Subjective Perspectives in Search of Global Subjects: Digital Africa

Subjective Perspectives in Search of Global Subjects: Digital Africa – The Electronic Arts Intermix and the African Film Festival

Subjective Perspectives in Search of Global Subjects: Digital Africa

The Electronic Arts Intermix and the African Film Festival

Curated by
Mahen Bonetti and Prerana Reddy of the African Film Festival, the Digital
Africa exibition at Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI) is an exhibition of five media works by contemporary African artists. Living and
working between Africa, Europe and North America, the artists speak to the 1hybridization of culture and identity, and work with an international
vocabulary of contemporary media art practice: conceptual performance,
multimedia and projection installation, single-channel video, and interactive Web art. Often, they use their own bodies or gestures to propel inquiries into social and cultural systems.

Mawuli Afatsiawo, Man in a Box, 2000, 5 minutes, color, sound. Single-channel Video.

Ingrid Mwangi (Kenya / Germany), for instance,
investigates personal identity in the context of the foreign or the “exotic”;
and, in the projection installation Within a shadow lies what will fall
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>(2003)
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, Mwangi’s symbolic ritual of transformation
— cutting off her dreadlocks — initiates a charged dialogue of cultural
exchange with her white European partner, Robert Hutter. Ghanaian artist Mawuli
Afatsiawo, on the other hand, charts personal memory across a landscape of
history and heritage, as in Man In A Box (2000), or in On a Journey…
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> (2001), a haunting meditation on
loss and displacement. His poetic works often integrate images of everyday life
in Ghana with ritual and performance.

The curators mean to explore how electronic technologies
both shape and reflect cultural perceptions. Pinned between Nigeria and the
United States, Mendi and Keith Obadike’s
interdisciplinary art practice includes video and sound art, music CDs and
text-based Internet projects, and their subjects have ranged from sex toys to
the commodification of race. In the current exhibition, The Pink of
Stealth (2003) is
an interactive Web and DVD project where the vernacular of foxhunting and the
color pink become springboards for a multi-textual investigation of language, race, gender,
color and class, encouraging alternate readings and associative meanings. Theo
Eshetu (Ethiopia/Italy) incorporates themes and imagery from anthropology, art
history, scientific research, and religious iconography, and his works are often
informed by the relationship between African and European cultures. In Eshetu’s
trompe l’oeil multi-media
installation Brave New World (2000), the viewer plunges through a looking glass into an
illusory space, where self-reflection meets cross-cultural media spectacle. A
mirrored box, which holds a video monitor, merges myriad images of the viewer
and footage from three continents and cultures, re-casting the subjective into
a global context.

Ritual and
storytelling, central to African art and cinema, are also woven throughout
these works, translated and transformed into the digital realm. Thus, the
dizzying visions of contemporary African diasporic reality in Digital Africa
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> find a fresh, dynamic expression
and continue to redefine their borders.