From the Editor

From the Editor Chika Okeke-Agulu T he role exhibitions have played in the growth of contemporary African art as a field within the discipline of art history, and as an important part of the global contemporary art is, undoubtedly, immense. And the reason for this is not far fetched. When properly conceived, art exhibitions provide unique opportunities to engage with important questions, issues, or debates pertinent to our understanding of, or approach to, the work of one individual or that of a group of artists. In the field of contemporary art, perhaps more so than in other fields of art history, exhibitions constitute primary sites and processes of knowledge production in the sense that, apart from the critical import of the conceptual problems motivating show, they make art works available to their established and potential critical and popular spectatorships and thus insert the art, regardless of the curator's intentions , into new discursive horizons in which knowledge is propagated, contested, and reevaluated. In a sense then, one might argue that no other form of critical practice equals art exhibitions and curatorial practices in reifying and insinuating an emergent field into the consciousness of the art world. Nka has, from the onset, kept abreast with exhibitionary practices in the field of contemporary African art, and the need to examine and debate crucial issues pertinent to international exhibitions of African artists led on the one hand to our decision to convene an unprecedented roundtable discussion by some of the leading figures in the field, and on the other to feature essays focusing on some of the key exhibitions of the past few years. As readers of the roundtable will notice, despite the incredibly rich, articulate ruminations by our panelists, several problems remain unexamined, and underlying tensions are apparent, all of which are indicative of the fraught nature of the field itself and the need for continuing discussions about methods, goals, tactics , structures, and politics underlying or implicated in contemporary African art exhibitions. One subject I would like to see subjected to close examination in a future issue of Nka—I am sure we will work on this—is the rise of alternative spaces for showing ambitious, experimental, non-commercially viable yet daring work by artists inside the African continent. (Let me admit that "alternative" here might be the wrong term, since the supposed "mainstream" spaces, with the exception of South Africa, either do not exist or are vastly inept and ill equipped to deal with this work, thus making the alternatives seem more like the only normative spaces for contemporary art. One might better call them "independent" to highlight the fact that they are not beholden to state patronage and bureaucracies , but instead are the result of work by motivated individuals who against great odds are committed to making a difference in their various art worlds). In the past few years we have seen important programs and events—art exhibitions, workshops, symposia, residencies, and artists projects—organized by L'Appartement 22 in Rabat, Rashid Diab Art Centre in Khartoum, Cairo's Townhouse Gallery, and most recently the resuscitated Artists' Alliance, Accra, and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Lagos. There are of course many others in various parts of the continent. What these modest yet enterprising, nonprofit institutions have done is to make it possible once again for exciting and experimental work by local and international artists never seen in normative art museums and galleries available to local spectatorships; in a way, these initiatives are reminiscent of the now legendary Mbari Artists and Writers Club in Ibadan, Enugu and Oshogbo, and the Chemchemi Cultural Centre in Nairobi of the 1960s. These centers, for the most part, answer to the longstanding need for suitable spaces and facilities for display of and conversation about work involving new media and challenging formats many artists have now embraced but with little or no opportunity of showing their local spectatorships, until now. The success of these centers will depend on, apart from the sustained enthusiasm of their founders, an effective exploitation of the resources of the internet, networking with colleagues inside and outside the continent, maintaining the trust of artists and patrons, and, more important, an...