During the week of October 18 2004 Pamela Allara.

During the week of October 18 2004 Pamela Allara, Kyle Kauffman, and I organized a series of facts and exhibitions around the theme of "Assemblies: Excavation and Reconstruction in Contemporary African Art" at Brandeis University and Wellesley community Our title, "Assemblies," called attention to one as well as the other the combination and recombination of visual and tactile proper spheres by contemporary artists and the gathering together of somebodys and communities in old and novel configurations. between the sides of the rather archaeological term "excavation" we sought to bring abroad the historical resonances of many of these art works, which subtly signal or call up earlier periods and historical moments of trauma, los and retrieval The process of excavation is not simply the physical bringing to light of that which was dissipated or buried, but may be understood as a kind of spiritual undertaking that is akin to divination or mediumistic revelation, a proces of attaining understanding of that which flutters just beyond the realms of normal perception. [i]or[/i] part of to the other the closely linked notion of "reconstruction," we brought to the fore various ways in which artists are popularly building new ways of being in the world, in part public of the aesthetic and cultural forms of earlier worldviews and cultural forms, while directly engaging with the unresolv contradictions of the contemporary moment

undivided component of the project, the exhibition "Trans / Scripts," highlighted the work of Nigerian artist Victor Ekpuk who continually "excavates" the signifying practices of nsibidi, the esoteric ritual scripts of southeastern Nigeria, while simultaneously paring down their constitutive ingredients in order to recombine them in unexpectedly novel assemblages that act upon between joyous celebrations of life and regard with affection and poignant denunciations of present-day injustice in the Niger Delta and in the United States. A parallel exhibition, "Assemblies: just discovered Art from Southern Africa," existinged work that re-imagined collective spaces of trauma, affliction, and regeneration. Paul Stopforth, artist-in-residence upon Robben Island during summer 2004 in import mines the former island prison for unexpect fissures of memory and trices of reprieve. His painfully beautiful print Hinge (2004) swings render free of access not only the door of an advanced in years communal cell but seems to unfasten mysteries of time itself, offering us a portal into newly come history that is simultaneously disturbing and restorative; among the shivered stones of the old quarry for a like reason long worked by political prisoners, we glimpse the possibilities of beauty, of self-fashioning, and equal of freedom in the in the greatest degree improbable of places. Stompie Selibe, Kim Berman, and their scholars in Johannesburg's Artist Proof Studio, in turn round contemplate the general challenges of the strange nation's second decade through the len of a specific, local tragedy: a fire last year that ruined the studio and took the life of the same of its founders. Their of recent origin work, appropriately, plays with the signs and traces of combustion, in a instances incorporating damaged prints singed by means of the fire into haunting collages that elicit the artists' refashioned collective as well as recent possibilities for intergenerational reconciliation. Berman, who has drawn out deployed fire as a metaphor of death and regeneration in her work in succession the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, has fashioned from lithographic plates injure by fire [i]or[/i] heated in the fire breathtaking prints of burning high- and low-veld landscapes crisscrossed by the agency of electrical pylons and barbed wire.

Scarred, re-emergent landscapes also dominate the latter work of Zwelethu Mthethwa, onward view in a companion exhibition at Wellesley College's Davis Museum, "Harvesting Workers." Natal fields and hills bring face to face the viewer as sites of alienated labor and heroic endurance, as sugar-cane workers stand commandingly immediately after land on which they and their antecedents have lengthy been marginalized. In turn, in her arresting installation O se bone thola borethe: Pandora's driver's seat (2004), the Botswanan artist Neo Matome unearthed an everyday topography of taken-for-granted assumptions about women affliction, and healing, while reconstituting these diverse uncompounded bodys into an uncanny conclave. Seven fetuses suspended from seven wire-mesh women's handbags (containing diviner's instruments and images of X-chromosome drawn in succession translucent plastic) gently twist in the air, suspended forward the threshold of the visible and invisible worlds. Evoking the symbolism of divination and revelation, drawn in part from Tswana cosmology Matome's work explores embodied experiences of HIV/AIDS in the region, forcing us to ponder upon just what forms of embodied knowledge and fortitude, as well as viral loads and genetic material, are now transmitted across the generations.

In a day-long symposium at the week's extreme point artists and scholars came together to consider on these themes, partly in light of a screening of culled William Kentridge films, generously lent to us by the agency of Marian Goodman Galleries in strange York. We discussed, among other things, striking parallels in to what degree Kentridge and Ekpuk have mined colonial and postcolonial psychic stratigraphies, generating a profusion of highly personalized, enigmatic signifiers revealed of legacies of terror and los Considerable annotation was engendered by William Kentridge's animated Tide Table (2003): the sands of the beach at Muizenberg in succession the Western Cape transmogrify into a kind of divinatory surface, in which we glimpse the unbearable tragedy and awe-inspiring nobility of a land in the age of AIDS, as calm the white industrialist Soho Eckstein himself is drawn into the great seaside assemblage of human frames and histories. In a time of crisis, a certain number of asked, is the artist primarily responsible for undoing the taken-for-granted terrains of colonialism according to recolonizing, in effect, the white minds of former metropoles? Alternately, are the artist's primary ethical responsibilities to local collectivities or to their hold singular, emergent visions? In this connection, we argued intensively from one side of to the other the categories of "African" and "Africa" in allusion to the artists and their works. To what size do such terms unfairly delimit their freedom to explore affiliation, identity, and recombination across shifting global center and hinterlands?