Make most of ‘Being There’
lorn Mahlangu outside her “hut” had affected him. As with Pigozzi, Magiciens was a bracing encounter, one that determined the focus and heft of Njami’s future curatorial activism.
“Africa has always been subject or object,” remarked Njami in a March interview with the French weekly Point. “Everyone has their opinion on this continent that has long been defined from outside.”
Njami’s comments are useful in thinking about the site chosen by Bernard Arnault, the luxury goods impresario behind Louis Vuitton and France’s richest man, for his cultural centre. The foundation is located on the northern tip of the Bois de Boulogne parkland, next to world’s fairs for the next 25 years the importance of people as objects transcended the significance of the manufactured goods on display,” wrote historian Richard W Flint in a 1996 essay about the Jardin.
There is a direct relationship between this musty history and the 2017 season of Africa show at the foundation, which are corralled under the rubric Art/Afrique, le nouvel atelier (Art/Africa, the new workshop). Magiciens, the show that inspired Pigozzi and launched Samba’s career, was explicitly pitched as a counterstatement to a colonial exhibition in 1931 Paris that featured human zoos.
Things have, of course, changed since 1877, and indeed 1989. The picture of Africa, as told to the world, has shifted. As Njami told Le Point, curators such as Bisi Silva in Nigeria, Koyo Kouoh in Senegal, Elise Atangana in Paris and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung in Berlin are “constructing a discourse from themselves and the Africa from which they stem”.
The foundation’s show is not part of this optimistic history. It forms part of a different legacy of institutional shows, many of them well meaning, but often compelled by different metrics and legacies of display. One noticeable aspect of these shows, particularly when it comes to the post-apartheid bearing witness to South Africa abroad, is the relative absence of painting.
In 1948, the same year white nationalists came to power with a programme of radical political transformation, London’s Tate Gallery hosted an exhibition of contemporary South African paintings, drawings and sculpture.
The line-up included JH Pierneef, Alexis Preller, Gerard Sekoto and Irma Stern, who is now ranked among the top 10 most collectable female artists globally based on 10-year auction statistics (20052015).
At the time, though, the South Africans were meekly introduced. “There is as yet no reason to speak of a South African school of painting: the main influences have come from European art,” stated Geoffrey Long in the introduction to the accompanying catalogue. The bias endures.
There has been no thorough examination of the drift and meaning of post-apartheid painting internationally, despite the emergence of serious talents such as Zander Blom, Carla Busuttil, Rory Emmet, Dorothee Kreutzfeldt, Georgina Gratrix, Jared Ginsberg, Cinga Samson and Mawande ka Zenzile. Painting endures, despite the expanded meaning of art in the present tense, but is also ignored.
It is lonely being a painter in South Africa, conceded Nkosi, “but lonely in a way that is not sad, and rather productive. I’m dying, though, for some kind of real conversation about it.” That may just happen, thanks to Paris.