Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa (review)

Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa was an exhibition at the UCLA Fowler Museum displaying time-based media works by five contemporary artists linked to Africa. While the works span varied themes, the exhibition broadly examines the relation between the individual subject and the continent. Experiences of individuals as sociohistorical categories are the key epistemological sources through which the exhibition offers a historicized survey of the cultural landscapes of postcolonial Africa. The imaginations and interrogations mapped by individual works provide a nuanced and complex insight into contemporary issues surrounding history, sociality and representation in Africa. This is a vital move in documenting cultural history, at far remove from the economic and social determinism surrounding the colonial encounter.

Continental Rifts makes two clear interventions. One, imagination in terms of a nostalgic longing and the projection of an idyllic quality to the “homeland,” is brought forth through a deconstructive and self-reflexive formal approach in a range of works. This occurs most poignantly in two works by Claudia Cristovao. The installation Fata Morgana includes a series of conversations with persons displaced from Africa who recount memories of the landscape. Their conversational approach serves to situate imagination as an agent in the constitution of postcolonial subjectivity without either reifying or undermining it. Le voyage imaginaire succeeds Fata Morgana. This piece exposes us to the journey of a man of mixed heritage who returns to his birthplace in search of a family treasure buried in haste while his family fled civil war. The piece does not provide resolution on the family treasure, but a web-based interview with the subject recounting his memories and a two-channel, low-resolution video projection plotting the concerned landscape situates the viewer in an in-between space where imagination and situation, memory and desire intermingle. Navigating between these, the viewer enters a nomadic space that parallels the subject’s experiences. Berni Searle’s installation Home and Away also creates a liminal experience. It is composed of two videos projected facing each other. One is shot off the coast of Spain and the other off the coast of Morocco. The work references migration from Africa to Europe. The artist performs in one video wherein we see her body in the ocean as if suspended and swayed by ocean currents. Shot from a top angle, her body freely enters and exits the frame repeatedly. The fluidity so rendered by the work serves in gesturing toward the contingency and arbitrariness of migratory experience, identity and cultural history.

The innovative formal approaches of the works included in Continental Rifts make for a further intervention. While some works, such as Cristovao’s and Searle’s installations, use design, sound and projection quality, among other features, to evoke a sense of liminality and fluidity in the viewing experience, others such as Yto Barrada’s and Alfredo Jaar’s films adopt a direct, documentarist visual regime to highlight sociocultural complexities extending out from the colonial encounter and perpetuated by a partial global order of contemporary times. Yto Barrada’s The Botanist is a short film that raises issues about the homogenization rendered by global urbanization. The film focuses on the depletion of native flowers such as the “Moroccan Iris” along the Atlantic coast. The film is structured around a group of visitors who visit amateur botanist Umberto Pasti’s garden south of Tangier. The garden is home to rare and endangered plant species. The film’s cinematography is powerful and subversive. The low angle from which we can only access the visitors’ feet in the garden emphasizes the landscape and situates in the film’s conversations a social and historical imperative. The viewer’s attention is directed on the debate within the film from a camera position that undermines the sound conventions in mainstream and institutional documentary practice. The critical stance toward globalization is not limited to the verbal discourse within the film but is embodied by the film’s form, which constitutes a...