While the past several years have seen major efforts to create a broader global awareness surrounding contemporary art produced in Africa, and by African-born artists living in the Diaspora, many of these events have been riddled with controversy and tirelessly chewed out in numerous debates. Key players in such attempts include curators Simon Njami and Fernando Alvim, who organised the highly contentious African Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale titled Check-list – Pop Luanda. Aside from the attested allegations of corruption towards Sindika Dokolo – the young collector whose works formed the majority of the exhibition – it transpired that the organisers were assigned an extremely limited amount of both time and money to put the highly exigent exhibition together. The results were public displays of discontent by Njami and Alvim and a much-anticipated event that was drowning in a sea of ongoing discord.

According to British writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun, Njami and Alvim’s complaints ‘reveal the painfully restricted space practitioners are still obliged to inhabit in order to create platforms through which the complexities of African contemporaneity become visible, audible and speakable.’ Africa is a continent that is inconceivably diverse; that many outsiders understand merely as being riddled with war, destitution and disease; that according to UN estimates should have a population of over 1 billion people by now, and that has also been the birthplace of some of the most compelling and singular artworks being displayed at recent contemporary art events.

While the 2009 Venice Biennale transpired sans another African Pavillion, some of the most significant pieces displayed there, as far as a number of visitors and critics were concerned, were the multifarious installations of Cameroonian Pascale Marthine Tayou, Georges Adéagbo from Benin and South African Moshekwa Langa. As Senegalese curator and writer N’gone Fall asserts in her 2002 essay ‘Compromise and conflict on the international art scene: The shift of African art from margins to the centre’, the inclusion of African artists in events such as the Venice Biennale and documenta and the resulting interest that their works generate sends out a ‘message [that] is clear: solutions for the future may be elsewhere and minorities, all the minorities, are a voice in the world’.

Fall continues by suggesting, however, ‘if we cannot move to the centre, then let’s bring the centre to us. Kwangju, Havana, Johannesburg, Dakar, Teheran, these young biennials are born out of political wills.’ Yet, despite the restrictions, as described by Eshun, on displaying African contemporary art internationally, there appear to be even further barriers that exist locally. In an interview with Bettina Malcomess on the 2007 African Pavilion in Venice, Fall was less optimistic: ‘One of the problems is that there is no local strategy. There is no sense of African art history and art appreciation. After 15 years of having a Biennale in Dakar I am still called “the lady involved in the entertainment business”. In Dakar we have been waiting for the rebuilding of our public museum for 20 years.’

This lack of ‘local strategy’ is something similarly bemoaned by Artlogic Director Ross Douglas, who explains that connecting with artists and curators on the African continent is more difficult than it seems, saying ‘most African artists go live in Europe, particularly if they’re any good… Once they’re in Europe, they’re no longer linked to Africa, they’re no longer in that circuit, they’re now in a European art circuit. So the idea of bringing work from the continent is incredibly difficult. It’s expensive. There’s not much there, there’s no gallery system that you can tap into.’

Read more in the March 2010 issue of CLASSICFEEL magazine