Mind the gap
by Brenton Maart
Gilane Tawadros, founding director of the Institute of International Visual Arts, recently curated 'Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes'. Presented as part of the 50th Venice Biennale, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue buttressed the 2003 Biennale theme, of 'Dreams and Conflicts: the Dictatorship of the Viewer'.
"Fault lines," writes Tawadros in his catalogue contribution entitled 'The Revolution Stripped Bare', "create new landscapes." On his show, a range of African and African diaspora artists and writers interrogate the influences of postcolonialism, migration and globalisation on contemporary living. Showing sculpture and photography, video and installation, architecture and painting, Tawadros draws on works "spanning five decades, four continents and three generations", thereby "resisting any notion of an authentic or one-dimensional African experience".
Tawadros' analysis of multi-faceted experiences extends on previous actions by curators like Okwui Enwezor, whose 'The Short Century' provided an analysis of African modernities (note the plural). In his catalogue essay to 'Fault Lines', Enwezor reiterates his previous conclusions about African modernisms based on postcolonial realities, in opposition to the hegemonic discourse of western modernism (singularly, allegedly, the grand narrative).
Enwezor writes that the postcolonial constellation "is the sight for what constitutes contemporary culture and its affiliations in other domains of practice, the intersection of historical forces aligned against the hegemonic imperatives of imperial discourse."
Egypt features prominently on the exhibition, with works by Hassan Fathy, Sabah Naim, Moataz Nasr and Wael Shawky. Nigeria's Rotimi Fani-Kayode, shows a haunting photographic analysis of African homosexuality in relation to both African and western delimitations.
South Africans Clifford Charles, Pitso Chinzima, Veliswa Gwintsa and Moshekwa Langa provide, collectively, visual and conceptual analyses of a range of issues that, although situationally specific to South African psychologies, are influencing global re-definitions.
Clifford Charles combines water with ink to create streaming paths of flow, light fissures of separation, dark interfaces of contact, organic constructions simultaneously discrete and in contact. In his catalogue essay, professor of African literature, writer and film-maker Bheki Peterson quotes Charles: "Working with water as the basic medium throws further challenges since its nature is liquid, uncontained, fluid and transparent - is nothing yet everything."
Pitso Chinzima and Veliswa Gwintsa show a collaborative project titled At least one person was killed. Originally presented at the Johannesburg Art Gallery earlier this year as part of Mads Damsbo's 'Show me home', Chinzima and Gwintsa reworked their multi-media installation. The work serves as a manifesto that projects the personal experience of trauma into the public sphere, analysing the reality of dense, urban living, violence, racism, AIDS and the effect of impersonal policy on real living.
In his catalogue essay, Prince Dube, educationalist at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, writes that this work "transforms the exhibition space into an arena in which to debate the critical subject of human orchestrated crimes against humanity."
Chinzima's transparent curtains of obituaries form chilling backdrops to Gwintsa's installation of plastic toys. Chinzima's obituaries extend into his video work laying bare a scene of domestic violence. In turn, the children in the video, then mere shadows, reappear in an even more-faded absence as coatings of obituaries on tricycles and dolls.
Moshekwa Langa's work spans a range of media. His constructions on paper, video, banners, photographs, drawings, painting and installations are an eclectic mix. The curator Hamza Walker writes that the work "recapitulates two contradictory artistic paradigms: namely, modernist art's aspirations for universal legibility � and postmodernism's investigation into the basis of subjectivity and identity formations as they reside in autobiography, performance and figuration."
Walker's opinion could easily apply to all the South African's on the show. While attempting to re-enact modernism's ideals of a sense of the wholeness, they also explore a postmodern method with its fragmented situation analysis. Tawadros refers to this as a 'vernacular modernity', modernism that grew from professing to speak universally from "the privileged bastion of Western metropolises', and expanded into a vernacular modernity that "emerged so vociferously [and] responded with an equally emphatic insistence on national and local specificities that were nonetheless in constant dialogue with an international consciousness."
'Fault Lines' interest in examples of vernacular modernity represents an important consolidation of ideas first expressed in 'The Short Century', as well as the book Reading the Contemporary: African art from theory to the marketplace. More than this Tawadros' efforts further strengthen the voices of contemporary African artists internationally.
