'Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography' at Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam
by Clare Butcher
Okwui Enwezor's two year-old 'Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography' has travelled from the New York International Center for Photography to various locations in the US and Canada. It now completes its tour at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, having never made it to the Africa.
Reminiscent in scale and intention of the recent mega exhibition 'Africa Remix' curated by Simon Njami, this 'blockbuster' showcases recent work of 35 African photographers living on the continent and in the Diaspora. It aims at highlighting their individualised perspectives in what Enwezor's catalogue essay calls the 'global cultural community'. The exhibition's lengthy list of curatorial themes - Landscape, Urban Formations, the Body, Identity, History, Representation etc - overtly identifies the branding mechanisms at work in historical photographic renderings of 'Africa'. However, presenting the camera's capacity to depict an already entrenched myth does not necessarily result in a viewer's recognition and re-negotiation of it.
Enwezor's complex presentation of contemporary African photography includes the work of such usual suspects as the cinematographically composed shots of Andrew Dosunmu, the erotically charged images of Oladélé Ajiboye Bamgboye and Guy Tillim's documentary photo-essays. Other photographers, while perhaps less familiar to European audiences, are not unknown in other contexts. Images from Standard Bank Young Artist (2008), Nontsikelelo 'Lolo' Veleko's Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder series have become the show's poster-girls (Cindy and Nkuli, 2006). Veleko's is merely one of the many South African lenses dominating the artistic geography represented in 'Snap'.
Criticism levelled at the show's first opening in New York in 2006 queried the reason for Enwezor's almost self-conscious extension of the project to practitioners from Francophone and Islamic African countries as well as, of course, those living in the Diaspora, with so glaring an imbalance in favour of the south. This curatorial decision was apparently prompted by a desire to reflect a pluralist perspective on current approaches to and uses of photography in various spheres of African societies, as suggested by the show's extensive curatorial themes.
Within the potential visual cacophony caused by this thematic profusion however, many surprising syntheses provide reward for those who ride out the first urge to generalise. UK-born Andrew Dosunmu's unusually graphic black and white Untitled Fashion Photography (2005) is a striking reminder of the heightened mediation of images of Africa by African practitioners, not only in artistic but also, in commercial spheres.
Dosunmu works in various media, and established his name in SA with programmes such as the award winning television drama series Yizo Yizo. The crisp ocular language of these works creates an interesting visual contrast when viewed alongside the blurry, more conceptual capturing of military costumes behind glass in Hentie van der Merwe's 2002-03, Trappings series.
The hybrid presentation of 48 chromatic prints with 4 DVD screens featuring golden leotard-clad Doa Aly (48 Ballet Classes, 2005) successfully challenges any of the Amsterdam audience's expectations of the staid, purely Keita-esque 'African' portraiture. The lesser-known Senegalese photo-reporter, Mamadou Gomis, presents compassionately close, situated stories of the society around him negotiating the tensions of urbanity, rurality, ethnicity and citizenship.
In keeping with photography's new look 'Afro-politanism' it is not the specific regionality but rather the materiality and movements of the photographers themselves which 'Snap Judgments' intends to foreground. This anti-nationalism, combined with broad and somewhat elusive labels, further complicates the narrative between hundreds of images jostling for attention in the low-ceilinged rooms of the Stedelijk's temporary premises.
Enwezor's post-colonial attempt to fill in all possible gaps in representing a new spectrum of current African photographic practice, is in danger of opening the door on an overly reflexive curiosity cabinet, which would only further enhance the stereotypes of chaotic Africa.
In his opening speech, Enwezor stated that the works on each wall contributed to an emergent 'iconography of the everyday', which challenges the visual vocabulary most often connected with images of Africa, the key words of much 90s photo-journalism - poverty, famine, rural, antiquated. By providing carefully considered, defiantly non-clichéd views of contemporary African societies and spaces, these in/sights oppose each of the preceding terms and, according to Enwezor's catalogue essay, address the 'conflict of vision' between the way Africa is perceived and the way it perceives itself. Hardly the products of snap judgments.
It is this very conflict however which is brought to bear as Enwezor's icons of the new vie for visual precedence and curatorial consistency within the exhibition space. Guy Tillim's stark
Johannesburg series depicting refugee squatters in some of the South African capital's high-rise urban detritus becomes a case in point. The series seems to depict the very stock 'pathologies' of Africa as spectacle which the exhibition aims at combating, and which are contrary to Enwezor's claims that he wishes to amplify 'Afro-Positivism'.
When asked in a lecture how he deliberated the ethical minefield of receiving international acclaim on the back of such 'African' tropes as photographs of child soldiers in Rwanda, Tillim replied that, 'of course, standing in a Manhattan penthouse apartment, sipping champagne in front of life-size portraits of ten year-olds holding machine guns was screwed up - the conviction so great that one is helplessly compelled to reach for another canapé.'
Together with the number of subjects, cultures and contents incorporated, the overall composition evokes some helplessness, leaving those viewing these works for the first time to make their own snap judgments regarding the very divergent socio-historical contexts of each photographic moment. If the visitor's capacity to apprehend the complexity of the exhibition's conceptual project is generally overwhelmed after one round of one room, can it be helped that the first tendency is, yes, to reach for another canapé and a sip of champagne?
Survey shows of this scale are always problematic, encouraging generalisation and easy consumption rather than consideration and criticality in art audiences preconceptions of Africa vs. 'Africa'. The witty title, 'Snap Judgments', self-fulfillingly resists the tensions inherent in contemporary African photography. By attempting to convey 35 'new positions' the exhibition in turn represents none faithfully, leaving international gazers dazed and jumping to old conclusions.
Opens: June 27
Closes: Sept 30
Stedelijk Museum
Oosterdokskade 5, Amsterdam
Tel: +31(0)20 5732 911
Fax: +31(0)20 6752 716
Email: info@stedelijk.nl
