| Contemporary art from Africa is thriving. Significant work is being produced in time-based formats of video, film, and related photography. The works that fuse medium and message most effectively address shifting notions of self and identity, home and exile, and transnational movements through space and time. |
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Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts curated Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa, on display at Fowler Museum at UCLA February 22-June 14, 2009.
Contemporary art from Africa is thriving. Significant work is being produced in time-based formats of video, film, and related photography. The works that fuse medium and message most effectively address shifting notions of self and identity, home and exile, and transnational movements through space and time. The artists selected for Continental Rifts have very particular relationships to Africa, and their stories complicate notions of what it means to be African. Their works express constantly transforming identities and blurred boundaries between continents and cultures. Africa has known such dynamism for millennia through transactions across Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Oceans, but in contemporary times we feel it ever more vividly.
The work that inspired the exhibition was Africa Rifting by Georgia Papageorge, a South African whose video reimagines the Gondwanaland split commencing 135 million years ago as the tectonic shift that rendered South America from Africa. Papageorge also explores social, political, and personal rifts. Draping seemingly endless, billowing crimson banners along the Skeleton Coast of Namibia and the coastal Brazilian city of Torres, Papageorge suggests bloodlines and separations among communities in apartheid South Africa, as well as the wrenching loss of her own two-year-old daughter to cancer. A principal day of filming was September 11, 2001, adding further tragic dimensions to her work. Subsequently, Papageorge’s banners have been used in rituals of reconciliation and healing among sundered communities of South Africa.
Another work in the exhibition, Home and Away, is a dual-screen projection by Berni Searle, a highly acclaimed artist based in Cape Town whose heritage extends from Saudi Arabia and Mauritius to Germany and the UK. Searle’s work addresses continental crossings of the Mediterranean and the hardships emigrés suffer, but more generally how identities are in perpetual flux. We see the artist floating in the sea, moving in and out of the frame, as Europe and Africa are glimpsed but remain indistinguishable from one another. We hear Searle conjugate the verbs “to love,” “to fear,” and “to leave” as she grows more and more distant from the camera, enveloped by the sea.
A third installation by Yto Barrada includes selections from the photographic series Iris Tingitana and a video entitled The Botanist. Barrada was raised and lives in Tangier, where she is founding director of Morocco’s first art house cinema. Her work documents what has happened as young Moroccans have left their homeland, rarely to return, while swarms of developers transform the coast with tourist resorts. Moroccan wildflowers, and especially a native iris, are the subjects of Barrada’s photographs and video that address how ruderal plants defy exploitation by waging a quiet resistance.
Claudia Cristovao was born in Angola to Portuguese parents and has lived in Lisbon, Amsterdam, Tokyo, London, and Copenhagen, where she has studied film and communications. Two of her works are featured in the exhibition, the prize-winning Fata Morgana and its coda, Le Voyage Imaginaire. “Fata Morgana” means “mirage,” and individuals who left Africa as children present memories and imaginaries of a continent they hardly recall and to which they have not returned. Video interviews are framed by an old colonial house of Namibia that is slowly filling with sands of time and longing. Le Voyage Imaginaire traces the story of an individual whose family left behind a “treasure” of deep nostalgia.
The last artist, Alfredo Jaar, is a Chilean who works intensely on the Rwandan genocide and social changes in Angola. Jaar films difficult subjects such as colonial injustice, civil war, and homelessness; yet he feels that we have become inured to images of violence that no longer affect us. Thus, in this film from Angola he seeks to regenerate images by linking them to a powerful song entitled Muxima—“heart” and “soul.” Visual vignettes called “cantos” accompanied by versions of Muxima present rifts and realities of contemporary Angolan life, for through the heart and soul—and ultimately the eyes of compassion—we can regain our ability to see and heal the pain of others.
These artists’ lives and works deconstruct the “myth of continents,” that is, the false assumption that the physically delineated land masses of continents can be used as frameworks for classifying social and cultural phenomena. Experience spills across and beyond these lines of demarcation, rupturing and redefining the very meaning of “Africa.” Transactional realities of travel, communication, and technology call for global geographies that accommodate the complexities of contemporary experience and identity. Each work in Continental Rifts tests the boundaries of artificial continental mappings and challenges colonial models of the world through the moving image.
