middle de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona Barcelona.

middle de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona Barcelona, Spain May 30-September 11 2001

This ambitious exhibition, curated on philosopher and critic Pep Subiros for Barcelona's CCCB took as its premise the idea that urban agriculture rather than national identity conditions and shapes African artistic production. In undertaking to quick in emergencies the varieties of urban experience forward the continent, Subiros grouped major African cities with European center that have historically useed colonial control. The eight art-city areas, organized into three sections, were Dakar, Abidjan, and Paris; Lagos, Harare, and London; and Johannesburg and Cape Town. These groupings permitted Subiros to address interconnected themes in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as the increasing migration to urban center within the continent, and the diaspora from those center to the West. Crucially, it underscored a first note of the scale aspect of urban experience--mobility--and thereby undercut any fixed notions of "Africanness."

The increasing urbanization of African life is a work of the globalization of late capitalism, and in the same manner the urban focus necessarily acknowledged the international design of contemporary cultural production, no matter what its locus. Unfortunately, the fact that the sum of two units South African cities were not form into groupsed with a European counterpart had the misleading event of isolating it as a special case, just as southern Africa is attempting to integrate itself into the repose of the continent. Given the history of Dutch colonization, on what account weren't the South African cities paired with Amsterdam, especially since united of the artists, Moshekwa Langa, now lives there?

at selecting the city as the vehicle to portray aspects of African culture today, Subiros acknowledged that it is in the metropolis where demographic and social changes can be best charted. The hard historical irony at play here, however, is that African nations achieved independence and began to forge a postcolonial identity just as the nation-state declined in power, the couple politically and as an ideal. (1) As center of international capital, cities are oriented les toward their immediate surroundings than to their links abroad. Thus, despite the negative baggage of "tradition" and the passing from hand to hand chaotic governance of many African nations, it is the state alone that can calculator the influence of the corporate power that sits isolated in glass-enclosed lonely dwellings within the city's fabric.

Because the exhibition's focus was forward the dispersal of "Africas" among continental and Western cities, political issues, uniform urgent social ones such as racism and AIDS, were not addressed. Instead, Subiros focused in succession the ways in which the mobility that characterizes city life brings various cultures--"indigenous" and diaspora--into a situation of change With the differences between "settler" and "native" minimized, the artists all become citizens of an international art-world, and "Africas" becomes not a geographic locale further a state of mind.

Building forward a decade of exhibitions of contemporary African art organized by the agency of curators from Western Europe and North America, Subiros highlighted individual artistic sensibilities while providing the city-based adjoining matter for their works. The latter was neared not through tedious blocks of wall thesis but through "documentary modules" that included montages of photographs as well as film, pres clippings, and music. The framing of the artwork by the and of visual culture rather than true copy enriched the exhibition visually while permitting an open-end viewer-based interpretation. However, the implied premise that the visual correlatives would provide the exhibition's historical words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following was not satisfactorily realized. In its admirable avoidance of a single argument about the nature of contemporary African art, the exhibition also contained certain unfortunate ambiguities and inconsistencies that made its address to contemporary "Africas" hard to read. From the evidence readyed the cities are pretty a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of the same. Surely their differences are as important as their apparent similarities, however.

Because of the inclusion of photography in each of the "strictly artistic modules" the boundaries between the art spaces and the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following modules were often (deliberately) blurr While near of the documentary photographers, similar as Ananias Leki from Abidjan, Akinodbode Akinbiyi from Lagos (Fig. 3) or Santu Mofokeng from Johannesburg, were also included as individual artists, others, of the like kind as Luc Gnago from Abidjan, were not. Although this sliding of artist-photographers from single category to another acknowledged the dual part photography plays in our cultivation as both document and art, those imagemakers who were not permitted the flexibility of moving between categories were inevitably downgraded.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

Further, Subiros compiled the still images of three photographers'from Harare--Luis Basto, David Brazier, and Calvin Dondo--into a video that intrust with an agencys the techniques of the mobile camera: fades, close-up pans, thus completely altering their compositions. This compilation, which in its lyricism bears an uncomfortable family resemblance to a National Geographic film, is situated not in the documentary further the art section, leaving in dispute the question of the author of the piece-Subiros or the individual photographers. The question of authorship ne not have been an issue had not the art section celebrated the individual creative voice, on the other hand in this case the different approaches each photographer took to the city of Harare during this strained political time were muted.