Inclusion Exclusion: Art in the Age of Post-Colonialism and Global Migration

E z o elUSION ART IN THE AGE OF POST-COLONIALISM AND GLOBAL MIGRATION THOMAS MULCAIRE W e take home and language for granted; they become nature and their underlying assumptions recede into dogma and orthodoxy. The exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety offamiliar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity . Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile "Inclusion/Exclusion" set out to demonstrate the ways in which the social systems of the first world (I guess welre supposed to read white, male, western society) are embedded in the dialectics of their differentiations, producing exclusions that pose virtually insoluble problems of identity and representation to those excluded. According to the organisers, quoting licentiously from the exhibition literature here, we can observe in the age of global migration the emergence of new and the downfall of historic zones and forms of rule, we can observe a cultural remix particularly in the metropolises of the former colonial lords. Within the frame of the exhibition, the wretched of the earth were seen to be moving to the capitals of the former colonial empires, questioning the prevailing cultural canon and consensus, making it necessary to remap the cultural cartography . After the post-modern deconstruction of the white cube, "Inclusion/Exclusion" proposed the deconstruction ofwhite art as a field of hegemonic and colonial practices from the point of view of post colonial critique. The selection of artists was focused on those walking along the borderline between inclusion and exclusion, within the geography ofthe colonial matrix. mm:!lIJournal of Contemporary African Art· Summer/Fan 1997 As an exhibition premise it was not a bad idea. To include is to simultaneously exclude and to exclude is to simultaneously include. "Inclusion/ Exclusion': An open paradigm, a permanent transaction. The show sought to liberate both modernism and postmodernism from their hidden colonial discourse; to relocate the culture of western modernity from the post-colonial perspective ; to show artists who reflect post-colonial and neo-colonial phenomena in their work and to thereby hone our attention and awareness of the possibilities of art in the age of post-modern geographies and post-colonial societies and unmask the bounds of exclusion. According to the organizers all the more hopes were pinned upon the post-modern dream, both in terms of economics and mass media globalization , that a geography of decentralization would one day be established in which the edges of the world and the center would be treated equally. Of course this type of delusionism belies a wish to homogenization which is truly utopic. In a world of homogenous reception and distribution there would logically be no need for culture. The world is necessarily pivoted on alternating zeroes and ones, with some black matter in between. Besides, all this decentering is becoming a little tiresome. Since Jorge Luis Borges published The Aleph, and probably some time before, those in the know have known that the center of the world is located in the staircase of an apartment block in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. A more challenging question in this age of advanced post-colonial migration and accelerated information transmission beyond geopolitics and territories would perhaps have been to ask whether art could be negotiated without an a priori deference to location, or culturallocus . What the curator, Peter Weibel, did manage to research an array of artists each with the respective theoretical and empirical groundings needed to effectively problematize the given and explode the hegemonic. The presentation of works by artists such as Rasheed Araeen, Mona Hatoum, Stan Douglas, Oladele Bamgboye, Yinka Shonibare, Romuald Hazoume, Candice Breitz, and Ike Ude contributed to the general sense that the exhibition had also managed to move beyond multiculture 101 in its pursuit of a political point, even if Weibel's definition of who is migrant in this world (reflected by the relative absence of Austrian, German, Swiss, or Italian artists in the show) sometimes slipped dangerously dose to some of the more raist of recent EU Immigration legislation . The dialectic between accretion and museological freeze...