The baggage of post-coloniality continues to weigh-in strongly in the discourse of contemporary African art, moreso when this discourse is coloured by the politics and economics of representation. In the 1990s, the contest that ensued in the global art space with regards to African art was one of representation and authorial spokesmanship that was engendered as a result of the seminal but hugely controversial Les Magiciens de la Terre exhibition of 1989 curated by Frenchman Jean-Hubert Martin. The blockbuster show undoubtedly reconfigured the reception of modern African art in the West. But beyond that, it helped to facilitate the emergence and acceptance of contemporary African art on large scales in major cultural institutions of the West. This, to borrow from Oguibe, set the tone for reclamation of author-ity and reversal of imposed anonymity on the native, perpetrated by ethnography that effectively bar claims to subjectivity and normativity.
The 1990s was a conflating era of definition and affirmation led by the
Diasporan intelligentsia. It was also a period of intense contestations informed
by issues of identity and representivity. Interestingly as it were, ideas of
labels and tags were fissures which considerably impacted the debate of
normativity and otherness, two constructs that framed the discourse of African
contemporaniety at that point. While this spawned palpable interests in the
Diaspora, its import was only beginning to trickle into continental Africa.
Exhibition venues in the West became battlegrounds, and exhibitions like Africa
Explores: 20th Century African Art (1991), Seven Stories About Modern Art in
Africa (1995), In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (1996), etc
were forums where discursive issues were debated extensively. It is important to
also iterate that these battles chiefly championed by the influential Diasporan
intellectual community were for a change of baton steeped in the political
economy of representation.
As contemporary African art exhibitions proliferated in the West in the 1990s
controlled by Western institutions and African-born metropolitan intelligentsia,
alternative platforms were also constituted in the continent. This thus gave
rise to mega events in the continent such as the first and second Johannesburg
biennales (South Africa) in the middle 90s, the Dak’Art Biennale (Senegal), the
Cairo Biennale (Egypt), East African Biennale (Tanzania) and, the Pan-African
Circle of Artists mediated Afrika Heritage biennale in Nigeria, among others. If
we agree with Barthes that enunciation is code of legislation like Oguibe
suggests, “It becomes clear that its essence is to define the rules of
interaction and interrelation between people, to set the limits of intervention
and dominatory incursion, of encroachment upon the sites of our individuality
and subjectivity, to present ourselves and establish our authority over not only
our creativity, but most importantly, over ourselves too.”1 This is what these
platforms were contrived for, but which forms the core of Afrika Heritage’s
agenda in the propagation of contemporary art in Africa.
From the first biennale in 1995, Afrika Heritage has illuminated the
well-rehearsed African-American maxim, “For US, by US (FUBU),” popularised by
the New York based clothing company FUBU. By inserting itself as an agency of
pan-African activism, PACA through Afrika Heritage redefines the rules of
engagement in/for a continent whose intelligentsia remain haunted by what Achebe
describes as the psychology of the dispossessed. The point one makes is that the
sensibility that is brought to most contrived biennales in the continent as
Nancy Hynes notes, “is one that is internationalist and global, conceived within
a privileged, cosmopolitan diaspora experience.”2 While one is quick to add that
there is nothing wrong in adopting strategies that are internationalist and
global, the question that arises is the efficacy of such strategies in
ameliorating the occlusion of the greater percentage of artistic production -
informed by reality and experience - from inside the continent? Afrika Heritage,
therefore, mediates the missing gaps by engaging and interrogating themes,
social and otherwise, that find much relevance in the living reality of a
continent worsted by its own constructed history.
In all its exhibitions, PACA has assumed the position of advocacy in ensuring
that a home-grown vibrancy is maintained in the continent in spite of the
drawbacks and the dehumanising socio-political and economic conditions that
plague the creative terrain in Africa. In 2000, the biennale was themed around
what George Agbo aptly calls “socio-political psychology of existential
conflicts and contradictions.”3 Thus Crossroads: Africa in the Twilight
confronted ideological issues of Otherness and Otherising, issues that informed
post-colonial debates at the twilight of the last century. Changing Attitudes in
2002 was a grand narrative that engaged socio-political and economic issues
affecting the continent. Afrika Heritage 2004 comprised of five exhibitionary
platforms namely, The Grand Exhibition, The PACA Peace Exhibit, The Nude Figure
Never Sleeps, Altars of Terror, and Tayo Adenaike: A Foremost African
Watercolourist. Ikwuemesi describes the exhibition as a river with many
tributaries that seeks to interrogate “peace from various complimentary
standpoints, the evolution of the nude in African art, the notions of leadership
in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, and the engagement of wide-ranging aspects
of contemporary reality in Africa.”4
The 6th edition of Afrika Heritage comes at a time when there is a call for a
Nigerian biennale. Biennales as Hynes points out “are large, extravagant
events…(where national governments) parade economic prosperity and enter luxury
art markets.”5 Although PACA is domiciled in Nigeria and has contributed
significantly to the development of an art ecology in Nigeria, it is however
important to reiterate that Afrika Heritage never set out to be a Nigerian art
biennale but rather a biennale that infuses an Africanity, a core essence
lacking in most biennales contrived in the continent. At the same time, it is
heartening to note that despite the attendant economic emasculation of the
creative terrain in Nigeria, nay Africa, the Pan-African Circle of Artists has
successfully organised its biennales with threadbare funds raised internally by
members, patrons and friends. That PACA has come this far is a measure of the
resilience, dedication to duty and perseverance of the human spirit; rare
instances of nobility exhibited by members and patrons.