Africa Remix: An Immigrant, to Be Looked at from the other Side of Reinforced Glass

AFRICA REMIX An Immigrant, to Be Looked at from the other Side of Reinforced Glass Rory Bester I n Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) and The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (1993), Pierre Bourdieu unfolds the interrelated concepts of cultural and symbolic capital. Where cultural capital implies a series of codes of cultural knowledge and a level of competence in accessing and reading these codes, symbolic capital marks the consecration that comes from this cultural knowledge and the recognition thereof. In Bourdieu's own words, cultural capital, tied to the meaningfulness of consumption, involves "an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code. ... A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence , that is, the code, into which it is encoded ."1 Recognition of the code brings empathy and appreciation. Building on this foundation of con80 • N k a Jo u r n al o f Co n t e m p o r a r y A f r i c an A r t H assan M u sa , Great American Nude, 2 0 0 2 . © Hassan Mu sa and Africa Rem ix , Johannesb ur g Art Gallery and Mu seu m Kunst Palast, 2 0 0 7 , Sou t h Af rica. Ph o t o : Jo h n Hodgkiss. trolled looking and seeing, symbolic capital involves "the acquisition of a reputation for competence and an image of respectability and honorability that are easily converted into political positions as a local or national notable."2 That cultural and symbolic capital are both circulatory —established through a disconnection from the material exchange of economic and political capital, but reappropriated by economic and political capital for their "power" as their cachet and value increases—is one of the beauties of Bourdieu's formulation. Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent is an exhibition that not only engages and confronts the delineation of cultural capital in Western contemporary art but also uses symbolic capital as a maneuver against the borders and blinkers of artistic gatekeeping at the center. Africa Remix came to Johannesburg in June 2007 marked with the scars of this engagement, which makes it an opportune moment to reflect on the successes and shortcomings of the exhibitions intentions and effects. This kind of large-scale international exhibition doesn't often reach South African shores, and it is useful by way of beginning to establish five moments in cultural and symbolic life of Africa Remix. Firstly it is worth noting that part of the symbolic capital of Africa Remix is its association with Simon Njami's enormous personal symbolic capital , accumulated through his cofounding of Revue Noire, and the subsequent groundbreaking work that the quarterly magazine did to circulate contemporary African culture amongst wider international audiences. There is no doubt that Revue Noire was one of the most important magazines committed to the circulation of African photography . That the magazine was founded in Paris, and Spring/ Summer 2008 N k a ' 8 1 in a country that of all the former colonizers of the continent still has the most involved (and often paternalistic) relationship with Africa, importantly contributed to the patterns of recognition of the magazine's format and content, and the growth of its cultural capital. Secondly, there is the cultural capital of the exhibition tour. Since opening at Dusseldorf's Museum Kunst Palast in July 2004, the exhibition's extended tour, while based primarily on the current and historical affiliations of the curatorial team—London's Hayward Gallery, Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou, Tokyo's Mori Art Museum, and Stockholm's Moderna Museet—has nonetheless forcefully reminded European and Asian art publics that Africa too can be coded and decoded within the global landscape of contemporary art. Thirdly, as a group show that in its fullest form included eighty-five artists from the continent and disapora, Africa Remix is on a scale the size of which the city has not seen since Okwui Enwezor's Second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997.3 Because this was a code so easy to read, Africa Remix's opening...