Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora

LOOKING IX 9BOTH WAYS Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora If travel is searching And home what's been found I'm not stopping —Bjork, "Hunter," 1997 Laurie Ann Farrell 3 8 * N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa, 2000-2003. Fourteen figures, fourteen chairs, table. Overall: 132 x 488 x 280 cm. Commissioned by the Museum for African Art, NY. Photo: Stephen White. Spring /Summer 2008 t:m:IIm L ooking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora showcases artists from North, South, East, and West Africa who live and work in Western countries, including Belgium , France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal , the United Kingdom, and the United States. The title "Looking Both Ways" refers to the artists' practice of looking at the psychic terrain between Africa and the West, a terrain of shifting physical contexts, emotional geographies, and aesthetic ambitions and expressions.1 Looking Both Ways explores this landscape as it manifests in these artists' work while also focusing on the increasing globalization of the African diaspora. It attempts to provide insight into the diaspora from an international perspective, revealing it through the art and stories of the artists themselves. Over the past few years, the field of African art history has expanded to include serious consideration of the modern and contemporary art of Africa and the diaspora. At the same time, a proliferation of exhibitions and publications has provided mainstream visibility for artists of African M o s h e k w a Lan g a, Untitled, 2 0 0 2 , Mix ed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Laurie Ann Farrell. Gh a d a A m e r Touch Me Group (3) - Tanks and Kisses, 2 0 0 1 . Stickers and crayon on monoprint. Courtesy of the artist and Private Collection, NY. descent. In 1999, as part of its World of Art series, the London publisher Thames & Hudson released Sidney Littlefield Kasfir's book Contemporary African Art. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor's 1999 anthology Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace brought together an impressive group of theoretical , historical, sociopolitical, and aesthetic writings on modern and contemporary artists of African heritage. Similarly, Iftikhar Dadi and Salah Hassan's 2001 exhibition and book Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading investigated the question "How European is Europe?"2 Artists such as Ghada Amer, William Kentridge, Chris Ofili, and Yinka Shonibare have earned critical acclaim, participated in large-scale group exhibitions, and had major solo exhibitions. Kentridge's film Stereoscope won the 1999/2000 Carnegie International prize. In the April 2001 issue of Artnews, the critic Barbara Pollack called contemporary African art "The Newest Avant-Garde." Later that year, Enwezor's traveling exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994 and Hassan and Oguibe's Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art at the 49th Venice Biennale both championed African cultural achievements within and outside Africa and offered revisionist alternatives to the way the story 4 0 • IMka Journal of Contemporary African Art O l ad e l e A. Ba m g b o y e , Still Life, 2 0 0 3 . Digital print. Courtesy of the artist. of Africa has been told.3 Finally, at the start of the twenty-first century, contemporary artistic production from Africa and the diaspora appears to be receiving long-overdue visibility and recognition. When I first started working at the Museum for African Art—as a graduate student intern in 1998, and then as a permanent member of the curatorial team in 1999—the Museum was in the process of mounting an exhibition titled Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa. Around the same time, an impressive range of books and exhibitions began to appear highlighting contemporary artists from Africa and making connections among art, travel, and city centers.4 I became increasingly interested in finding a way to present current art practices being used by artists around the world without homogenizing individual artistic practices and identities or producing new forms of ethnocentric universalism.5 Moreover, I wanted to organize an exhibition that would allow artists to reveal (or conceal) what ignites and informs their...