Museum set to stop silo thinking about contemporary African art
• Opening shows at Zeitz Mocaa reflect continent’s diversity
The sheer scale of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa is a statement. With undulating walls like a mountain fortress, the hulking 1920s grain silo on Cape Town’s Waterfront — once the tallest building south of the Sahara — opened last week as the world’s largest museum of 21st-century art from the continent and its diaspora.
Softly protruding “pillow” windows reflecting Table Mountain turn the building into a lantern at night. A new beacon for art, the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Mocaa) will guide and dazzle.
Inside the soaring space-age atrium, art installers were suspended like astronauts alongside an airborne dragon of rubber inner-tubing, ribbon and bone. The mythological crooner of deathly Xhosa lullabies, created by Capetonian Nicholas Hlobo for the 2011 Venice Biennale, is among the art the museum aims to preserve.
The fate of the Benin bronzes is on the mind of the museum’s South African executive director and chief curator, Mark Coetzee, “now that museums around the world have woken up to African art”. As important, the museum is meant as a catalyst for the continent’s artists and curators.
“It’s a public museum with a private collection,” says Jochen Zeitz, 54, former CE of Puma. The German philanthropist has built his world-class collection with Coetzee since 2008, expressly to show it publicly “as a contribution”.
Zeitz’s Segera Retreat in Kenya was their laboratory until the Victoria & Alfred (V&A) Waterfront proposed the silo as a not-for-profit museum.
“It’s not my museum or the Waterfront’s — it’s for Africa,” Zeitz says. “Africans need to come on board.”
After the free opening weekend, for which 24,000 timed tickets were snapped up in nine minutes, entry will be free for under-18s and at various times every week for citizens of African countries.
Mindful of those who may never have entered an art museum, UK architect Thomas Heatherwick has devised a spectacular lure. The silo, once a hub for exporting maize, was abandoned in 2001. Rather than gutting its vertical storage tubes, a space was carved out of the pinkish concrete to form a cathedral-like atrium; the shape is precisely that of a grain of corn left in the silo, which Heatherwick’s team digitally scanned and enlarged, mapping it on to the interior to be cut away.
Obliquely severed tubes overhead are held up by sleeves of fresh concrete, although pockmarks and rust have been painstakingly preserved.
Carving concrete with GPS tracking is “cutting-edge technology”, says V&A Waterfront CE David Green, whose shareholders funded the Silo’s R500m renovation. Their joint venture with Zeitz underwrites operating costs.
The museum’s nine floors are leased free for 99 years. The seeding private collection is on loan for at least 20 years or Zeitz’s lifetime while acquisition committees build a permanent core. But curators have been given scope to draw on loans, making this more than a display of one man’s collection. Nicholas Hlobo’s dragon inaugurates the BMW Atrium, an answer to the London Tate’s Turbine Hall.
Donations are flowing in. William Kentridge is a strong supporter and the jazz soundtrack to his multiscreen puppet
More Sweetly Plays the Dance sounds discordantly through the galleries.
Johannesburg-based photographer Roger Ballen has donated his entire archive. A Christie’s fundraising auction, including works donated by El Anatsui and Yinka Shonibare, raised about £1.4m. Judge Albie Sachs sits on the board.
While the Centre for the Moving Image has cosy tubular booths, most of the numerous galleries are climate-controlled “white cubes” to secure Mocaa a place on the touring circuit.
But several works are in dialogue with the silo. In the Dusthouse, which used to filter chaff, Shonibare’s patterned windows pick up the cathedral theme, matching the Indonesian batik in his film Addio del Passato.
In the museum’s transport tunnels, Edson Chagas’s Luanda, Encyclopedic City is on show for the first time since it made him Africa’s first winner of the Golden Lion at Venice in 2013.
The atrium’s circular skylights are vertiginously transparent floor panels in the rooftop sculpture garden, inscribed by the Togolese artist El Loko before he died in 2016.
The building’s industrial past adds resonance to All Things Being Equal, a group show of more than 40 artists. Isaac Julien’s nine-screen installation Ten Thousand Waves, a moving response to the drowning of 23 Chinese cockle pickers in Morecambe Bay, finds an echo in The Waves by Liza Lou, a US artist in Durban, whose 1,194 panels of tiny chalk beads are striated with weavers’ sweat and toil.
In the Midst of Chaos There Is Opportunity, a heroic installation by Mary Sibande, a battalion of women in combats — modelled on the artist’s mother, a domestic worker — ride hobby horses past snarling red hounds and vultures.
A strategy has been to collect artists’ oeuvres, to enable the museum, in Zeitz’s words, to “tell the artist’s story”. While it risks leaving artists out, it bears fruit in two solo shows.
Kudzanai Chiurai is known for photographs of staged dioramas satirising power and masculinity in Zimbabwe, from which he fled. Regarding the Ease of Others, a midcareer retrospective curated by Azu Nwagbogu, includes early paintings and charcoal drawings.
In Material Value, photographs of an empty Mozambican bull ring capture performances by Nandipha Mntambo from Swaziland, who is at once matador, bull and spectator.
Dresses sculpted from cured cow hide probe the boundaries we construct between animality and human sexuality, attraction and repulsion.
A small room of paintings curated by Xola Mlwandle exemplifies the museum’s ambition. Works range from Ghanaian Jeremiah Quarshie’s realist portrait of Auntie Dedei seated on plastic containers, and Congolese Chéri Samba’s surrealist satire, to Briton Chris Ofili’s abstract Blue Steps.
In disparate styles, these paintings hold conversations across what the scholar Paul Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic — and beyond.
History is examined in Joël Andrianomearisoa’s petal-like fragments of silk saris hanging alongside sepia ancestral photographs. Lungiswa Gqunta’s Divider, with 130 beer bottles hanging from wicks, alludes to petrol bombs. Mohau Modisakeng’s self-portraits suggest priest-like exorcisms of a violent legacy using pangas and sjamboks as props.
Other powerful portraiture ranges from Zanele Muholi’s defiant photographs of lesbian survivors of corrective rape to Tunisia’s Mouna Karray photographed in a sack, her thumb holding the camera’s remote release like a detonator; bound, invisible, yet grasping the power to represent herself.
In the run-up to the opening, Coetzee was repeatedly challenged with the identity question: “Where am I in this museum?” These shows offer oblique and unexpected answers.
That Mocaa was founded on the vision of four white men (only one of whom is African) has not escaped its critics. In the city that produced the #Rhodes MustFall campaign, it will remain under scrutiny.
Yet the opening shows demonstrate what many western art institutions have been slow to recognise: that a diverse curatorial staff makes for surprising and challenging art.
A museum that can inspire new audiences not only to create and appreciate art, but also to tell its story, could augur a true shift in power.
IT’S NOT MY MUSEUM OR THE WATERFRONT’S — IT’S FOR AFRICA. AFRICANS NEED TO COME ON BOARD