I have recently been invited in the conference Other Views: Art History in (South) Africa & the Global South. Organised by SAVAH under the aegis of CIHA, the event is to take place at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 12 – 15 January 2011.
I have been invited to contribute to the panel entitled “Africa, Africanness, and their representation in the contemporary mega-exhibition”. Below is an abstract of the paper I will be presenting:
From Hommages to Magiciens: Finding somewhere for Africa at the Pompidou Centre and beyond
“Somewhere in Africa, I was told, when two
persons meet they ask each other: How is
your cow…and how is your field?…and how
is your oldest son…and how is your house…
and so on, reviewing in this way all their
possessions until one of them says:
POIPOI
to which the other answers:
POIPOI
Then they break off, or at times start over again”
- Robert Filliou
This paper offers a case study of the exhibition La Fondation Poïpoï présente: Hommage aux Dogons et aux Rimbauds, Pompidou Centre, Paris, 1978. This show sought to explore the artistic links between Paris and Bandiagara via an installation of The Poïpoïdrome alongside cultural objects and ethnographic material from Mali’s Dogon people.
The significance of Hommages in the lineage of exhibitions considering artistic practices within a global context has thus far been overlooked. It is the purpose of this paper to uncover the specific ethnographic, utopian and intercultural fictions that guided the exhibition in it’s attempts to communicate and represent international art practices and transnational exchange in the burgeoning years of post colonialism.
As a precursor to the much-documented and debated Magiciens de la Terre of 1989, Hommages can be said to have mobilised the Pompidou’s thinking around representing non-western cultures within its decidedly western art context. It’s handling of this predicament was problematic at the time and remains so today. It can be said that the project enacted what Édouard Glissant understands as Rimbaud’s errantry, a mentality that conceives of identity and dialogue in terms of the fixed dichotomies of coloniser and colonised, native and foreigner, primitive and civilized etc. The paper will critically address how Africa as the West’s “cultural other” is exoticised and represented as a site of alterity and esotericism in both Hommages and Magiciens.
The paper will end by assessing the legacy of these precedents and their relevance to contemporary biennials and large-scale exhibitions, ultimately speculating on the different spaces Africa and Africanness can come to occupy today and tomorrow.
