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Contemporary African art is commonly understood as art made by artists in Africa and the African diaspora in the post-independence era. However, there are about as many understandings of contemporary African art as there are curators, scholars and artists working in that field. All three terms of this “wide-reaching noncategory [sic]” are problematic in themselves: What exactly is ‘contemporary’, what makes art ‘African’, and when are we talking about art and not any other kind of creative expression? Western scholars and curators have made numerous attempts at defining contemporary African art in the 1990s and early 2000s and proposed a range of categories and genres. They triggered heated debates and controversies especially on the foundations of postcolonial critique. Recent trends indicate a far more relaxed engagement with definitions and identity ascriptions. The global presence and entanglement of Africa and its contemporary artists have become a widely acknowledged fact that still requires and provokes critical reflection but finds itself beyond the pressure of self-justification.

Scope
Although African art has always been contemporary to its producers, the term ‘contemporary African art’ implies a particular kind of art that has conquered, or, as some would say, has been absorbed by the international art world and art market since the 1980s. It is in that decade when Europe and the US became aware of art made in Africa by individual artists, thus breaking with the colonial tradition of assuming collective ‘ethnic’ origins of so-called ‘tribal art’ as found in most ethnographic collections. The exhibition Magiciens de la terre by Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989 is widely considered (but also challenged as) a key exhibition in this very recent history of international reception of African and other non-western art. However, this reception, too, has its roots in an exotizing and mystifying view on African culture from a dominant western position, as Rasheed Araeen argued in his response to Magiciens de la terre.

Therefore, although this exhibition and many that followed had a strong influence in creating a kind of a common understanding of what constitutes contemporary African art, it is true that it has been and still is subject to discussions and controversies. Almost every exhibition following Magiciens de la terre offered a taxonomy or system of categorization that helped to reflect the very notion of contemporary African art, but they failed to recognize the postcolonial need of giving up the Eurocentric epistemology.

Contemporary African art is believed to feature particularities typical to African aesthetics while at the same time it shares properties with other international contemporary arts. Therefore, it is both, shaped by and feeding into the globalizing art worlds and art markets, like any other contemporary arts. At the same time, there are a lot of contemporary art practices and forms in African regions and cities that are almost exclusively locally known. While meeting all three requirements of being contemporary, art, and African, they fail to fit into a certain type of art production that has been spreading on the international art market in the last 30 years.

Exhibitions variously showed work by artists based in Africa; by artists using aesthetics typical to African traditions; by African artists living in the West but including aesthetics and topics related to their “roots” ; traditional artworks related to customary practices such as rituals; and urban African art that reflects the modern experience of cultural pluralism and hybridity. Modernity as a colonial and postcolonial experience appears as an intrinsic and significant attribute in most conceptions of contemporary African art. Scholars and curators therefore have proposed a wide range of taxonomies that tried firstly to define what is African about this art, and secondly, the range of genres it covers. Diverse attempts to define particular genres of contemporary African art however mirrored the fascination of art scholars and curators for the appropriation of cultural elements assumed ‘Western’ into ‘African’ modes of expression and traditions. One example is Marshall W. Mount who proposed four categories: first, “survivals of traditional styles” which show continuities in traditional working material and methods such as bronze casting or wood carving; secondly, art inspired by Christian missions; thirdly souvenir art in the sense of tourist or airport art as defined later by Jules-Rossette ; and finally, an emerging art requiring “techniques that were unknown or rare in traditional African art”. Valentin Y. Mudimbe in turn proposes to think of three currents rather than categories, namely a “tradition-inspired” one, a “modernist” trend, and “a popular art” whereby Mount’s categories would be situated somewhere “between the tradition-inspired and the modernist trend”. Similar to other categorizations, this proposal considers the education of the artists as well as the envisaged clientele/patrons as important factors for the respective “currents”. In the exhibition catalogue of Africa Explores (1991), curator Susan Vogel distinguished between “traditional art”, “new functional art”, “urban art”, “international art”, and “extinct art”. Rejecting these categories, collector André Magnin proposed to group similar works into sections named “territory”, “frontier” and “world” in his survey book Contemporary African Art, thus placing them into “imaginary maps”. However, this approach was also criticized by Dele Jegede with convincing arguments against its ethnocentric perspective. Amongst other, he pointed to the hubris of attempts to talk about art of a whole continent, but also to the common reflex to exclude Northern Africa in such considerations and to follow a global rather than “particularistic focus on the study of the art of the continent” that would provide more specific and deeper bodies of knowledge. In the 1990 exhibition Contemporary African Artists: Changing Tradition, the Studio Museum in Harlem tried to take the perspective of the presented artists and distinguished between African artists who refuse outside influences; African artists who adopt modes of Western art; and African artists who fuse both strategies.

A commonality to all these categorizations is their reliance on dichotomies between art and craft, Europe and Africa, urban and rural, and traditional and contemporary. These dichotomies tend to consider mutual influences in African and European art as an exception rather than the norm. Even more, they fail to think of African art independent from Europe as its counterpart or ‘influence’, resulting in a frequent reproach of African artists ‘copycatting’ or ‘mimicking’ European achievements of modernism. Such Eurocentric attitudes have been revealingly criticized by theorists like Olu Oguibe, Rasheed Araeen , Nkiru Nzegwu , Okwui Enwezor or Salah Hassan. This problem is not easy to solve, and in some cases it is tackled by simply subverting any attempt of categorization. Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, directed by Clémentine Deliss and curated by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Salah Hassan, David Koloane, Wanjiku Nyachae and El Hadji Sy (London 1995) is a case in point. Rather than grafting binary taxonomies, it narrated seven modern art histories in different parts of Africa by invited curators and artists who were familiar with these recent histories and their respective art scenes. The exhibition proved to offer a highly complex, historically informed and well-researched presentation. Another example for subverting binary taxonomies is the book Contemporary African Art after 1980 by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu. Rather than putting contemporary African art in relation to Western traditions, they contrast it with modern African art, in that it defies linear grand narratives of modernism and is radically postcolonial. “[F]irst, within categories of time, it is neither belated nor does it exist out of time; second, because it is post-historical, it did not emerge out of a succession of historical styles; third, because it is critical of colonial valorization of an authentic past, it is postcolonial; and fourth, in relation to its postcoloniality, it seeks, according to Hans Belting’s thesis, to be post-ethnic […]. Neither being out of time nor belated, contemporary African art strategically inhabits a third epistemological space by being in time”. As they add, this being “fundamentally of its time” counts for all contemporary art, not only the African. In their book, Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu discuss contemporary African art by its approaches and guiding topics rather than trying to define categories on the basis of styles, markets or traditions. Their chapters therefore are designated as “Between postcolonial utopia and postcolonial realism”, “Networks of practice” in the globalized field of cultural production, “Politics, culture and critique”, “Archive, document, memory”, “Abstraction, figuration and subjectivity” and “The body politic: difference, gender, sexuality”. Doing so, they locate contemporary African art within a historical perspective, something that had largely missed in previous discussions.

Dominant Narratives of Contemporary Artican Art
Nkiru Nzegwu states that “[i]n Africa art historiography, ‘contemporary art’ is a technical term that logically functions both as a chronological and theoretical marker. In a similar way but for different reasons, it parallels Europe’s choice of the word ‘modern’ to reference and characterize its African-inspired works produced in the first half of the twentieth century. As used by Africans, ‘contemporary art’ distinguishes a body of works created since the beginning of the twentieth-century with imported materials.” Other authors maintain the distinction between African modernism as rooted in the 1920s and 1930s and contemporary African art as it evolved since the middle of the 20th century. According to Sidney L. Kasfir, the beginnings of contemporary African art can be traced back to art workshop initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s. They were usually established by European or American missionaries and anthropologists and introduced to local artists both, a modern Western understanding of art as non-functional, and European traditions of technique like oil painting on canvas. Among the most famous workshops of this kind were the Oshogbo school founded and conducted by Ulli and Georgina Beier in Nigeria, the Salisbury Workshop School of Frank McEwen in then Rhodesia, the Lubumbashi School founded by Pierre Romain-Desfossés in the Congo of the 1940s, the Polly Street Art Centre in Johannesburg founded in the 1950s, or the Margaret Trowell School of Fine Arts founded in the early 1940s in Kampala. Although each of these schools had their own profile and program, they share some commonalities such as European teachers and an art education that involved ‘Western’ techniques, art history and education while promoting an often romanticized and primitivizing idea of an authentic ‘African expression’ and aesthetics. Art patrons like Ruth Schaffner in Nairobi, Cecil Skotnes in Johannesburg or Pancho Guedes in Moçambique established important transcontinental links that opened up the art market for these artists while the artists and intellectuals themselves built on these foundations for a more autonomous, national and Africanist art program before, but even more so after independence.

Following this established narrative, contemporary African art sources from both, African cosmologies, philosophies and iconographies, and European modes of painterly expression, art genres and technologies. Therefore, contemporary African art has always been subject to hybridity and a ‘syncretism’ of different aesthetic traditions. This is also true for so-called classic African art that only was considered ‘art' once it was incorporated into Western museums, but for a long time, there was an expectation in Western audiences that the latter be “authentic” whereas hybridity is understood as part and parcel of contemporary African art.

The fact that African art incorporates aesthetics, media or techniques from other regions or cultures has however also been deplored as disruptive and destructive for African art. However, such claims for authenticity and unchanging art traditions are imbued with an outdated idea of Africa as a ‘primordial’ place in which the history of humankind is preserved or a fictional ethnographic present maintained. In reality, there has never been a culture that has not changed over time, and the term ‘tradition’ itself indicates a process rather than stagnation.

Popular and 'High' Art
In the introduction of her classic Contemporary African Art, Sidney L. Kasfir criticizes the judgement that Africa only “digests” the West and instead proposes to think of it having built through “a process of ‘bricolage’ upon the already existing structures and scenarios on which the older, precolonial and colonial genres of African art were made”. In fact, there are art forms today that source from a cultural history tracing back earlier than colonization, such as masks, ritual objects, weapons, tools, ornaments, pottery, textiles or architecture. Kasfir calls them – in inverted commas – “contemporary traditional art”. Therefore, contrary to what is understood in everyday parlance of contemporary African art – urban based, globally circulating, using modern media and aesthetics – she emphasizes that also artists working in more local or continent-specific idioms and serving a local clientele, should be included in the discourse of the contemporary (Kasfir 1999; see also Firstenberg 2003). Similarly, Gitti Salami argues against an exclusion of kinship-based communal art forms (a term she prefers to terms like ‘contemporary traditional’ or ‘neo-traditional’ because it is less fraught with primitivist art historiography) from the discourse of contemporary African art (Salami 2009). These genres are marked by change and innovation as are those in the established art world, and they do happen in “our time” but are excluded from the international ‘high art’ world. These voices are important because they run counter to current international trends of perhaps too easily absorbing as ‘contemporary African art’ what fits into Western epistemologies and internationally established market norms. African art is often produced in series and in workshops, especially in the case of tourist, souvenir or popular art. Its characteristic is not necessarily singularity but seriality, especially in the case of popular art forms. It comes therefore close to what in Western culture is understood as commodity or craft. These objects only become an artwork in the Western sense once they enter Western elite collections such as private collections, art galleries, or museums (Kasfir 1999: 22) and a western-based art discourse. A typical example is flour-sack painters in Congo or sign painters in Ghana who make sign paintings for local business. Chéri Samba for instance started as a sign painter before becoming known in Congo and abroad for his originality, political satire and mastery of the brush. Already before Magnin included his work in his exhibition Magiciens de la terre, his paintings received artwork status and now are traded at high prices in the international art market. African studio photography experienced a similar fate. Portrait photography by famous studio photographers like Seydou Keïta or Malik Sidibé were first known locally in the cities where they worked. They were very successful photographers and popular amongst their clients for outstanding portrait photographs. It is only with their inclusion in the exhibition In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (co-curated by Okwui Enwezor, Octavio Zaya, Clare Bell and Danielle Tiklin at the Guggenheim New York in 1996; see Bell et al. 1996) that their work became actual icons of African art and were absorbed by the international art market. They stood out by their fusion of the ‘modern’ technology of photography with elements typical to African aesthetics such as the use of vividly patterned fabric for backdrops and the garb of their African sitters. These studio photographs enjoy a particular popularity in the international contemporary art world for several reasons. One of them is certainly the empowered representation of (modern) Africans by Africans as opposed to the long dominating representation of Africans by explorers and ethnographers with their unequal power relations (Enwezor 2006; see also Peffer & Cameron 2013). The archival character of photography, however, is also of utmost importance in contemporary African art since the 1980s. By re-considering such archives, contemporary artists question colonial grand narratives and discover local commercial and domestic archives as a source for alternative histories. However, different to the advocates of inclusion of African popular art into the canon of contemporary African art, Nkiru Nzegwu criticizes this attitude as an “exotizing gaze of anthropology” and asks why popular African art should be included in the narrative of contemporary African art while popular culture in the West is still not considered as art in the contemporary art world (Nzegwu 1998: 8). In South Africa, an additional category was proposed in the 1980s: Transitional art. It was used for objects that were neither ‘traditional’ nor ‘modern’ and found their way into museum collections. The Tributaries exhibition in Johannesburg, curated in 1985 by Ricky Burnett, showed works by Noria Mabasa, Phutuma Seoka and Jackson Hlungwane under this label. These artists mostly have a rural background, no formal art education, and tap into local art traditions. Kasfir also considers Kane Kwei (Ghana) and Sunday Jack Akpan (Nigeria) as “transitional” because they fused in an unprecedented way local traditions with visual, aesthetic, and technical innovations. As with most terms used in the attempt to categorize African art, also the term “transitional” is highly debatable. It implies a teleological transition from ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’, thereby ignoring the fact that all art histories have always been “transitional” and changing over time. Many of these “transitional” artists were of particular interest to the Euro-American reception in the 1980s and 1990s. ‘African’ then was often associated with ‘untrained’ or ‘self-taught’, which usually implied that the artists had not attended formal art education. However, this expectation is controversial for two major reasons: It denied African talent and skill an actual history of art training beyond the Western academy. Certainly, the artists had not attended formal art academies as known from Paris, London or Munich, but they mostly had learned and trained for several years in the workshop of a local master and often became masters themselves, training the next generation of artists. Secondly, the search for ‘self-taught’ artists mirrored the notion of African art as ‘untouched’ by Western education and aesthetics, as something authentic that could only be preserved by individuals that ideally have not been in touch with Western education systems. This was, of course, an illusion. While these popular art forms were omnipresent in the exhibitions of the 1980s and 1990s in the West, recent key exhibitions privilege art that is informed by postcolonial critique. Artists typically acquire this theoretical foundation through academic education.

Modernism, Postcolonial Modernism and Contemporary Art
Largely in line with Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu (2009), Ugochukwu Smooth Nzewi (2013) distinguishes two interrelated periods of postcolonial art, namely postcolonial modernism, situated in the 1960s and 1970s and contemporary art since the 1980s (Nzewi 2013). The 1960s were the watershed moment of independence for many African nations and marked the beginning of post-colonial modernism which consciously attempted to re-activate historical, pre-colonial ‘roots’ - different to European modernism that rather sought to break with the past. With independence, art became a means of nation-building, especially in Senegal where the poet president Leopold Senghor famously invested a remarkable share of national budget into the arts. The idea was to decolonialize (Kasfir 1999a: 166) and nationalize Senegalese art by establishing art universities that followed European traditions on the one hand but put particular emphasis on local art and craft traditions as well as Pan-African, Africanité and Négritude concepts (Nzewi 2013). Similar movements were inspired by anti-colonial intellectual groupings or clubs in Nigeria such as the Mbari Mbayo Club in Ibadan and Oshogbo, or the Zaria Arts Society in which artists had explored the possibilities of reconnecting to African art traditions for the creation of a postcolonial African aesthetics. Such art clubs and art circles, often associated to African art universities like Nsukka, were and still are crucial in the critical assessment of contemporary art and its socio-political role in the postcolony. Artists like El Anatsui, Bruce Onobrakpeya or David Koloane have been pivotal in the establishment and leadership of such intellectual circles and in teaching on the continent and beyond. But also artist residencies and workshops with artists from different parts of the continent like the international Triangle Workshops crucially contributed to artistic and curatorial networking within Africa and beyond. The late 1980s then marked a juncture toward contemporary art characterized by a rapid internationalization and globalization of African art discourse and of African art in the international art market. It was sparked by a “catastrophic and traumatic” economic crisis in the context of the Structural Adjustment Programs, a decline of state support in the arts, and increasing political and social tensions which also were the subject of critical work by many artists and art movements at that time (Enwezor & Okeke-Agulu 2009: 19). The introduction of neo-liberal economies and the collapse of the Soviet Union also facilitated the entry of African art and artists into the international art world and global art markets. This globalization was fertile ground for a postcolonial critique of Eurocentric art historiography and hegemonic art economies and value systems by recurring to concepts and philosophies of the Négritude and Pan-African movements of the 1960s (Nzewi 2013: 225). What distinguishes contemporary African artists today from their modernist predecessors however is a “common commitment to addressing contemporary realities from the artists’ subjective positions” rather than within a nation building ideology, and they articulate “narratives that engage a broader audience at both local and global levels” (Nzewi 2013: 230). This post-1980 era of globalization and migration also produced a new generation of curators, artists and art professors in and beyond Africa who commute between Africa, Europe, the US, the Middle East, and South America. They all shape the current visibility and critical discourse of contemporary African art internationally. At the same time, an Afrocentric renaissance is taking place in which leading artists and intellectuals emphasize the importance of art taking place on the continent itself rather than abroad.

African Renaissance and Global Entanglement
For many African nations, rewriting their art histories became part of the postcolonial project. However, this endeavor often stands in an ambivalent position to the international art world. They face the challenge to reclaim the African history while participating in contemporary global trends. As much as globalization offers the opportunity to make African aesthetics acknowledged internationally, because of its neo-liberal or ‘Westernizing’ drive it also challenges the very notion of an inherently African identity. Sidney L. Kasfir summarizes this double-bind of contemporary African art as follows: “One can say that African artists are not so much fighting for the freedom to be 'African' (whatever that may mean) but to be fully accepted as artists, though this can only be articulated through their Africanness, since that is the site of their categorical exclusion from a global art discourse in the first place” (Kasfir 1999: 213; see also Nzegwu 1998: 9-12, and Nicodemus 1995). Such identity issues were particularly prevalent in the 1990s, and although they have somewhat given way to a more international and diasporic understanding of contemporary African art, they continue to be pertinent. ‘African art’ used to be a colonial designation; now it tends to claim postcolonial and counter-hegemonic relevance. Even more, with the collapse of the conceptual binaries of ‘African’ and ‘Western’, the role of African artists – diasporic or not ─ in the grand narrative of art history must be rehabilitated (Farrell 2003; Tawadros & Campbell 2003). Okwui Enwezor's and Octavio Zaya's essay Moving In: Eight Contemporary African Artists published in Flash Art (1996) as well as the second Johannesburg Biennale Trade Routes: History and Geography in 1997 or later Simon Njami’s exhibition Africa Remix (2004) represent crucial steps in this direction by including diaspora artists in the umbrella term of ‘contemporary African art’. They opened up the localized idea of Africa towards its connections, transformations, migrations and diasporas in the world. Following the foundation of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art in 1994, more and more journals, blogs and internet platforms are dedicated to art and artists in the diaspora (see Enwezor 1994). A new generation of curators and art critics are introducing new perspectives on African art. They tend to approach African art beyond the “identity question” (Koloane 1987) and seek other ways to highlight but also embed African aesthetics and topics into an international and global context. In the spirit of Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, African identity is not understood as “an absolute, but a malleable term. It refers to both cultural and geographic situations, and to modes of subjectivization, dimensions of identification, and ethical strategies” (Enwezor & Okeke-Agulu 2009: 11), accommodating “slippages, incompleteness, eccentricities, idiosyncracies, and ambivalences”. They conceive of it not in “ethnocentric, national, regional, or even continental terms alone, but as a network of positions, affiliations, strategies, and philosophies that represent the multiplicity of cultural traditions and archives available to and exploited consistently by the artists to shape their artistic positions in a way that reflects the diffuse repertoire of artistic forms and concepts which we designate as contemporary African art. […] It is about Africa in the world today.” (Enwezor & Okeke-Agulu 2009: 11) Accordingly, innovative art exhibitions featuring African artists increasingly avoid the label of ‘African art’ and either opt for monographic shows or seek shared artistic topics or practices rather than national or continental identities. They aim at allowing for explorations into political, economic and social issues of global concern rather than offering easy answers to questions of national, cultural or continental identity. As Lauri Firstenberg writes in 2003, “[g]esturing toward the dismantling of the dominant approach, a younger generation of scholars has begun to map a critical dialogue among contemporary practitioners living and working in the African, European, and American metropoles. The demonstration of a network of formal and conceptual exchanges serves to create context rather than categories, historicizing individual practices in terms of a dynamic series of mobile experiences and dialogues based on a logic of migratory diasporic travel and global or rather transnational exchange.” (Firstenberg 2003: 37-38) Directed by Okwui Enwezor in 2001-2002 in cooperation with six co-curators, Documenta11 was groundbreaking in this regard. In many ways, the exhibition he presented undermined ideas of the ‘African’ curator showing ‘African’ art and instead significantly broadened the horizon of its audiences to all world regions within a contemporary and globally connected present. However, many large-scale shows like Simon Njami’s The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists (shown at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, the Savannah College of Art and Design, and the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington in 2014 and 2015) continue to include ‘Africa’ at least in their subtitles in order to offer perspectives that challenge Eurocentric concepts. Concurrently, a growing number of skilled curators, art critics and art promoters who pride their African descent and affiliation while capitalizing on their mobility and diasporic experience re-emphasize the importance of being active and promoting contemporary African art on the continent (Kouoh 2013). This “continentalism” (Enwezor & Okeke-Agulu 2009: 24) is the motor behind establishing art events on the continent and de-centering established cultural metropolises. It returns the focus to the former periphery by attracting art audiences from all over the world to major events like the Dak’Art Biennale or Rencontres Africaines de la photographie in Bamako, to name just two. In some cases this reflects also a counter-movement against a renewed marginalization of African art and its aesthetic, philosophical and historical specificities on the continent in favor of global forces that more easily embrace diasporic aesthetics (see Wemega-Kwawu 2011). Similarly, African art history scholars like Sylvester Ogbechie have been reminding their African and international colleagues to continue doing research on the continent and thus work with a very different heritage, body of knowledge and frame of reference than is the case with diasporic art (Ogbechie 2010).