I should have published this earlier but I’m currently still catching up with things on the ground here in London, sorry …
Cambridge/Africa Collaborative Research Programme
With support from the Leverhulme Trust and the Issac Newton Trust, we now have a programme of academic and intellectual exchange that will establish longer-term partnerships between Cambridge and particular African universities. A group of five Africa-based scholars, chosen out of a competition organized around a particular theme, will come to Cambridge for six months of research. A Cambridge lecturer pursuing research on the yearly theme will coordinate the programme. At the conclusion of the Visiting Fellows' tenure in Cambridge, the lecturer involved in the previous year's activities will go to the African university with which we have partnered to convene a conference. The five African hVisiting Fellows will also attend. During the following year an edited volume would be produced, published on the Centre of African Studies' book series and co-published by a press run by the partner African university.
Africa-based scholars are invited to apply for the 2012-2013 fellowship programme, which will be centred on the theme of 'Art and Museums in Africa'.
An application package can be downloaded here.
Art and Museums in Africa
African art has long been globally famous but has also been controversial both intellectually and politically. Most obviously, the scramble for African art engaged in by western museums and art collectors has been condemned as an appropriation, as has the borrowing of forms and motifs derived from African arts by European modernist artists. Within disciplines such as art history and anthropology, there has been much argument about appropriate methods and concepts for the study of African art traditions. In the epoch of decolonization efforts were made to establish new museums in African states, relevant to local aspirations and new national cultures. Over the same period efforts have been made to revive customary art practices, and to create new craft industries, sometimes in the context of post-conflict and AIDS-prevention community projects. Over the last 50 years modernist and contemporary arts have also emerged and have gained increasing international recognition, while typically lacking secure financial or institutional support within African states.
This theme aims to support a wide range of interests in historical and contemporary arts in Africa and in changing practices in local and national museums and art institutions.
Visiting Fellows for 2010-2011
The five Visiting Fellows for the academic year 2010-2011 are:
Dr Tunde AWOSANMI of University of Ibadan, Nigeria
Dr Eiman EL-NOUR of Al-Ahfad University for Women, Omdurman, Sudan
Dr Oyeniyi OKUNOYE of Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria
Dr Kenneth SIMALA of Masinde Muliro University, Kenya
Dr James TSAAIOR of Pan-African University, Lagos, Nigeria
These five scholars spent time in Cambridge, pursuing research on the theme 'Myth and Modernity in African Literature. In August 2011 the Centre in collaboration with the School of Media and Communication, Pan-African University, Lagos will convene a conference at the Pan-African University.
For information about the conference and the call for papers 'click' here
Research Horizons Conversations across continents.
Each year, academic dialogue is enriched at the Centre of African Studies by the arrival of a group of African scholars who spend up to six months researching and working together.
To read more click here
I already told you about last autumn’s symposium Curating in Africa at Tate Modern and the videos documenting the event at the Tate’s video channel. So, I naturally assume, that you will be interested in the organiser Kerryn Greenberg return visit to the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Lagos. Here’s what Next had to say about it:
By Obidike Okafor,
Next, February 19, 2011 04:09AM
United Kingdom-based South African curator, Kerryn Greenberg, held a session with members of the art community at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), Yaba, Lagos on February 10. She shared her experiences and the aspirations for one of the major art institutions in Britain, the Tate Modern, where she works. Her talk, centred on plans for African artists on the continent and those in the Diaspora, was delivered to an audience comprising art collectors, students, artists and representatives of the National Gallery of Art.
Greenberg, who was in Nigeria for a two-week residency at the CCA, noted that curating is as essential as the art being displayed. Touching on the objectives of Tate Modern, she disclosed that the museum has realised the importance of expanding its African content after a decade of existence, hence its resolve to have a rich representation of contemporary and modern African art.
Curatorial past
The curator, who has a Master of Arts degree in Curatorial Studies from Bard College, New York and who joined Tate Modern in 2007, also spoke on projects she has handled in the past. They include Frédéric Bruly's ‘Bouabré'; Francis Alÿs' ‘The Story of Deception', John Baldessari's ‘Pure Beauty'; Nicholas Hlobo's ‘Uhambo' and Rothko's ‘The Late Series'.
She also gave insight into the intricacies of curating at the Tate Modern, using Francis Alys' works as an example. She noted that works by the talented artist start with an uncomplicated action either by him or others, which is thereafter documented in a range of media. Greenberg said his work explores issues affecting Latin America and border zones in areas of conflict.
While nothing that Alÿs, uses video projection and film, the curator observed that he also spreads his ideas through postcards, adding that painting and drawing are equally central to his work. Greenberg talked about some of the artist's video installations including ‘Tornado'; ‘The Green Line' and ‘When Faith Moves Mountains'. She disclosed that it was difficult to get the right equipment to screen ‘Tornado' at the Tate Modern because it was shot in high resolution.
Life at the Tate
Taking the audience through the different levels at the UK museum, Greenberg disclosed how each floor affects the artist's showing. "Level Four is for more established artists, while Level Two, Level Three and Level Five are for smaller groups. Emerging international artists are shown on Level Two," she said.
Greenberg whose first African curatorial project was South Africa's Nicholas Hlobo's ‘Uhambo' held on Level Two of the Tate Modern, further disclosed that the exhibition is the first of many that will involve Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora. Tate Modern, she added, will build relationships and show more works from Africa in the near future.
Greenberg also disclosed that she had earlier organised a symposium for African curators including Bisi Silva of the CCA. "I have been having conversations with artists in Lagos. I am always glad to collaborate with my colleagues from the continent," she said.
During the interaction, Bisi Silva wondered what relevant government organisations were doing to support collaborations between Nigerian artists and international organisations. Eze Obizue of the Education and Research Department of the NGA, responded that artists have benefited, as they had been part of Art Expos held in Las Vegas and New York; the Dak'Art biennale in Dakar, Senegal; Lagos International Art Expo and the African Regional Summit on Visual Art (ARESUVA), held in Abuja.
Advising young artists who want to be recognised internationally, Greenberg said, "Artists need to be ambitious, they are not ambitious. When they develop their works, they can find themselves. Apply for residencies, discover possibilities, and keep on trying if you want to grow internationally."
Critical Encounters: A Graduate Student Symposium in Honor of Sidney Littlefield Kasfir
Emory University’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, Art History Department, and Institute for African Studies announce a graduate student symposium in honor of Sidney Littefield Kasfir.
Keynote address
Friday, April 22, 2011
7:30 pm
Chika Okeke-Agulu, Assistant Professor of Art History, Princeton University is a curator, artist and art historian and co-author of Contemporary African Art Since 1980, will deliver the keynote address.
Graduate Symposium
Saturday, April 23, 2011
9:30 am – 5:30 pm
“If tourist art, the lowest common denominator of what is thought by Westerners to be inauthentic in African art, can be deconstructed in ways that make the definition of authenticity full of self-contradictions, then the same kinds of questions can be asked even more readily about other non-canonical categories such as “elite” or “international” art. Now, in the closing years of the twentieth century, it is perhaps time to bring the canon into better alignment with the corpus, with what African artists actually make, and to leave behind a rather myopic classificatory system based so heavily on an Africa of the mind”
— Sidney L. Kasfir, “African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow” in African Arts
Throughout her career Dr. Sidney L. Kasfir has sought to rethink the way scholars, artists, museums, and viewers understand and categorize African art. She has attempted to expand our classificatory system, without allowing generalizations to dilute the complex efforts of artists, cultures, and visual languages. This symposium, organized in honor of her retirement from Emory University, considers three themes to which Dr. Kasfir has contributed: Commodification and Tourism; Heritage; and The Artist, the Workshop, and Cultural Brokerage.
Proposals should consider one of these three major themes. Papers should be twenty minutes in length. We welcome submissions from graduate students from any discipline and at all stages of their studies working with visual culture in Africa. Airfare and accommodations will be provided for students whose papers are accepted.
Deadline for submissions: Please send your cv and a one-page abstract by mail or email no later than February 5, 2011 to:
Elizabeth Hornor
Marguerite Colville Ingram Director of Education
Michael C. Carlos Museum
571 South Kilgo Circle
Atlanta, GA 30322
Ehornor [at] emory.edu
Selected speakers will be notified by email by March 5, 2011.
I just received the news that the video recordings of October 2010’s symposium Curating in Africa at Tate Modern are now available at the institution’s video channel (four parts). Enjoy.
On a different note, this video of Christopher Ofili may be of interest to some of you.
Thought that might be of interest …
Joseph Nevadomsky (Oct. 2010): The Art of Benin Repatriation and the Repatriation of Benin Art
Review of Peju Layiwola. Benin1897.com: Art and the Restitution Question. Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria: Wy Art Editions, 2010. Illustrations. 244 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-978-902-703-3.
There are several features of this book that deserve review and comment. First is the title, intriguing and open to interpretation. The “.com” suggests commercial applications in terms of sharing the market on Benin brass castings. “Restitution,” too, suggests some form of financial liability rather than the more constraining repatriation. (Transfer of money and deeds is easier than movement of property.) Leasing cultural identity or creating new identities of ownership and transfer are viable options as the “.com.” Maybe cultural property is a loan agreement into which banks should venture, like sub-primes and refinancing. Everything is negotiable in market economies. When money talks, heritage walks.
Second, Peju Layiwola’s book is about her art, the production of it, the exhibition that displayed some of it, and the accompanying symposium that opened the exhibition. Layiwola, noted for installation art, offers an exploration of Benin art, heritage, and repatriation as she interprets this in mixed media: clay, calabashes, and layered copper among them. The art is meant for us to reflect on the Benin kingdom, on its downfall and removal of palace objects, and especially on the political agenda of restitution. This is aided by the essays of various commentators.
Layiwola is the daughter of Elizabeth Olowu, an accomplished artist and a half-sister of the present Oba (king) of Benin, Oba Erediauwa. Princess Olowu is noted for her cement civic statuary. Daughter Peju is a studio-trained installation artist and university teacher. This magnificently produced book celebrates daughter Peju’s art constructions, with essays about her and by her, and photographs of her work and workshop, as well as photos of family, friends, and conference associates. It contains essays from the opening symposium in Lagos (from where the exhibition traveled to Ibadan, Abuja, and Benin City).
Keenly observed accounts of her creativity permeate this text--narratives that warmly capture a place and time with emotional asides and that demonstrate how Layiwola’s lifelong affection for Benin has imprinted her imagination. One example of Layiwola’s work as shown here consists of gourds painted with images, each labeled with the name of a different Benin king. They are suspended in a way that reminds one of a roped lattice or patio divider. The one thousand terracottas mostly replicate late (ca. nineteenth century) Oba brass commemorative heads, although they are less detailed. Intended as protest art, they are not as symbolically potent or ascorbic as, say, Barbara Donahue’s Amber Waves of Grain, an exhibit of thirty thousand ceramic nose cones that represented America’s nuclear arsenal in 1986.
Several essays are a paean to her art, and suitably adulatory. A foreword by her uncle, the king of Benin, places her skills in family surrounds; a preface by Tunde Babawale (director of the Center for Black and African Arts and Civilization in Lagos) highlights the contemporary relevance of her art for education; and a note by Mimi Wolford (d irector of the Mbari Institute for Contemporary African Art in Washington DC) describes how she and Layiwola became close friends. There are, too, an anonymous “A Profile” about Layiwola, and an introduction by the artist that illuminates her socialization, schooling, and artistic training.
Also by Layiwola, “Resurrecting the Disappeared: A Recontextualization of 1897” is a memory lane recounting of how her family background intersects with her art. There may be a comparison here to Amir Nour’s 1969 Grazing at Shendi, 202 stainless steel semi-circular arches evocative of childhood memories of goats grazing in the Sudan.
Two other essays also use Layiwola’s background to explore her art. “Material Culture, Maternal Culture, Peju Layiwola’s Art and Its Obligations” by Mabel Evwierhoma (professor of theater arts at the University of Abuja) takes off from the artist’s childhood as an emanation to dwell on feminism and women’s art. Inniversity of Wisconsin) takes us through the exhibition, seeing it as a metamonument that in its iconography depicts a multitude of subjects that synecdochically stand for Benin monarchs and subjects both before and after the Punitive Expedition of 1897. For High, a meta-monument is a postmodern construction that requires ambulatory viewing and critical reflection to comprehend how an art installation glorifies the past and connects it to the nostalgia of the present.
Interlarded among these encomia are serious examinations of repatriation by proponents, and this is the third feature of the book. The essays take the path of political rectitude in declaring Benin objects in Western museums as “looted,” “stolen,” “arrogant theft,” “aggressive art imperialism,” and “pillaged cultural heritage.” The essays are variously incisive, vitriolic, and explosive, but never petty. Beyond that, while Western museum defenders of their loot see their domain as a “curatoreum,” which, like a crypt or mausoleum, preserves the dead, the authors here see the Western domain as a “curatorium,” which destroys cultural identity as a crematorium destroys the dead. Trying to fathom how to resolve such oppositions is a mug’s game.
Some of these essays are primed to “history” as fraud, and restitution as legit payback. Sola Olorunyomi (who teaches performance and media art at the University of Ibadan) offers “Hmmm ... 1897? Or an Introduction,” hitting the reader with a discursive rebuttal of a colonial master text: what he calls the “mortifying lingo of colonial speak,” a reference to the bug-bear “civilizing mission”--and argues that the events of Benin’s past set the textual agenda (p. xx). The reinterpretation of the 1897 British Punitive Expedition now includes plays (e.g., Ola Rotimi’s Ovonramwen [produced in 1971, published in 1974]) and the 2009 rap musical track 1897 by Osaigbovo Agbonze (alias Monday Midnite). In “Art, Anonymity, Anger and Re-appropriation,” Benson Eluma (freelance writer) comments on the artificial distinction between “looted” Benin art and “contemporaneous” Benin art, or between “authentic” value and “repro” ersatz.
“Negotiations for the Return of Nok Sculptures from France to Nigeria: An Unrighteous Conclusion” by Folarin Shyllon (dean, Faculty of Law, University of Ibadan), an expert on cultural property, goes beyond his knowledge about Nok terracottas to offer details about the Benin Idia ivory hip mask requested for loan by Nigeria from Britain for the celebrated 1977 FESTAC (the Second Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture). Britain refused, and an excellent replica, equally iconic, carved by a young man from the Benin Arts Council replaced it as the logo for the festival. Dipping into subaltern studies, Sylvester Ogbechie (associate professor of art history at University of California, Santa Barbara) in “The Sword of Oba Ovonramwen: 1897 and Narratives of Domination and Resistance” tells us the effects that the collapse of the Benin kingdom had on the political economy of outlier groups, such as the Western Igbo, expressed in the telling phrase by one of the Ogbechie family: “Uwa kpu ekpu” (the world turned upside down).
“Of Desecrated History, Memories and Values in Peju Layiwola’s Recent Works,” by Akin Onipede (Department of Creative Arts at the University of Lagos), is a travail that laments the violation of a people’s cultural heritage and shows how Layiwola’s art excites the conscience to expose Western chicanery. Kwame Opoku is a polemicist on cultural affairs willing to take on the likes of anti-repatriation advocates, such as James Cuno (director of the Art Institute of Chicago). Opoku is noted for positing sharp and lucid rebuttals. In “One Counter-Agenda from Africa: Would Western Museums Return Looted Objects if Nigeria and Other African States Were Ruled by Angels?” he takes up the hoary issue of secure and suitable locations for repatriated objects; this leads quickly to observations on obscurantist African leaders, indigenous looters, and local nonchalance. He takes head on a practical consequence of repatriation: what to do with returned loot and where to chamber it?
There is a lot of petrol in these contributions, a fair share of angst and anger, retorts, and shifts in linguistic discourse from the language of the managers of art to the language of putative owners. The arguments for the repatriation of Benin objects are remarkably intelligent rather than histrionic. What remains wobbly and largely off stage is the fact that Nigeria’s museums are so unkempt and mismanaged as to not deserve that restitution.
Layiwola’s creations are meant to make a statement and the symposium papers published here are meant to highlight that. But there is a disconnect between her art and the repatriation issue. The gourds and clay busts do not have that symbolic or monumental impact. What do they evoke? Are they compelling? Layiwola’s pieces can be seen as playful or as profound, whimsical rather than channeling one’s thoughts to repatriation, and a celebration and remembrance of dynastic continuity; nostalgia for a kingdom past its glory but still intact in some ways. The gourds, each painted with the name of a king are a fun garden partition, like large chimes swaying in a rain forest breeze. Other installations are incredibly thoughtful: Chequered History III (2009), of polyester, glass, and acrylic, expresses the fragmentation of Africa as a consequence of the Berlin Conference of 1884 and of colonialism. Theatre of War (2009), terracotta and copper, documents a timeline of the Punitive Expedition and participants. Compare her installations to the Benin plaques that once graced the wall of the left staircase and confronted visitors upon entering the British Museum, not necessarily a display of imperialism though the aggregation of plaques can be surmised that way, but arguably a glorious display of the historic art of a West African forest kingdom. Maybe Layiwola’s installations harbor the same ambiguity and discursive complexity.
Of real value is the color catalogue that occupies the second half of the book. In addition to workshop photographs, the major installation pieces are described from inception and meaning to production and arrangement. Of particular importance is Layiwola’s insistence on utilizing her art as teaching aids for school children and community groups to bring about a level of cultural awareness of historical patrimony. She melds art practice and social activism without outrage or stridency.This is really where her art succeeds. While it may not garner the international attention or allure of Christo’s The Gates (2005) or Running Fence (1976), her art serves as an anthem and a beacon. Like the AIDS Memorial Quilt Project laid out on the Washington Mall in 1987 that commemorates and calls attention to those who died of AIDS, Layiwola’s art exerts an educational force in its own dominion.
Citation: Joseph Nevadomsky. Review of Layiwola, Peju, Benin1897.com: Art and the Restitution Question. H-AfrArts, H-Net Reviews. October, 2010. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30187]
Exciting find. If you are me that is. If you are me and terribly excited about the repeatedly mentioned religious posters from Kano. At Marifah.Net there are some gorgeously beautiful photographs. I’m particularly excited about the one depicting wall murals of Tijani sheikhs inside a house in Kano. I have some qualms republishing it here. I have been at this particular sheikh’s house in Kano with my friend Nura in summer 2008. I asked permission to photograph the murals but was politely asked not to take a photo. But I’m terribly excited about stumbling across it on the net. I’m amazed by the beauty of these murals. But instead, let me republish a photograph of a poster on the site which I too think is terribly fascinating. It's a poster made for sale so I’m more comfortable publishing it.
In this regard a short plea for help: Pls. I tried to contact the people behind that website but my messages via the contact page don’t seem to have gone through. If anybody has advice on how to get in touch pls. let me know. Basically, to get permission to publish the photograph of the wall murals here and to use it as an illustration in my PhD.
This aside, I should probably use this blog post as an opportunity to wish everybody ‘Barka da Azumi’ before I head straight back into proof reading and revising my thesis.