Recalling the Future Art in Contemporary Africa.

Produced and directed by Claudine Pommier Executive Producer Cheikh Tidiane N'diaye

Arts in Action Society (Vancouver, Canada) and Sud Prod SenVision S.A. (Dakar, Senegal), 2000. Versions in French (Memoire du Futur: Art en Afrique Contemporaine) and English, each with subtitles. Color, 48 min. Available in BetacamSP or VHS. $220.

This collaborative production by Claudine Pommier and Cheikh Tidiane N'diaye offers an insightful exploration of issues and debates fundamental to discussions about contemporary art in Africa. The forty-eight minute video is underpinned most broadly by three interwoven lines of inquiry: What constitutes contemporary African art? With which issues do selected artists in Africa locate their practices? And finally how do art-world information brokers, especially critics and curators, construct artists as subjects? To pursue these questions, the filmmakers skillfully combine interviews with both artists and art-world information brokers in attendance at Dak'Art 98, Senegal's third Pan-African Visual Arts Biennial. Although filmed during Dak'Art 98, Recalling the Future is far from a documentary reportage of this international exhibition as an event or institution. (1) In fact, the Biennial's objectives and relation to other exhibitions are mentioned only briefly by Remi Sagna, its Executive Director, and Ousmane Sow Hutchard, its Chairman of the Board. Rather, for the filmmakers the Biennial represents a social space, an international meeting point for artists resident in Africa and art-world personalities, where knowledge about contemporary art is constructed and mediated. In this respect, the Biennial affords a platform for dialogue as well as a site in which the dynamics of knowledge production about this subject may be examined.

Just as the video's content and structure are well conceived, the camera work and editing demonstrate pronounced cinematic skill. Recalling the Future is composed of extended commentaries, didactic close-up shots of artists at work or discussing their work, still shots of paintings and sculptures by participants in the Biennial, and long shots of gallery interiors. This footage is intercut with ambient scenes of Dakar's crowded streets, bustling markets, and panoramic coastal vistas to create an engaging and descriptive visual product. The commentaries, excerpted from lengthier interviews conducted by Cheikh Tidiane N'diaye and Nina Ferretti, incorporate perspectives from individuals of various nationalities, ages, and specialties. Despite the effort to represent a cross-section of artists, those featured in the video reflect this particular Biennial's majority participation from Francophone Africa. Among them are the Senegalese mixed-media artist Viye Diba and the painter Tanguy, the Senegalese sculptors N'dary Lo and Ousmane Sow, the Ivorian painter Youssouph Bath and sculptor Lydie Etien Okpoby, the Cameroonian painter Claudie Poinsard, and the South African mixed-media artist Kevin Brand. Of these artists, Diba, who was recipient of the Dak'Art 98 jury prize, is profiled most extensively throughout the video.

Viewers also hear from two art critics, Dakar-based Iba Diadji N'diaye and New York-based Okwui Enwezor, formerly Artistic Director of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial, Dak'Art 98 jury member, and Artistic Director of Documenta 11. Compared with Diadji N'diaye, whose expertise focuses on Dakar's local art scene, Enwezor provides a more globally inflected viewpoint. Taken together, the two perspectives, one from the inside and the other from the outside, complement each other while challenging supposed center/periphery hierarchies. What the two voices do hint at is the existence of multiple, occasionally intersecting contemporary art worlds and critical enterprises. Although no one individual acts as a narrator, Enwezor is the video's defining voice. Within moments of its beginning, he introduces a set of issues for consideration: What constitutes modern African art, and who defines it? How do critics bring African artists into their discourse? How do curators make meaning out of multiplicity? Enwezor reappears strategically throughout Recalling the Future to punctuate discussions and broach additional questions. His authoritative position in this production further underscores the powerful role of critics in determining and articulating which issues are accorded attention. At the same time, however, by juxtaposing multiple voices, the video calls into question the interface between artists' positions about their practice and production and those of the individuals writing them into exhibitions, scholarship, and critical discourse. Such polyvocality is undoubtedly one of the greatest strengths of Recalling the Future.

A good deal of discussion is devoted to the debate on Africanity, a discursive construct privileging contemporary artistic production that appears to build upon cultural traditions or reference a specifiable African identity. (2) The video emphasizes the complexity of this debate. A point of departure is articulated by Enwezor, who takes issue with the Western insistence on narrating contemporary art from Africa within the frames of negotiated cultural traditions, authenticity, and primitivism. Indeed, as Western scholarship and exhibitions from the past decade demonstrate, contemporary artists from Africa very often enter global art discourse via the relation of their work to Africanity. It is useful that Enwezor grounds his argument in a historical perspective, asserting that Africanity is a deeply entrenched imposition inherited from anthropology, colonialism, and popular culture. Here, black-and-white footage alluding to the documentation of so-called vanishing cultures and the European powers' extraction of Africa's natural resources adds an evocative visual component to his discussion.

The construct of Africanity is dismantled most effectively by a sequence of commentaries by artists who speak for themselves about their practice and production. Viye Diba and N'dary Lo maintain that their work is no more bound to cultural traditions or explorations of heritage than that of their colleagues making art in other parts of the world. Lo states succinctly that while he may be African, he does not carry notions of Africanity around like a cumbersome bag over his shoulder. This sentiment is echoed by Diba in an especially eloquent and reflective discussion. He explains:

   I don't believe in an African problematic,
   but there is a problematic of contemporary
   art in Africa. This is why I don't
   identify myself as an African artist. I am
   a contemporary artist living in Africa.
   The notion of Africanity is a notion
   decided elsewhere which does not implicate
   me. In my work I don't try to be
   African. I try to express my sensibility
   through contact with my materials.

In close-ups and long shots, Diba is portrayed at work in his studio, wrapping long planks of salvaged wood with cloth. Rather than explicitly investigating Africanity, this extended footage illustrates the artist's engagement with universal issues of art making such as technical approach, artistic process, and the exploration of materials.

The profiles of various artists is another highlight, for their voices resound to articulate their distinctive aesthetic sensibilities, explain their attitudes to art making, and identify the conceptual issues informing their practices. For instance, N'dary Lo and Youssouph Bath describe their motivation for using local materials while situating their practice in relation to a broader critical discourse.

It is significant that a handful of women artists are featured, as their voices are too often elided from other scholarly productions. At various junctures, the Cameroonian painter Claudie Poinsard, the Ivorian sculptor Lydie Etien Okpoby, and the photographers Edith Taho, Rachele Babehi, and Hein Mcline discuss the distinctive obstacles they face as artists within their families and in society at large. In addition to gender inequalities in education and in exhibition opportunities, a general disapproval of these women's choice of profession makes it difficult for them to forge a viable artistic career. On this note, it is curious that neither artists nor critics touch on contemporary art's aesthetic value or relevance to local audiences in Africa. In considering the selection of artists in the video, one may also wonder whose voices are not heard and what they might have offered. Surely, artists who chose not to participate in Dak'Art 98 would have quite different perspectives on how information is brokered at an international exhibition.

The question remains, then, How does one evaluate and locate contemporary artistic production from Africa? Should these artistic propositions be situated vis-a-vis international trends, universal issues of practice, or geopolitically specific discursive frames? Senegalese critic Iba Diadji N'diaye contends that this question is at the crux of the art critic's enterprise, for it is the critic's responsibility to distinguish what is universal and what is specifically African about an artwork. He proposes that works made by African artists be considered in light of distinctive African realities as well as broader critical and technical issues.

While the premise of discussing Africa and African artists as monolithic categories seems problematic, Diadji N'diaye's point is clear: certain histories and contemporary circumstances do unite many art practitioners from the continent. For him, a crucial distinction between contemporary artistic practice in Africa and art making elsewhere lies in economic conditions, especially the availability of material resources and financial opportunities. To illustrate Diadji N'diaye's assertion that artists in Africa create in conditions different from those of their colleagues in the United States or Europe, the video fades to footage of N'dary Lo discussing his expressive, large-scale sculptures fashioned from recycled horseshoes. Clearly, art is a question of what one does with the resources at one's disposal.

On the whole, this video is a welcome contribution to the ever growing interest in and discussion of contemporary art and artists from Africa. While it not does necessarily expand contemporary debates with new or alternative insights, it does introduce a set of issues that have been central to the discourse about this subject for some time. It succeeds especially well in identifying significant questions and complicating them with multiple perspectives. Also of considerable value are the profiles of individual artists discussing their work. In comparison to other productions portraying the Dak'Art Biennials, this one actually begins to break down widely held assumptions about contemporary art in Africa. With this in mind, Recalling the Future: Art in Contemporary Africa would be most suitable as a supplementary resource for teaching beginning or intermediate-level classes. Those already interested in contemporary art from Africa and beyond will find the video thought provoking in the way that it raises questions about art practice, critical authority, and representation. In doing so, it demonstrates that the dynamics of art-world knowledge-producing systems do indeed cut across geographical boundaries.

(1.) For more on this event, see Dak'Art 98 and Okeke 1998.

(2.) For more problematized discussions of Africanity, see Figueroa 1995, Grabski 2001, and Oguibe 1999.

References cited

Dak'Art 98: Biennale de l'art africain contemporain. Paris: Sari Cimaise, 1998.

Figueroa, Eugenio Valdds. 1995. "Africa: Art and Hunger, A Critique of the Myth of Authenticity," Third Text: Third World Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture 31: 3-8.

Grabski, Joanna. 2001. "The Historical Invention and Contemporary Practice of Modern Senegalese Art: Three Generations of Artists in Dakar." Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University.

Oguibe, Olu. 1999. "Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art," in Reading the Contemporary; African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, pp. 16-29. London: Institute of International Visual Arts.

Okeke, Chika. 1998. "Dak'Art 98: An Interview with the 3rd Dakar Biennale Director Remi Sagna," Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 8: 24-27.

JOANNA GRABSKI is assistant professor of African art history at Denison University. She has conducted research on contemporary art and artists in Dakar, Senegal, and Brazzaville, Congo, and is currently at work on a manuscript dealing with Dakar's art world.