Tag Archives: Global Art

Extra: Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie – ‘Where is Africa in Global Contemporary Art?’

Posted on 23/12/2011

By publishing the Project ‘1975’ essay ‘The Politics of Exclusion’, SMBA presented an introduction to the range of problems connected to the definition of African Art. Author Rikki Wemega-Kwawu is certainly not alone in his criticism towards the current discourse of African and Global art. In addition the Nigeria-born American Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Associate Professor Art History at the University of California Santa Barbara, criticizes the ‘Eurocentric’ definition of contemporary art and the idea of ‘global contemporary’ in his article ‘Where is Africa in Global Contemporary Art?’ in Savvy Journal.

Okwunodu Ogbechie argues: ‘My estimate is that there are less than one thousand “Contemporary African artists” who live and work in the West although they account for 99 % of all artists included in international exhibitions of Contemporary African Art.’

Comparable to Wemega-Kwawu’s argument, Okwunodu Ogbechie states that the aspects of ‘transnational interaction’, to travel and communicate internationally, seem to be crucial in the definition of contemporary art. Yet, who has the facilities to perform this transnational interaction? And are the concepts of place, location and site-specific history of any value to the definition of African art? Click here to read Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie’s article ‘Where is Africa in Global Contemporary Art?’ in the online version of Savvy Journal (page 24-31).

Extra: Article N’Goné Fall ‘The Repositioning of Contemporary Art from Africa on the Map’

Posted on 21/04/2011

Internationally operating curator and art critic N’Goné Fall has recently published an article in which she maps out the landscape and the positioning of contemporary art from Africa. Fall contributed with this article to the catalogue of Ars 11 in the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Finland, an event that will ‘change your perceptions about Africa and contemporary art’, in which also Alfredo Jaar participates.

Fragment of N’Goné Fall’s article:
“As a curator with an obvious focus on art production in Africa, I often had the bad feeling that I was seen as a wood dealer or a hyper enthusiast promoter of hand made mass-produced tacky exotic junk for tourists. And no I am not paranoid. For decades, ethnographic museums had the monopoly on non-western cultures. […] While looking at the work of Matthew Barney or Olafur Eliasson people will never refer to their supposed Celtic or Roman origins.”

Click here to read the article on the website of GAM – Global Art and the Museum.