Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa
Fowler Museum, Los Angeles, USA
Alfredo Jaar, Muxima (2005), still from digital film
A number of recent exhibitions have taken it upon themselves to complicate prevailing conceptions of Africa as a monolithic culture or ‘global problem’. Shows like the traveling ‘Africa Remix’ (2005) and last year’s ‘Flow’ at the Studio Museum in Harlem sought to combat misplaced generalizations with a barrage of specificities, bringing together large numbers of artists from across the continent in a celebratory display of Africa’s teeming heterogeneity. Such an approach largely reiterates a view of the continent as a singular whole – albeit one now appreciated for its diversity.
‘Continental Rifts’ smartly takes five artists who are cited as ‘deeply connected’ to Africa, yet who are positioned in, outside and around the continent in such a way that they can hardly be seen as part of an equation ‘adding up’ to an African whole. Alfredo Jaar, Berni Searle, Yto Barrada, Cláudia Crostóvão and Georgia Papageorge were born in Chile, South Africa, France and Angola, often to parents of different nationalities (Moroccan, Portuguese); they live and work in equally diverse locations. The artists’ repeated distancing from and returns to Africa have led to their common conviction that the place is fundamentally elusive, impossible to pin down.
Berni Searle, Home and Away (2003)
The loose and allegorical video sequences of Searle and Papageorge benefit from company. The presence of other videos – that engage more explicitly with myths of family and media – show Searle’s and Papageorge’s works to be mythifying endeavours too. Home and Away (2003) shows Searle floating quietly in the Mediterranean strait between Morocco and Spain, embodying the fluidity of national identity; Papageorge’s Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire: Namibia/Brazil (2001) documents long strips of red cloth – indicated as symbols of ‘both rupture and reconciliation’ in the exhibition text – as they flap loudly in the wind along the Brazilian and Namibian coasts.
Georgia Papageorge, Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire: Namibia/Brazil (2001), video still
Africa consistently appears as the object of entangled fiction and fact. In Crostóvão’s short, two-screen video, The Imaginary Journey (2008), a young man wistfully recites an imagined trip to his birthplace, where his parents buried a family treasure before being forced to flee the country. He reminisces in the future tense: ‘To be able to say, “I was there, your house is still standing...’’.’ The accompanying video of city streets is punctuated with poignant images of an empty house which has filled almost entirely with sand. In contrast, in Fata Morgana (2005-6), Crostóvão interviews individuals born in Africa though who left as children. The documentary slides quickly into humour as people express the most ardent and incongruous of opinions regarding a place that they hardly remember.
Alfredo Jaar’s ten-chapter film Muxima (2005) takes on African histories of war, AIDS and the church – issues that the media routinely brings into distorted focus for a global audience. If the traditional Bantu song chosen by Jaar invigorates some scenes – a motor boat carrying five stoic men staring straight ahead seems to be driven forward by the music itself – it is completely unmemorable in others: a heart-in-mouth sequence which follows a young man as he hunts land mines in dense undergrowth is so riveting that the music hardly matters. In a similarly documentary vein, Barrada records an amicable garden meal in Tangiers (The Botanist, 2007); colour photographs trace the contest between iris tingitana (Moroccan iris) and encroaching commercial developments outside of the city (’Iris Tingitana’, 2007).
Yto Barrada, Hôtel Ahlen, Tangier (2006), from the ‘Iris Tingitana’ series (2007)
The real strength of ‘Continental Rifts’ is its curatorial model. If each artist suggests that myth (both personal and public) is one way of understanding place, curator Mary Nooter Roberts utilizes myth to productively re-specify old disciplinary ‘spaces’ – the over-generalized concepts of both ‘Africa’ and ‘African art’.
Sarah-Neel Smith
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