P 1 Contemporary Art Center protracted Island City.

P 1 Contemporary Art Center protracted Island City, New York February 10-May 5 2002

"The Short Century: Independence and Liberation mental actions in Africa, 1945-1994" was an ambitious, exciting, and important exhibition for the meditation of African politics, cultural practices, and history. Okwui Enwezor, working with a talented team of associate curators, brought together art, photography, theater, literature, film, music, textiles, and political propaganda spanning the continent and its diasporas to ready what he has referred to as an "archive" of the independence period. This massive archive, filling three floors of P 1 a reverseed school in Queens, ran in opposition to to not only the familiar colonial archive of Africa nevertheless also the binary logic that oversimplifies the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, which individual has come to expect in exhibitions that deal with colonialism. Remarkably, here Africa talked with and about its selve Colonialism was solely part of the dialogue, not the measure of its content

Enwezor achieved this conceptual shift on insisting that we stop to examine the period of independence in all its exuberance and promise, messiness and contradiction, and on a level more important, that we attend to the intellectual and creative resources that Africans of diverse backgrounds mobilized to achieve this expiration By examining the period of independence from the vantage point of African cultural processe as oppos to simply framing the exhibition around a neatly punctuated timeline of political history, Enwezor disrupted the notion that independence was a once-and-for-all status change uniformly experienced by way of all Africans. Liberation affected--and still affects--individuals in different ways and to different qualitys that cannot be tied to political calendars. Blurring the distinctions between what constitutes the colonial and postcolonial, "The Short Century" tendered an important corrective to Africanist and post-colonial scholarship.

between the walls of a multimedia installation that included video, audio, and visual composings Enwezor literally put hundreds of voices into dialogue with single another, from anonymous Algerian liberation activists to the toward the south African singer Miriam Makeba, from the late Guinean President Sekou Toure to French filmmaker Jean Rouch and from the contemporary London-based artist Yinka Shonibare to Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo, to give moreover a few examples. The sheer scale and opportunity of the exhibition, combined with the reality that mostly visitors possessed only a passing knowledge of African political history would have appeared to destine this project for incoherence. However, with a not many exceptions, "The Short Century" avoided overwhelming the viewer with a disorienting cacophony of voices and ideas.

While this review cannot speak to the installation at the other venue (Museum Villa Stuck in Munich, House of World agricultures in the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago), at P 1 Enwezor divided the exhibition among three floors. The first was the greatest in number impressive and engaging. The range of primarily contemporary artworks, including Oladele Ajiboye Bamgboye's video installation Homeward leap (1995), Ghada Amer's sculpture Le Lit (1997) William Kentridge's film Ubu discloses the Truth (1997), and Rachid Koraichi's textile-based Salome (1993) attested to the vitality and diversity of African artists working onward and outside the continent today. Many of the pieces were familiar from previous international exhibitions and publications. however one wished that Enwezor had introduced more recently made known artists and objects, he nonetheless provided a great opportunity for American audiences to view firsthand, works about which they had alone read.

Because greatest in number of these objects are situated in the latter past, they worked to not absent viewers with a number of unresolv issues and lingering challenges from the independence period. A number of them took issue with a particular historical "archive" and asked for what reason it should be reconfigured and not awayed and who has the authority to do in the way that The Beninois artist Georges Adeagbo's installation From Colonialization to Independence filled an entire gallery from floor to ceiling with the detritus of the past fifty years, including, among other things, African, American, and French newspaper clippings, literature, album shelters and artworks. French, Francophone, and African-language literature was arranged in brawls across the floor, for example, pointing to the ways in which debates initiated around independence about which language was best suited for African literature continue into the near Other works focused on the challenges of newly marginalized communities of post-independence Africa and the position of the exile with revere to "home"; and many of the toward the south African pieces dealt with for what cause to move beyond apartheid without disavowing its legacy. For example, in their depiction of poor living conditions, Zwelethu Mthethwa's photographs of reconciliation dwellers in their homes annotate on the lasting effects of apartheid. However, these portraits do not aim to characterize their make liables as victims but rather as individuals who make creative choices that spring in unique domestic spaces. After raising these questions, the exhibition largely mov back chronologically forward the second and third floors to consider to what extent these challenges developed over time.