the areas of art collecting, research, promotion, and documentation. OYASAF
takes pride in having the largest individual collection of artworks by Lamidi
Fakeye and recently published a book on him. This paper aims to map the
foundation’s trajectory in its art, cultural, social, academic, and philanthropic
commitments.
Separ(n)ation *
Alexander Opper
This paper is based on the most recent iteration of an ongoing body of practiceled artistic research—under the title of ‘Undoing Architecture’—developed by the
presenter over the past five years. The exhibition Separ(n)ation attempts a
spatially translated productive tension between process and product(s). This
translation is based on a close reading of a single material manifestation of
defense—that of steel palisade fencing—in the urban conurbation of
Johannesburg, South Africa. The manifold manifestations of the seven new
artworks that encompass the environment-like exhibition offer an unsettling
mirroring of the socio-political undercurrents of Johannesburg’s ongoing
preoccupations with security and defense.
Visualizing Ijo History through J. S. Green’s Photographs
Lisa Aronson
Skidmore College
[email protected]
By the post-Biafran war period, Port Harcourt had become a hub for the
distribution of posthumous prints of historic photos originally taken by the latenineteenth-century photographer Jonathan Adagogo Green (1873-1905). This
paper looks at the ways in which Ijo photographers and photo distributors in Port
Harcourt in the post 1970s period organized, documented and mounted
Jonathan Adagogo Green’s late nineteenth century photographs in albums with
an eye to reconstructing Eastern Ijo histories, and giving Ijo consumers a
compelling visual medium for reflecting on their cultural past.
10.5 Art from the Archive: Archival Art (Part 1 of 2). Convener: Ferdinand de Jong,
University of East Anglia, [email protected]
Over the last few decades, contemporary artists have increasingly been inspired by the
archive. Often attributed to the publication of Archive Fever by Jacques Derrida, this
turn to the archive has a longer history than is often acknowledged. However, in more
recent trends to watch the archive, formidable questions are raised about truth and
testimony, authority, history, and memory. Especially pertinent in post-conflict societies,
such questions about the archive are equally relevant to postcolonial contexts. The first
part of this panel presents an occasion to examine some of the questions raised above
in the work of individual artists.
Presenters:
The Transcultural Archive of George Adéagbo
Kerstin Schankweiler
Freie Univerität
[email protected]
In his site-specific installations Georges Adéagbo (born 1942, Ouidah/Benin)
combines countless found objects of culturally diverse provenience, along with
handwritten texts and commissioned paintings or sculptures produced by
craftsmen in Adéagbo’s hometown of Cotonou. This paper will interpret his
artistic practice as working on an alternative, transcultural archive – a kind of
“Mnemosyne Atlas” of globalization – in which the 'mobilisation' of the objects
plays a central role. Adéagbo presents a discursive network of contemporary and
historical relationships between Africa and those places where he exhibits,
conceptualizing a model of 'entangled' histories that his non-hierarchical
assemblages seem to transform aesthetically.
Black Box: William Kentridge’s Multi-Directional Archive
Ferdinand de Jong
University of East Anglia
[email protected]
Commissioned by the Deutsche Bank, Black Box/Chambre noir is an installation
the South African artist William Kentridge made to remember the genocide of the
Herero people in the German colony of Southwest Africa. Recycling footage of
rhino hunting, anthropometric measurements and gold mine ledgers, Black Box
presents an archive constituted by the scientific technologies used in the Herero
genocide – brought to technological culmination in the Shoah. Drawing on a wide
range of archival material, Black Box presents the dark side of our
Enlightenment. Set to the music of The Magic Flute, the installation makes us
mourn modernity at large.
The Archives of the Future: Revisiting Iconographies of Revolution and
Utopia in Contemporary Art Practice
Nadine Siegert
Africa Center of the University of Bayreuth
[email protected]
Aesthetic practice catalyzed revolutions and anticipated a utopian alternative
reality within the context of the African independence struggles. In the
contemporary art in post-revolutionary societies we find a revisiting of (political)
icons, referring to nostalgic and utopian concepts. Such images form the visual
archives of the revolution as a body of inter-iconic references. I focus on Angola
and Mozambique, analyzing and interpreting images linked to the revolutionary
project, questioning how icons are communicated by referring to the
revolutionary archive and how these aesthetic processes are linked to the
constitution of collective memory and ideas of nation and belonging.
Archive, Art, and Anarchy: Challenging the Praxis of Collecting at IwalewaHaus
Ulf Vierke
Africa Center of the University of Bayreuth
[email protected]
Picking up on the 2011 art project not_in_the_title by Sam Hopkins the paper
critically analyzes existing orders within the contemporary museum and archive.
Starting point is a paradigmatic body of Nollywood horror video tapes at
Iwalewahaus. Major concern is not the arbitrary praxis of collecting, based on
personal mission or professional area of expertise. Rather, it is the treatment of
the archival record after its entry, as well as its subsequent reception that seems
to intrigue him. The project challenges the archive by editing new archival
objects. A thorough reading of the project reveals shortcomings of archival
politics as well as the potential of archival processes.
Discussant:
Elizabeth Harney
University of Toronto
[email protected]
Session 11 (11:15 AM – 1:00 PM)
11.1 The Senses of the Medium: Senses and Sensibilities (Part 2 of 2). Conveners:
Till Förster, University of Basel, [email protected] and John Peffer, Ramapo
College, [email protected]
This double-session panel addresses the significance of “medium” in African and
Diaspora cultures. Part II will explore how other senses besides the visual have
informed the perception and creation of art. If the body is art’s primary medium for
expression and perception, beyond the visual what are the other senses of art and their
roles in the experience of culture? What is the embodied politics of African art? How can
the broader study of the significance of the range of senses inform critical questions of
mediality in African art studies? After iconology and after post-structuralism, we turn to
touchy subjects of feelings, affect, other senses, and the political in everyday life
through art.
Presenters:
The Sounds of Silence: Quiet Photography and the Sonic Registers of the
Image
Tina Campt
Barnard College
[email protected]
Responding to Ariella Azoulay’s invitation to ‘watch a photograph’, this paper
develops a theory of quiet photography by redefining quiet as neither silence, nor
the absence of sound or expression, but instead as one of the primary sonic
registers of photography. It reaffirms the importance of engaging the affective
registers of black vernacular photography by foregrounding the ways in which
photographs solicit intensive responses on multiple sensory levels. I argue that
black vernacular photography registers much differently when we listen to, as
well as 'watch' photographs, for the affects of images are not produced solely at
the level of the visual or the visible.
Artist Talk
Senzeni Marasela
Independent Artist
[email protected]
Pictures and the Media: Senses and Sensibilities Regarding The Spear by
Brett Murray
Fiona Siegenthaler
University of Basel
[email protected]
Brett Murray’s painting The Spear (2010) caused an unprecedented turmoil in
South Africa in 2012 and dominated the news and public debates for almost a
month. The analysis of the controversies surrounding ethics of representation
and notions of ‘cultural’ norms shows that the image and its reproduction in the
media was sensed, experienced and judged in often contradictory ways. This
paper traces the main topics and arguments in the debate and looks at visual
appropriations of the painting in the media in order to understand its perception
and reception in a public sphere reaching beyond the usual art world.
Just Paper and Glue?
Julie McGee
University of Delaware
[email protected]
In the work of South African artist Peter Clarke, a notational and quotational
quality of collage and inherent cognitive leaps are engendered by various
juxtapositions. Transit tickets, stamps, envelopes—evidence of movement across
time and space—are remainders and reminders of previous experiences. Recast
as static or formal data in the collage, they re-imagine the sensate life of the
artist. Playful or provocative, they are diaristic and fable-like, incidental and
coherent. The elements used in collage reflect trajectories beyond the studio of
the artist; global intimacies appear in the work, undermining simplistic narratives
of place, space and nationality.
Discussant:
Henry Drewal
University of Wisconsin–Madison
[email protected]
11.2 Performing Place: Psychological Environments and Contingent Sites.
Conveners: Gemma Rodrigues, Fowler Museum at UCLA, [email protected]
and Ruth Simbao, Rhodes University, [email protected]
Performance is contingent, and ontologically it becomes itself though disappearance.
Typically, though, place is viewed as less contingent, and its being-ness seems to rely
on presence rather than absence. Through an analysis of performance, this panel
interrogates the being-ness and live-ness of place, opening up a reciprocal engagement
between people and places. Sites are not simply locational but are psychological,
conceptual and discursive, manifesting their own agency. This panel will raise questions
about performance, materiality and the senses, exploring touch and transformation,
“blindness” and privileged perspective. It unpacks new questions about the relevance of
site-specificity in a time of nomadic fluidity and reflects upon intimate processes of
localization.
Presenters:
Architecture and Autochthony in Postcolonial Zimbabwe
Gemma Rodrigues
In contemporary Zimbabwe, the large majority of Shona rural homesteads
include at least one traditional, cone-on-cylinder, thatched structure: the kitchen.
Exploring reasons for this selective “survival,” my paper examines the mutually
structuring relationship between the kitchen and the multisensory liturgy of
kurova guva, a Shona memorial ceremony that combines with its architectural
setting to effect an apotheosis—a spiritual transformation that converts the spirit
of the deceased into a family ancestor. I also explore how, in the context of
present politics, a fashion for elaborate kitchen architecture has emerged among
Zimbabwe’s Shona elite as a means to foreground a ritually intimate,
autochthonous relationship to the land.
Site-Situational Performance in Cosmolocal Places: Athi-Patra Ruga and
Anthea Moys
Ruth Simbao
Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape is home to the National Arts Festival, which
recently introduced the category of Performance Art. In this presentation I
examine the relationship between performance art and place, arguing that the
term site-situational is more apt than site-specific, as reiterations of performances
occur in multiple places, such as Athi-Patra Ruga’s Future White Woman of
Azania, which recently appeared in Grahamstown, Johannesburg and Venice. I
focus on Performance Obscura (2012) by Ruga and Anthea Moys vs The City of
Grahamstown (2013) by Anthea Moys. I question how site-situational art can
develop new ways of viewing cosmolocal places.
CityWalk: The Cartography of Poetry and Politics of the Urban
Doung Anwar Jahangeer
‘dala’ NPO, South Africa
[email protected]
The CityWalk initiative began in Durban, South Africa in 2001 as an investigative
journey and exploration into the lives (and pathways) of the post-apartheid urban
poor, but has become a psycho-geographic celebration of, amongst other things,
the power of the in-between as a “space of radical openness” (hooks). The walk,
which essentially invites alternative ways of seeing urban space/place, has been
performed around the globe in such diverse cities as Copenhagen, Belo
Horizonte, Paris and Addis Ababa. Engaging with this initiative/performance, this
presentation will explore the concept of mimetic urbanism as inspired by the
power and poetry of the pavement.
Grounding Robin Rhode
Leora Maltz-Leca
Rhode Island School of Design
[email protected]
There is something afoot with Robin Rhode’s grounds. Painted olive green and
red, scumbled and stained, veined with cracks and guarded by shadows, they
oscillate, shake and flip. He, in turn, hugs, crawls and “rides” them, embracing
walls and floors, or spurning them with exaggerated gestures of refusal. Drawing
on painterly rhetorics of figure and ground – and especially the unmoored,
rotational fantasies of early abstraction – Rhodes seizes on these formal tensions
to gesture to other pressures: specifically the fraught relationship of the emigrant
artist to his generative context, the urban ground of Johannesburg.
Walls and Divisions in South African and Palestinian Aesthetics
Rachel Baasch
Rhodes University
[email protected]
Physical and psychological walls separate an inside from an outside. They deny
vision while simultaneously providing a surface for the imaginary projection of
fear and insecurity. Walls and boundaries are not static nor are they
impermeable, as sites of division they fluctuate in relation to multiple narratives of
division and the performance of every-day life. This presentation examines the
articulation of separation through narrative, architecture and mechanisms of
security and surveillance as they can be read, documented and interpreted in
connection with notions of meaningful place and the work of South African and
Palestinian artists.
11.3 Colonial Uncannies. Conveners: Z. S. Strother, Columbia University,
[email protected] and Debora L. Silverman, University of California, Los Angeles,
[email protected]
This panel will examine the exchange of ideas, objects, images, and fantasies that
(despite asymmetrical power relationships) changed the practice of art making in Africa
and in Europe. There are many surprises. For example, Central Pende masquerading
flourished in the 1920s and its style became radically more naturalistic. In Belgium,
some 1890s art nouveau architects adapted Congolese scarification patterns as they
invented modernist ornament. Scholars and contemporary audiences alike have often
repressed the attraction for difference. We take up Shaden Tageldin’s question to ask:
“not what makes [colonial enemies] `hate’ each other so but what makes them `love’
each other so.”
Presenters:
A Cloth for a Crown: Gender, Wealth, and Masquerade Performance in
Early Colonial Nigeria, Otta 1884-1921
Thabiti Willis
Carleton College
[email protected]
Two women, the wives of a warrior, channeled their collective resources toward
the production of a new Egungun ancestral masquerade that inaugurated a new
mode of performance in the early British Crown Colony of Nigeria. This paper
highlights the contributions of the wives as well as the performances
of unidentified men who masqueraded as Oya, the mythical wife of a legendary
Yoruba king. As Oya, this male wife adorns an attire adopted by Yoruba men
from their Hausa neighbors. I argue that the divergent performances of wifehood
raise questions about the agency of wives in masquerades.
`Breaking Juju’: Between Destruction and Preservation in Southern Nigeria
Z. S. Strother
By 1890 there was already a complex language for iconoclasm operating in
southern Nigeria. For officers of British administration, the destruction of shrines
was uppermost. The contents of the shrines were incidental and could be seized
as “trophies,” scientific artifacts, or nascent works of art. In contrast, African
iconoclasts shifted the emphasis away from the shrines and from the act of
destruction to the objects on the altar, as a means to communicate with both
British and local audiences. This transformative gesture laid the groundwork for
the explosive scale of destruction led by African prophets in the 20th century.
African Colonial Architecture in Coastal Ghana: Loving or Hating Britain?
Courtnay Micots
Independent Scholar
[email protected]
Beginning in the late 1860s Ghanaian patrons blended foreign styles with local
elements to create an intentional hybrid style of architecture that expressed ideas
of status, wealth, modernity and possibly resistance to the British colonial
hegemony. Local courtyard and two-story plans were combined with elements of
the Afro-Portuguese sobrado and British architectural styles, including the
Italianate, Queen Anne and Beaux Arts. Motivations behind such cultural
appropriations are complex and require a deep understanding of the social,
political and economic context. This paper will present a few key residences and
patrons, questioning colonial mimicry and offering multi-layered meanings.
Whips, Ships and Scars: Henry van de Velde’s Congo Style in Belgium
1885-1908
Debora L. Silverman
In 2005, rarely exhibited collections of the Royal Museum of Central Africa--Art
Nouveau ivory sculptures and wood furnishings commissioned by King Leopold II
in 1897- --were showcased for the 175th anniversary of Belgian independence.
These objects exemplify a complex and understudied mix of artistic innovation,
political radicalism, and imperial enthrallment shared by members of the fin-desiècle Belgian avant-garde, and they form part of a distinctively Belgian design
style made from the raw materials of empire. This paper identifies imperial origins
of Belgian Art Nouveau and the ways that stylistic forms of modernism expressed
a displaced encounter with a distant, but encroaching, imperial violence.
Colonial Distance Abolished: Visual Attractions in Photography of the
Belgian Congo
Sandrine Colard
Columbia University
[email protected]
Colonial photography has long been assimilated to an oppressive tool of control
and exoticization at the hands of colonizers over indigenous populations.
However, an examination of the photographic apparatus deployed in the Belgian
Congo shows that rather than being systematically divisive, photography could
also enhance proximity—at least visually—between metropole and colony,
Europeans and Africans. This paper will show that the images featured in the
illustrated colonial magazine L’Illustration Congolaise (1924-1940) recurrently
mirrored Belgium and Congo’s décor and social life, and that this visual
convergence was pursued further with the governmental photo agency
Congopresse (1955-1968) and its representation of an alleged “BelgianCongolese community.”
11.4 Art and the Digital Revolution in Africa. Conveners: Sylvester Okwunodu
Ogbechie, University of California Santa Barbara, [email protected] and
Julie L. McGee, University of Delaware, [email protected]
The panel will investigate how digital technology is altering the production of art in
global Africa and the divergent locations and positions of digital art practice in global
Africa. African artists working with digital media and interactive technologies are
creating new protocols of visual representation that both celebrate and problematize
questions of ethno-cultural and geo-spatial specificity. Digital technologies provide
artists with new tools and protocols of artistic practice that are now just being integrated
into the global African culturescape. The panel will therefore provide a critical space to
review the impact of new media technologies on the production of digital art in Africa
broadly defined as art that uses digital technology either as the product, as the process,
or as the subject.
Presenters:
Digital Technology and Visual Aesthetics
Tegan Bristow
University of the Witwatersrand
[email protected]
It is at the ‘Half-Tiger’ (40 US cents) level of commerce where contemporary and
deeply afro-urban digital cultural practice is found. A mass street level culture
that in East Africa is driven by the mobile phone as socio-political development
tool. In South Africa by a media industry, hacked and gone viral. These cultures
augment music, politics and social shifts with a digital aesthetic unique to their
regions. The paper addresses mobile and digital culture in the two cities,
comparing mobile technology use and its residue in cultural and aesthetic
practices in diverse urban environments. I will address work of key artists,
looking closely at how they respond aesthetically to shifting engagements with
digital media.
Signwriters in Ghana: From Handmade to Digital
Mariaclaudia Cristofano
Sapienza Università di Roma
[email protected]
The paper will focus on how signwriters’ work is nowadays changing in Ghana.
Colorful painted signboards, formerly the main advertisement in the country, are
today giving way to digital versions, made through software easily accessible in
contemporary technologised Ghana. These signboards are arrangements of
internet downloaded pictures, which are either made by computerised signwriters
or graphic designers specialised in ICT and without artistic background. My
intervention will investigate the work of handmade signwriters, their manufactures
and training. It will also present how artists and public imagery is changing, and
how messages are transforming in this transition from manual to digital.
Obsolescing Analog Africa
Delinda Collier
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
[email protected]
This paper works toward a functional theory of digital art in Africa. I start by
asking what its substance is, from monitors and “assorted wires,” as they say in
new media art, to a dispersed collection of electric impulses, hard drives, servers,
and microprocessors scattered around the world. I then move to the history of the
digital/analog divide on the continent, which is both material and conceptual, and
related to industrial modernism. I will propose that African artists who work with
electricity-based media are best situated to address its substance and primitivist
history—the analog/digital divide—and, consequently, the ontology of digital art.
Opening-Up Place through Sound
Carol L. Magee and Emeka Ogboh
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
[email protected]
Our paper explores the ways in which digital technologies as product, process
and subject engage with conceptualizations of place to open up understandings
of global intersections. Specifically, we begin with Ogboh’s Lagos soundscapes a
means by which to create a sense of place for listeners. We then look at three
different means by which these soundscapes can be digitally manipulated
complicating notions of where Lagos is or can be. Highlighting the experiential
possibilities that digital technologies offer, we focus our discussion equally on
artistic practice and art historical analysis, taking into account both production
and consumption.
11.5 Art from the Archive: Archival interventions (Part 2 of 2). Convener: Ferdinand
de Jong, University of East Anglia, [email protected]
What is especially interesting in the current turn to the archive is that many researchers
revisit colonial archives in order to establish their relevance in the present. Such
revisiting of the archive is not gratuitous, but displays a serious engagement with the
past (as represented by the archive), and the possibility it opens to intervene in that past
and invent an alternative history. The archive is revisited to articulate a postcolonial
critique and imagine an alternative future. Work within the archive enables visitors to the
archive to move back and forwards in time and address perceived problems in the
present through a return to the archive.
Presenters:
Going and Coming Back: Redisplaying the Bryan Heseltine Collection
Darren Newbury
University of Brighton
[email protected]
This paper is based on a collection of photographs made in and around Cape
Town in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The work was briefly exhibited in South
Africa and England in the 1950s before slipping into obscurity, only resurfacing
more than fifty years later, in 2009. The paper reflects on the project of returning
the photographs to South Africa in a recent exhibition – Going and Coming Back
– curated by the author, the ambition of which was to begin the process of
reconnecting the photographs to the city in which they were made.
Exposing the Contours of Photographic Archives in Mozambique
Drew Thompson
Bard College
[email protected]
Exposing the contours of photographic archives in Mozambique, Mozambican
photographers first published their images in colonial newspapers. After
Mozambique's liberation war, these images appeared in international art
collections. Images by Mozambican photographers have become foundational to
the claims of power and legitimacy articulated by the government of Mozambique
thirty-five years later, but these photographs also risk undoing the very histories
they produced. In this paper, I consider the formation of the photographic
collections at the National Archives of Mozambique and the Center for the
Formation of Photography. Reflecting on these collections' construction
alongside my own experiences working within them, reveal the politics of writing
Mozambique's history.
Sankofa (Go Back and Pick): The Daily Graphic’s Archives and Accra’s
Fashionable Elite
Christopher Richards
University of Florida
[email protected]
The title of my presentation invokes the culturally significant Ghanaian proverb
“Sankofa” to indicate my own experience with “going back and picking” from one
of Accra’s most comprehensive collections of daily and weekly newspapers, the
archives of The Daily Graphic. This paper will explore a series of historical
photographs from The Daily Graphic and The Sunday Mirror, with particular
attention given to images of attendees at Accra’s annual horse races. My
discussion of the photographs will demonstrate the importance of mining The
Daily Graphic’s archive to understand the inherently ephemeral and visual nature
of Accra’s historical fashion culture.
Congo Far West: Artists in Residence at the Royal Museum for Central
Africa
Mathilde Leduc
The Royal Museum for Central Africa
[email protected]
This presentation focuses on some recent exhibitions at the Royal Museum for
Central Africa in Tervuren where African artists have been invited to engage with
the archives. Willing to face the colonial archives, a new engagement on the part
of the public and archivists requires new ways of engaging the archives. Visual
artists, photographers, performers and sculptors have produced an engagement
that tells us about the stereotypes that informed the creation of archives. The
archives therefore become the host for emergent voices, emotional outbursts
about the past or traumatic experiences.
Discussant:
Elizabeth Harney
University of Toronto
[email protected]
BREAK FOR LUNCH (1:00 – 3:00 PM)
LUNCH SESSION, 1:00–1:40 pm
Cantor Auditorium. FILM SCREENING: Africanizing Christian Art (2013).
40 minutes. Directed by Catie Cadge-Moore
Documentary film on Christian art in Africa, focusing upon Yoruba carving from the Ekiti
region in collaboration with Fr. Kevin Carroll, Society of African Missions. The film
includes interviews with John Picton, Nicholas Bridger, Babatunde Lawal, and others.
LUNCH SESSION, 1:45–2:45 pm
Cantor Auditorium.
ACASA Business Meeting
All ACA SA members are invited to attend a brief meeting to hear updates on ongoing
business, recent elections to the board, and to discuss future plans.
Session 12 (3:00 – 4:45 PM)
12.1 Red, White, Black and More: Sensing, Defining and Performing Color.
Convener: Dunja Hersak, Université Libre de Bruxelles, [email protected]
This panel will explore the dynamic lives of colors by examining their materiality and
their multi-sensory and performative significance through time and space. It will bring
into view varying and shifting perceptions, groupings and evocations of color in different
contexts and culture areas, and will look at how people, past and present, have talked
about, staged and experienced color in Africa. It will seek to extend beyond purely
visual and fixed cultural constructs by looking at how regional contacts and exchanges,
local and distant trade networks and globalizing forces have impacted in different ways
on transformations and temporalities in the coloring of secular and ritual spaces,
objects, bodies, performances and other creative and lived expressions.
Presenters:
The Multiple Lives of Color: Opening Considerations
Dunja Hersak
Université Libre de Bruxelles
[email protected]
Formerly applied linguistic and symbolic models on color, particular to EuroAmerican art historical methodologies are enshrined in connoisseurship and are
an integral part of the ‘art’ status of objects. Yet color and coloring substances
are often ephemeral and transient; they materialize, objectify and transform and
in so doing contribute to layers of cultural history. The object of this paper, based
on field material from DRC and on other significant anthropological studies, is to
consider alternative cultural perception and sensory orders in which the
properties and experiences of color participate in a more holistic, processual
aesthetic synthesis.
Feel the Color, Play with Power: Orisa Color in Africa and its Diaspora
Bolaji Campbell
Rhode Island School of Design
[email protected]
The presentation examines how colors are employed in providing visually
stimulating images, which evoke the essential nature and character of the orisa,
whether on devotional altars or on the ritual vestments and in the attitude of its
followers. It also explores the symbolism and power of color used ritually in the
selection of destiny and more philosophically as a palpable medium of veneration
and control in the hands of contemporary Yoruba artists and also within the
equally engaging recreational spaces of professional sports.
After-Image: Exploring the Tangible and Intangible through Color
Osi Audu
Independent Artist
[email protected]
There is a formal purpose to colors that communicates itself directly to our eyes
in ways that elicit psycho-physiological retinal responses. Is color a property of
the objective world, or is it a construction of the brain? Drawing from my on-going
experimentation with color as an artist, I discuss some autonomous behaviors of
the eyes in color experience; and invite visual interactive audience participation. I
also discuss my use of the after-image effect as a reference to the tangible and
intangible, and the concept of dualism prevalent in certain African beliefs.
Amadede: Yellow, Red, and Another Yellow
Atta Kwami
Independent Scholar and Artist
[email protected]
Examining both practice and theory, with emphasis on color in Ghanaian painting
and textiles, the presentation will deal with aspects such as abstraction, music
notation and synaesthesia, spontaneity and modern Ghanaian poetry since the
1980s. Color theory from the 1960s, with an adaptation from Kofi Antubam’s
notes and the author's own writings on the subject, will be discussed as well as
the personal use of paint and color in recent paintings made at the Inter-Art
Symposium in Aiud, Romania, in 2013. The second part of the presentation will
discuss Ewe and Akan-Twi language terminologies on color and the connections
between color and music with reference to the whimsical, the aesthetic, the
symbolic, and the synaesthetic.
White Sufis, Black Beasts and Yellow Coquettes: the Performance of Race
and Gender in Gnawa Possession Trance
Cynthia Becker
Boston University
[email protected]
Gnawa, the descendants of enslaved Sahelian Africans in Morocco, perform
possession-trance ceremonies to heal those afflicted by spirit-induced
illnesses. White spirits are associated with Islam and the possessed perform
dances associated with Sufis. Those possessed black spirits (called “sons of the
forest”) beat their chests and crawl on the ground. Feminine spirits include a
flirtatious Lalla Mira, who prefers perfume and the color yellow. This paper
considers how conceptions of race and gender are embedded within Gnawa
color symbolism. It will be used to contemplate Morocco’s historical relationship
with sub-Saharan Africa and consider conceptions of “Africa” north of the Sahara.
12.2 International Collaborations in Contemporary African Art. Convener: Pamela
Allara, Boston University, [email protected]
Contemporary art is now global and artistic “collaborations” take place routinely on both
institutional and individual levels. What kinds of visual arts collaborations have emerged
over the past several decades and how have they shaped the discourse of
contemporary African art? How are such collaborations generated and funded, and
what are the outcomes? This panel will address specific projects and also the
theoretical frameworks guiding them.
Presenters:
Engaged Pedagogy and Collaboration at Artist Proof Studio and the Boston
Arts Academy
Kim Berman and Linda Nathan
University of Johannesburg and Boston Arts Academy
[email protected] ; [email protected]
Artist Proof Studio is a community printmaking centre that has embarked on
numerous cross-cultural collaborations over the past 22 years. Its mission is to
develop young artists as agents of change in society. Six years ago, Linda
Nathan, founder of the Boston Arts Academy initiated ongoing exchanges with
APS that share methodologies of arts-based approaches to learning, practice
and citizenship. Each encounter has engaged critical reflection that generates a
follow up action. This example of international exchange deepens the mission of
APS to develop leadership capacities in students and to create a model of
practice for arts organisations in South Africa.
Public Scholarship: The Isithunzi Writing Project
Julie Ellison (in collaboration with Rangoato Hlasane, University of the
Witwatersrand)
University of Michigan
[email protected]
Artist Proof Studio (APS) and the Wits Writing Centre at the University of
Witwatersand, along with University of Michigan partners, originated the Isithunzi
Writing Workshop in 2007-2008 to cultivate writing as part of the creative
process. It supported Johannesburg-based visual artists in developing their artist
statements. The team plans to work more closely with APS instructors on
integrating writing into printmaking education while building an organizational
culture of writing that frees the visual artist’s “other voice.” Reflections by Julie
Ellison and Rangoato Hlasane will focus on arts-mediated writing in the context
of urban knowledge interventions.
Situating Contemporary Video Art Practice in Angola: My African Mind
(2010) by Nàstio Mosquito
Joseph Underwood
Stony Brook University
[email protected]
N stio Mosquito (b. 1981) is an artist from Angola whose practice has led to
increasing global visibility. His video, My African Mind, created in ‘collaboration’
with the Barcelona-based artistic platform Bofa da Cara for the 29th S o Paulo
Biennial in 2010 was reviewed as “the most powerful piece in the Biennial,”
resulting in N stio’s popularization through the widespread
sharing/posting/reblogging of this tagline and video. Although ‘collaboration’ has
remained a staple of his artistic practice, Nástio eschews the term, instead
favoring the concept of ‘exchange’ as it is voiced in his newest project: My
European Mind.
French-funded Collaborations in the Francophonie: Neoliberal Policies and
Expressions of Cosmopolitanism
Marie Lortie
University of Toronto
[email protected]
This paper explores international collaborations funded by the French
government agency Afrique en Créations. Since its establishment in 1990,
Afrique en Créations has funded international collaborations in the visual arts,
fashion, dance and music. They include “north-south” collaborations between
artists from France’s majority population and artists from the African continent;
and “south-south” collaborations between African artists based on the continent
or in the diaspora. This paper explores examples of each type of collaboration,
what they reveal about neoliberal strategies for managing culture, and the
cosmopolitanism that can emerge in spite of such strategies.
Discussant:
Pamela Allara
12.3 Realms of Alterity: Curating Cultures, Memories and Places. Convener: Mary
(Polly) Nooter Roberts, University of California, Los Angeles, [email protected]
This panel will explore the creation and curation of realms of alterity, as places of
contestation and counter-hegemonic discourse. Such realms may also possess potency
as places of retreat amidst the madness of this world, even as they offer opportunities to
explore, excavate and manifest marginalized cultural narratives, expressions, and
artistic creativity. Five papers will offer new ways of understanding artistic and curatorial
agency in the creation of alternative spaces for reinscriptions of the past in museums
and memory worlds of the 21st century. Recent research addresses case studies in
Cape Town, Elmina, Lagos, Los Angeles, and Lubumbashi.
Presenters:
Aesthetic Contestations and Curatorial Debates in the Formation of the
District Six Museum in Cape Town
Ciraj Rassool
University of the Western Cape
[email protected]
This paper extends our understanding of the District Six Museum by examining
neglected aspects of its aesthetic beginnings. The work of visual artists in design,
set production, muralism and various aspects of installation has been a critical, if
under-acknowledged aspect of the museum’s transactions of knowledge
amongst former residents, memory activists, intellectuals and cultural producers.
Indeed, this paper argues that it is not possible to understand the foundations
and fundamental principles of the District Six Museum without an appreciation of
the collaborative and participatory art practices that have been an essential part
of its memory work.
Excavating Memory: Shrines for African Spirits along the Malabar Coast,
India
Neelima Jeychandran
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
In this paper, I discuss how the memory of African communities in port cities
along the Malabar Coast is recalled through shrines dedicated to African spirits
or locally known as Kappiri (black man). Even before the Europeans ventured
into the Indian Ocean world, thriving trade relations with the Swahili Coast
brought African seafarers, merchants, as well as slaves to port cities along the
Malabar Coast of Kerala. Mobilizing the arguments proposed by scholars
studying African diaspora in the Indian Ocean world, I explain how the rituals
performed to please Kappiri act as a field of memory retention.
“Like Tongues of Fire”: The Symbolic Significance of Pentecostal
Architecture
Adedamola Osinulu
University of Michigan
[email protected]
The Nigerian Pentecostal group Winners' Chapel International has found
tremendous success in Nigeria and across the African continent by disseminating
a message of "faith and prosperity." One marker of the group's success is a 560acre campus that it calls Canaan Land on the outskirts of Lagos. This paper
explores a connection between Winners' Chapel's guarantee of access to a
metaphorical "Promised Land" and the symbolic meaning of the site they have
aptly named Canaanland. I propose that the "miraculous infrastructure" at
Canaanland is intentionally deployed to reinforce the message that emanates
from the group's leader who, not coincidentally, is a former architect.
Palimpsest Memories, Ancestral Legacies, and Diasporic Identities in Eve
Sandler’s “Mami Wata Crossing”
Elyan Jeanine Hill
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
African American visual artist Eve Sandler brings the pan-African water goddess
Mami Wata into dialogue with the ruptures of the Middle Passage journey and
employs the goddess as a means of remembering and reframing histories of
loss. Sandler’s multimedia exhibition entitled “Mami Wata Crossing” (2008) is
both a means of history-making and an expression of diaspora. By projecting
images of herself being ritually cleansed as an aspect of the installation,
Sandler’s body becomes the canvas through which she claims and recontextualizes lost histories. This installation offers new ways of thinking about
reinscribing traumatic histories in museum spaces.
Reimagining the City: Mapping Art Spaces of Lubumbashi
Elaine Sullivan
University of California, Los Angeles
[email protected]
In October 2010 Lubumbashi hosted the second Picha Biennale. Taking the city
as its exhibition space, organizers placed photo and video installations along
major thoroughfares and in public plazas. This paper analyzes how the biennale
mapped and reinscribed meaning onto an already multi-layered city. This
reimagining occurred not only through the placement of photo and video but also
through the actions of the biennial visitors and everyday citizens as they walked
through the city. Attendees experienced art from across Africa and the world,
participating in a remapping of Lubumbashi on a local and global scale.
12.4 African Ceramics on Display: Beyond Didactics and Demonstrations.
Conveners: Elizabeth Perrill, University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
[email protected] and Wendy Gers, University of Johannesburg, [email protected]
When included in museum exhibitions, African ceramics displays have historically
employed norms used within broader ceramic exhibition practices, that is to say stale,
contextually detached, and didactic. “Ethnic” or social typologies, geographical studies,
chronological narratives and visual affinities are the primary thematic devices employed
within the curatorial lexicon of displays of African ceramics. While a few museums have
tried to invent new scenographic, contextual, or textual means to display African
ceramics, such as visually striking tower of ceramics at the British Museum, there is a
widespread lack of discourse underpinning these experiments.
Presenters:
African Pottery, Studio Pottery, and Contemporary Ceramics on Display:
Sankofa, Ceramic Tales from Africa
Moira Vincentelli
Aberystwyth University
[email protected]
As a curator of a collection of studio pottery and contemporary ceramics I have
sought to incorporate ceramics from Africa. The paper will reflect on issues that
were raised in an exhibition for Manchester Museum, Sankofa Ceramic Tales
from Africa, in 2006. In Manchester the designer attempted to create displays
that suggested some of the different contexts that African ceramics might be
found, from domestic environment to museum store or elegant display. When the
exhibition was later re-created in Aberystwyth, in a very different type of space,
we organised a display that more overtly evoked the colours and flavour of an
African context.
Unpacking the Practice of Developing and Displaying National Ceramic
Collections at Iziko Museums of South Africa
Esther Esmyol
Iziko Museums of South Africa
[email protected]
With the formation of Iziko Museums in 1998, various Cape Town based
museums which had formerly functioned separately were amalgamated. Iziko’s
newly established Social History Collections department became the home of
collections from diverse cultural backgrounds, including African ceramics
formerly held at the South African Cultural History Museum and the South African
Museum respectively. This paper critically examines how these museums
interpreted and displayed African ceramics, and how, in its amalgamated guise,
Iziko Social History Collections was meaningfully able to dovetail the collections
in an exhibition of South African ceramics in February 2012. Despite various
challenges, Fired is testimony to an integrated approach and is a positive
departure from how ceramics have previously been presented in South African
museums.
Nigerian Contemporary Ceramics and Voiceless Displays: Reflections on
the National Exhibitions of Craft Potters Association of Nigeria, 1996-2006
Ozioma Onuzulike
University of Nigeria, Nsukka
[email protected]
The paper reflects on the history of the Craft Potters Association of Nigeria
(CPAN) and its adoption of the exhibition display model of the UK-based East
Anglian Potters Association, especially from 1996 to 2006. Using visual
illustrations, it describes and challenges such imported ‘standard’ by offering
insights into how the works shown in the CPAN national exhibitions tell much
about the making of several modes of Nigerian ceramic art modernism. The
paper suggests alternative display strategies and thematic possibilities capable
of illuminating our understanding of the place of African contemporary ceramics
in the discourse of global modernities.
Suspended Tents: a Personal strategy for Installing New Ceramics in the
Gallery
Kim Bagley
University for the Creative Arts (UCA)
[email protected]
In designing the installation of ceramics, Extermination Tents, physical aspects of
display were a significant concern. Access and proximity, height, light, shade and
movement can dramatically alter the perception of this work, which addresses
permanence and transience in relation to migration and identity construction in
the South African context. Within the university this expressive attitude is usually
encouraged, but in other locations it may not be, notably due to prohibitive costs
and risks to the work. Using my installation as a focal point, I will discuss
installation and documentation strategies for transnational and African artists
expressing personal narratives using clay.
Discussant:
Robert T. Soppelsa
Art in Embassies, U.S. Department of State
[email protected]
12.5 Photography: After the Archival Turn. Convener: Jennifer Bajorek, Tisch School
of the Arts at NYU, [email protected]
At a moment when formal academic discourse of “the archive” has begun to seem
rather stale—philosophers, historians, artists, and curators have been turning to the
archive since the 1980s—the resources of archives for postcolonial narratives of
liberation, contestation, and struggles for autonomy and self-determination appear to be
limitless. In photography in particular, archival energies show no sign of waning, and the
number of scholarly and artistic projects and initiatives that are drawing on the archive
to re-assess official histories, contest dominant narratives, and make new claims for
alternative histories, hidden pasts, and brighter futures continues to grow. This panel
will bring together case studies of photographic archives in Africa to interrogate these
new archival energies.
Presenters:
Challenging Ruins: Thoughts on West African Archives via Édouard
Glissant
Jennifer Bajorek
Fixated on the Past in the Post-Conflict Present: Photographs in Sierra
Leone’s National Archives
Julie Crooks
SOAS, University of London
[email protected]
From Intimacy to History: Algerian Memories in Visual Arts Today
Érika Nimis
Université du Québec à Montréal
[email protected]
‘Artistic research’ on the archive: Case studies from Algiers and Cairo
Kerstin Pinther
Freie Univerität
[email protected]
Discussant:
Erin Haney
George Washington University
[email protected]