The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994.

P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center Long Island City, New York February 10-May 5, 2002

"The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994" was an ambitious, exciting, and important exhibition for the study of African politics, cultural practices, and history. Okwui Enwezor, working with a talented team of associate curators, brought together art, photography, theater, literature, film, music, textiles, and political propaganda spanning the continent and its diasporas to present what he has referred to as an "archive" of the independence period. This massive archive, filling three floors of P.S. 1, a converted school in Queens, ran counter to not only the familiar colonial archive of Africa but also the binary logic that oversimplifies the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, which one has come to expect in exhibitions that deal with colonialism. Remarkably, here Africa talked with and about its selves. Colonialism was only part of the dialogue, not the measure of its content.

Enwezor achieved this conceptual shift by insisting that we stop to examine the period of independence in all its exuberance and promise, messiness and contradiction, and even more important, that we attend to the intellectual and creative resources that Africans of diverse backgrounds mobilized to achieve this end. By examining the period of independence from the vantage point of African cultural processes as opposed to simply framing the exhibition around a neatly punctuated timeline of political history, Enwezor disrupted the notion that independence was a once-and-for-all status change uniformly experienced by all Africans. Liberation affected--and still affects--individuals in different ways and to different degrees that cannot be tied to political calendars. Blurring the distinctions between what constitutes the colonial and postcolonial, "The Short Century" offered an important corrective to Africanist and post-colonial scholarship.

Through a multimedia installation that included video, audio, and visual components, Enwezor literally put hundreds of voices into dialogue with one another, from anonymous Algerian liberation activists to the South African singer Miriam Makeba, from the late Guinean President Sekou Toure to French filmmaker Jean Rouch, and from the contemporary London-based artist Yinka Shonibare to Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo, to give but a few examples. The sheer scale and scope of the exhibition, combined with the reality that most visitors possessed only a passing knowledge of African political history would have seemed to destine this project for incoherence. However, with a few exceptions, "The Short Century" avoided overwhelming the viewer with a disorienting cacophony of voices and ideas.

While this review cannot speak to the installation at the other venues (Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, House of World Cultures in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago), at P.S. 1 Enwezor divided the exhibition among three floors. The first was the most impressive and engaging. The range of primarily contemporary artworks, including Oladele Ajiboye Bamgboye's video installation Homeward Bound (1995), Ghada Amer's sculpture Le Lit (1997), William Kentridge's film Ubu Tells the Truth (1997), and Rachid Koraichi's textile-based Salome (1993), attested to the vitality and diversity of African artists working on and outside the continent today. Many of the pieces were familiar from previous international exhibitions and publications. Though one wished that Enwezor had introduced more new artists and objects, he nonetheless provided a great opportunity for American audiences to see, firsthand, works about which they had only read.

Because most of these objects are situated in the recent past, they worked to present viewers with a number of unresolved issues and lingering challenges from the independence period. A number of them took issue with a particular historical "archive" and asked how it should be reconfigured and presented and who has the authority to do so. The Beninois artist Georges Adeagbo's installation From Colonialization to Independence filled an entire gallery from floor to ceiling with the detritus of the past fifty years, including, among other things, African, American, and French newspaper clippings, literature, album covers, and artworks. French, Francophone, and African-language literature was arranged in rows across the floor, for example, pointing to the ways in which debates initiated around independence about which language was best suited for African literature continue into the present. Other works focused on the challenges of newly marginalized communities of post-independence Africa and the position of the exile with respect to "home"; and many of the South African pieces dealt with how to move beyond apartheid without disavowing its legacy. For example, in their depiction of poor living conditions, Zwelethu Mthethwa's photographs of settlement dwellers in their homes comment on the lasting effects of apartheid. However, these portraits do not aim to characterize their subjects as victims but rather as individuals who make creative choices that result in unique domestic spaces. After raising these questions, the exhibition largely moved back chronologically on the second and third floors to consider how these challenges developed over time.

Both those floors allowed a more focused look at particular media and historical documentation from the independence era, an exercise facilitated by P.S. 1's layout. Enwezor could not have found a more perfect location, for the former school's combination of large and small galleries facilitated constant movement between the "big picture" and a more focused idea. For example, the small music gallery, with its audio feed, record covers, and publicity and contextual photographs, caused one to consider the formal development of African popular music and local production and distribution--to think of music as a particular art form. As viewers traveled into other parts of the exhibition, however, this media-specific approach was loosened to integrate music into the larger view of the independence period: they watched news footage of political rallies where music played a key role in political agitation, or, in the photographs of Malick Sidibe, they observed Mali's urban youth who appropriated musical personas to forge new identities.

One saw the same strategy in the treatment of architecture and space. Enwezor deftly juxtaposed colonial architectural plans and monuments detailing spatial domination and control with a gallery of works that depict aspects of these spaces from the point of view of their marginalized inhabitants, as in Antonio Ole's bric-a-brac Margem da zona limite: Township Wall (1994-95) and Zwelethu Mthethwa's series of township interiors (1998). Once this notion of contested space emerged, it was difficult not to consider it in relation to other parts of the exhibition. Moving into the video and film section (one of the show's few poorly installed areas, where the audio, from one monitor drowned out that from another), one began to weave the strands of music and architecture into yet another medium, creating more complex and layered notions of this period.

What was most admirable about Enwezor's curatorial vision was not simply its ambitious scope but its trust in the viewers. The focus was loose enough to allow a free flow of associations between parts of the exhibition, yet tight enough to communicate the underlying concepts. The easy give-and-take of the installation allowed visitors to feel confident about picking and choosing elements from which they could construct their own narrative, thus giving them a degree of agency in the exhibition process and convincing them experientially of this period's complexity.

The novel setting of a converted school undoubtedly helped to put viewers in an open frame of mind, but equal credit should be given to Enwezor's ability to convey his ideas visually. Given the breadth and complexity of the material, his limited use of text was remarkable. Most of the time, Enwezor's visual language was legible, but at times the viewer was left wanting more information. This was particularly true of the paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, located on the third floor; they required greater explication of their complicated ties to Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and European modernist movements. An excellent catalogue that includes primary texts by intellectuals and politicians from the 1945-1994 period as well as short essays by present-day scholars from a range of disciplines helped make up for these occasional lapses. This catalogue, an archive in its own right, will serve scholars and students of African art as they continue to work through the questions raised by this exhibition. "The Short Century" will undoubted have lasting significance for our discipline as an exhibition that situates the developing field of contemporary African art in a historical frame and challenges us to attend to the ways in which the objects of our study are not only affected by political change but often work to effect that change as well.

The catalogue The Short Century (2001), edited by Okwui Enwezor (496 pp., 333 b/w & 244 color illustrations; $75 hardcover), is available from Prestel Verlag, Munich, London, and New York.

KRISTINA VAN DYKE is a doctoral student in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Harvard University. Her dissertation will focus on architectural history in Mali.