Assemblies: Excavation and Reconstruction in Contemporary African Art.

During the week of October 18, 2004, Pamela Allara, Kyle Kauffman, and I organized a series of events and exhibitions around the theme of "Assemblies: Excavation and Reconstruction in Contemporary African Art" at Brandeis University and Wellesley College. Our title, "Assemblies," called attention to both the combination and recombination of visual and tactile elements by contemporary artists and the gathering together of persons and communities in old and novel configurations. Through the rather archaeological term "excavation" we sought to bring out the historical resonances of many of these art works, which subtly signal or call up earlier epochs and historical moments of trauma, loss, and recovery. The process of excavation is not simply the physical bringing to light of that which was lost or buried, but may be understood as a kind of spiritual undertaking that is akin to divination or mediumistic revelation, a process of attaining understanding of that which hovers just beyond the realms of normal perception. Through the closely linked notion of "reconstruction," we brought to the fore various ways in which artists are currently building new ways of being in the world, in part out of the aesthetic and cultural forms of earlier worldviews and cultural forms, while directly engaging with the unresolved contradictions of the contemporary moment.

One component of the project, the exhibition "Trans / Scripts," highlighted the work of Nigerian artist Victor Ekpuk, who continually "excavates" the signifying practices of nsibidi, the esoteric ritual scripts of southeastern Nigeria, while simultaneously paring down their constitutive elements in order to recombine them in unexpectedly novel assemblages that move between joyous celebrations of life and love and poignant denunciations of present-day injustice in the Niger Delta and in the United States. A parallel exhibition, "Assemblies: New Art from Southern Africa," presented work that re-imagined collective spaces of trauma, affliction, and regeneration. Paul Stopforth, artist-in-residence on Robben Island during summer 2004, in effect mines the former island prison for unexpected fissures of memory and moments of reprieve. His painfully beautiful print Hinge (2004) swings open not only the door of an old communal cell but seems to unlock mysteries of time itself, offering us a portal into recent history that is simultaneously disturbing and restorative; among the broken stones of the old quarry so long worked by political prisoners, we glimpse the possibilities of beauty, of self-fashioning, and even of freedom in the most improbable of places. Stompie Selibe, Kim Berman, and their students in Johannesburg's Artist Proof Studio, in turn, contemplate the general challenges of the new nation's second decade through the lens of a specific, local tragedy: a fire last year that destroyed the studio and took the life of one of its founders. Their new work, appropriately, plays with the signs and traces of combustion, in some instances incorporating damaged prints singed by the fire into haunting collages that evoke the artists' refashioned collective as well as new possibilities for intergenerational reconciliation. Berman, who has long deployed fire as a metaphor of death and regeneration in her work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has fashioned from lithographic plates burned in the fire breathtaking prints of burning high- and low-veld landscapes crisscrossed by electrical pylons and barbed wire.

Scarred, re-emergent landscapes also dominate the recent work of Zwelethu Mthethwa, on view in a companion exhibition at Wellesley College's Davis Museum, "Harvesting Workers." Natal fields and hills confront the viewer as sites of alienated labor and heroic endurance, as sugar-cane workers stand commandingly upon land on which they and their antecedents have long been marginalized. In turn, in her arresting installation O se bone thola borethe: Pandora's Box (2004), the Botswanan artist Neo Matome unearthed an everyday topography of taken-for-granted assumptions about women, affliction, and healing, while reconstituting these diverse elements into an uncanny conclave. Seven fetuses suspended from seven wire-mesh women's handbags (containing diviner's instruments and images of X-chromosomes drawn on translucent plastic) gently twist in the air, suspended on the threshold of the visible and invisible worlds. Evoking the symbolism of divination and revelation, drawn in part from Tswana cosmology, Matome's work explores embodied experiences of HIV/AIDS in the region, forcing us to reflect upon just what forms of embodied knowledge and fortitude, as well as viral loads and genetic material, are now transmitted across the generations.

In a day-long symposium at the week's end, artists and scholars came together to reflect on these themes, partly in light of a screening of selected William Kentridge films, generously lent to us by Marian Goodman Galleries in New York. We discussed, among other things, striking parallels in how Kentridge and Ekpuk have mined colonial and postcolonial psychic stratigraphies, generating a profusion of highly personalized, enigmatic signifiers out of legacies of terror and loss. Considerable comment was engendered by William Kentridge's animated Tide Table (2003): the sands of the beach at Muizenberg on the Western Cape transmogrify into a kind of divinatory surface, in which we glimpse the unbearable tragedy and awe-inspiring nobility of a land in the age of AIDS, as even the white industrialist Soho Eckstein himself is drawn into the great seaside assemblage of persons and histories. In a time of crisis, some asked, is the artist primarily responsible for undoing the taken-for-granted terrains of colonialism by recolonizing, in effect, the white minds of former metropoles? Alternately, are the artist's primary ethical responsibilities to local collectivities or to their own singular, emergent visions? In this connection, we argued intensively over the categories of "African" and "Africa" in reference to the artists and their works. To what extent do such terms unfairly delimit their freedom to explore affiliation, identity, and recombination across shifting global centers and hinterlands?

In the space of the indaba (SiZulu) or the kgotla (SeTswana), persons have come together for centuries to debate and reason over matters of law and politics; we now find ourselves pondering what new modes of assemblage, argument, and conversation are emerging in domains of art, performance, and social practice. Through this symposium and associated exhibitions, we sought to understand how those who were so long excluded from full participation in the polity are now entering into, and actively constituting, new local spaces and intercultural arenas.

It is worth remembering that the final lines of J. M. Coetzee's masterpiece Life and Times of Michael K. (1983) directly explore these enduring paradoxes of excavation and reconstruction. Having traversed the nation's fractured and desiccated surfaces, the protagonist returns to the soothing interiority of the ground itself, beside his mother's abandoned flat, and gazes upon the water pump destroyed by the soldiers. He thinks to himself that if he were asked,

   "What are we going to do about water?"
   he, Michael K., would produce a teaspoon
   from his pocket, a teaspoon and
   a long roll of string. He would clear the
   rubble from the mouth of the shaft, he
   would bend the handle of the teaspoon
   in a loop and tie the string to it, he
   would lower it down the shaft deep into
   the earth, and when he brought it up
   there would be water in the bowl of the
   spoon; and in that way, he would say,
   one can live (p. 184).

Is this not the promise offered to us by all these extraordinary assembled artists and their colleagues, that somehow in these troubled times--through returning to the deepest well and creating something anew, through submersion and re-emergence, through excavation and reconstruction--we, too, can live?