Distant Relatives/Relative Distancebrings together recent prints by Julie Mehretu, a video projection by Wangechi Mutu, paintings by Odili Donald Odita and Owusu-Ankomah, and installations by Senam Okudzeto and Barthélémy Toguo. These artists are ‘citizens of the world’, or ‘Afropolitans’, to use the term coined by Taiye Tuakli-Wosornu in an essay first published in The LIP and reprinted in this catalogue. As she writes, “Like so many African young people working and living in cities around the globe, they belong to no single geography, but feel at home in many.”

At present, many South African artists are enjoying an international prominence that was inconceivable a decade ago and have also become ‘citizens of the world’. Artists who live in South Africa – such as William Kentridge, David Goldblatt and Berni Searle – regularly show in the leading museums and biennales of the world, and artists who live in Europe – including Marlene Dumas, Robin Rhode, Candice Breitz, Kendell Geers and Moshekwa Langa – are similarly acclaimed. In the Venice Biennale of 2005, five South African artists were included in the official curated shows, making it the country with the fourth largest number of artists.

Although South African artists share many concerns with their African counterparts, there has been surprisingly little exchange between these ‘distant relatives’ at a high profile or sustained level on the continent,(2) and specifically in South Africa.

In the 1990s, with the advent of democracy in South Africa and the ending of the cultural boycott, a new, celebratory freedom lessened the country’s isolation from the continent and the rest of the world. In the realm of visual arts, the first Johannesburg Biennale in 1995 invited participation through national exhibitions including representation from 18 other African countries. The second Johannesburg biennale, curated by Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor in 1997, emphasised global connections through its theme of Trade Routes: History and Geography. The international roster included many prominent African artists (among them Distant Relatives’ Wangechi Mutu and Odili Donald Odita). This exhibition ended controversially, with the city withdrawing its support, and there were no further biennales. In retrospect, it was a triumphant event in the history of contemporary South African art but the momentum it generated soon dissipated.

The exhibitions schedules of public galleries in post-biennale South Africa only sporadically included contemporary African art.(3) The reasons for this absence could arguably be ascribed to South Africa’s preoccupation with ongoing debates about the politics of transformation and representation. The demographics of South African galleries and their collections continue to be debated, and the lack of significant state funding has hampered transformation in institutions. The documentary film, The Luggage is Still Labeled: Blackness in South African art (directed by Julie McGee and Vuyile Voyiya, 2003), highlighted the strong dissatisfaction with the pace of transformation in the South African art world, and its airing was accompanied by vigorous and vocal arguments. Some years earlier, the contentious issue of representation was brought to the fore by Enwezor during his tenure as the artistic director of the second Johannesburg biennale when he criticised some South African artists for their representation of the black body. A plethora of responses, encapsulated in Grey Areas,(4) a collection of essays published in 1999, indicated that he had touched on a delicate and unresolved situation which continues to be contested. These issues and their broader ramifications have been the focus of South African artists, critics and curators, with the side effect of a continued inwardness and parochialism.(5)

Seemingly times are changing. Almost 10 years after the second Johannesburg Biennale, there is, at an institutional level, once again a consciousness of the relevance of contemporary African art to South Africa. The first manifestation of CAPE, founded and funded by South Africans, and billing itself as “the first largescale exhibition of African contemporary art held in South Africa”, is scheduled to open in September 2006. Africa Remix, curated by Simon Njami, which has been seen in Düsseldorf, London, Paris and Tokyo, and moves to Stockholm later this year, concludes at Johannesburg Art Gallery early in 2007, marking the first occasion a major international exhibition of contemporary African art has travelled to the continent.

Artists from across the world gravitate towards Paris, London, New York, Berlin and other urban centres for the educational opportunities and proximity to other artists, museums, galleries and collectors that they offer. However, this is more pronounced in the case of Africa because of the extreme paucity of support structures for contemporary art practice, particularly in a white cube context, on the continent north of South Africa. Consequently, it is often imperative to establish a link with another world in Europe or the United States in order to sustain relationships and realise creative ambitions.

There are many examples. Julie Mehretu, born in Addis Ababa to an Ethiopian father and American mother of European descent, was raised in the USA, studied in Dakar and is based in New York. The prints on this exhibition were produced by her at Crown Point Studios in San Francisco, and are her response to the catastrophic devastation wrought in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Senam Okudzeto was born in Chicago to an African American mother and a Ghanaian father, spent most of her childhood in Ghana and Nigeria, and now lives between London, Basel and Accra. The watercolours on this show are drawn from bodies of work that have been exhibited, among other places, at Harvard University in the USA, where Okudzeto was recently a Radcliffe research fellow, but have been specifically reconfigured, on site, for the gallery in Cape Town.

Wangechi Mutu was born and raised in Kenya, spent two years at a school in Wales and furthered her studies at the Cooper Union in New York and at Yale University. Her video work on this exhibition was filmed in Texas on the US-Mexico border, a site of migration and violence currently at the centre of much political controversy in the States. Barthélémy Toguo, who also visited Cape Town to create his installation, painted his watercolours in Paris, found banana boxes and mosquito netting in Cape Town, and augmented his installation with a wooden stamp carved on his visit – part of a series of stamps which mock the bureaucratic processes entwined with travel and migration.

Artists with African connections living elsewhere in the world are, as a matter of course, negotiating their relative distance and closeness to the continent, and these physical, cultural and ideological links manifest themselves on various levels. In a direct response to the lack of exhibition venues and sites of cultural exchange in Cameroon, Toguo has created the Bandjoun Station Institute of Visual Arts. He describes it as “a venue for experiencing life and coming together in that particularly ‘African way’, a convivial venue, for hosting workshops and creating residencies for artists from all over.”(6) Owusu-Ankomah also maintains strong links to his home country. He regularly travels to Ghana, and in 2004 he held a solo exhibition at the National Art Museum in Accra. Yet his imagery, which once drew primarily on the Adinkra sign system of the Akan, now incorporates symbols from antiquity through to contemporary culture, from African, Asian and European sources.

Okudzeto, who also regularly returns to Ghana, is registered through the London Consortium for a PhD on commodity fetishism, modernity, memory and material culture in the context of post-independence West Africa. Odita, who was born in Enugu, Nigeria, but has lived virtually all his life in the USA, carefully articulates his desire to work in an abstracted format that subverts preconceptions of contemporary African art. He writes: “African culture is so interregnal to Western culture, and yet the continent continues to exist as a region denigrated in the mind of the world. I wish to rechannel the negative thinking around Africa, speak from the centre of its present beauty, and expand upon what I know and understand about the history of this wonderful and mysterious place.”

The varied ways in which these artists respond to their relative distances from Africa encourage viewers to resist reductive assumptions around geographical and national classifications. Their disparate aesthetic sensibilities, drawing on their different life histories and their fluid movements between capitals and continents, explode preconceptions that the adjectives of ‘contemporary’ and ‘African’ in any way limit or confine their art practice. The display of their work in South Africa also provokes us to think about this country’s schizophrenic connection to its former European colonial powers and its fraught relationship with Africa, as well as its sometimes awkward interaction with people born in South Africa who have chosen to live elsewhere. The dialogue in South Africa with these artists – and their contemporaries who are included on the upcoming CAPE and Africa Remix – will continue to stretch and tease South Africans’ understandings of our relative distances to Africa and the world.

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Notes:

(1) Appiah, Kwame Anthony, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a world of strangers (New York: WW Norton & Co, 1999), xviii.
(2) In terms of the broader continent, the Dakar, Cairo and Bamako biennales are the prime opportunities for exchanges, although these events have often been undermined by disorganisation.
(3) This is not to state that there was no contemporary African art to be seen. Small projects, mostly initiated by a few dedicated individuals, maintained a certain level of engagement with artists from elsewhere on the continent. Immediately after the biennale, Angolan Fernando Alvim, Carlos Garaicoa of Cuba and Gavin Younge organised Memorias Intimas Marcas, an exhibition about the Angolan war that started at the Cape Town Castle in 1997 and traveled to Johannesburg and Pretoria in 1998. Kendell Geers collaborated with Cameroonian artist Bili Bidjocka on the installation Heart of Darkness, shown at the National Arts Festival in 1998, and later that year the foreign-curated eyeAfrica: African Photography 1840–1998 brought the work of more than 300 African photographers to Cape Town.
During its brief existence from December 1999 to September 2001 the Johannesburg gallery Camouflage, run by Clive Kellner and affiliated to Fernando Alvim’s institution of the same name in Brussels, hosted a number of high-profile artists. Bidjocka, Pascale Marthine Tayou of Cameroon and N’dilo Mutima of Angola were included on the opening show, and in 2001 Camouflage brought Yinka Shonibare to South Africa for a solo exhibition.
The Fordsburg Artists Studios in Johannesburg and Greatmore Studios in Cape Town (both part of the international Triangle Network) have offered residencies to visiting artists from Africa and further afield since as early as 1996. Isaac Carlo of Angola took part in the Pulse project, an exhibition and conference organised by Greg Streak with support from the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in 2000. In 2003, South African Thomas Mulcaire brought Reading Room, a project he developed with Beninese designer Joseph Kpobly for the São Paulo biennale, to the SA National Gallery. March 2004 saw the Eritrean artists Alazar Asgedom and Laine Blata Kiflezion exhibit at Johannesburg Art Gallery. In 2005 Algerian artist Zoulikha Bouabdellah visited the SA National Gallery with a French residency grant, while Anawana Haloba, a Zambian artist living in Oslo, Norway, took part in the KZNSA Gallery’s Young Artists Project.
It is also rare that artists from elsewhere in Africa have shown in South Africa’s commercial galleries. At Michael Stevenson, we curated a pan-African photography show titled Staged Realities in 2004, and in 2005 In the making: materials and process featured Ghanaian El Anatsui as a guest artist; most recently the gallery showed photographs by Rotimi Fani-Kayodé. In other exceptions, Antonio Ole and Reinata Sadimba Passema of Angola have occasionally been part of projects at the Goodman Gallery. Congolese artist Roger Botembe has exhibited at Gallery MOMO, as has Zimbabwean sculptor Shepherd Ndudzo. Zimbabwean Kudzanai Chiurai and Malawi-born Billie Zangewa, both living in Johannesburg, have increasingly high profiles.
(4) Atkinson, Brenda, and Candice Breitz (eds), Grey Areas: Representation, identity and politics in contemporary South African art (Johannesburg: Chalkham Hill Press, 1999)
(5) Internationally, the category of ‘contemporary African art’ has rapidly gained prominence, led by the efforts of curators such as Okwui Enwezor, Salah Hassan, Simon Njami and Olu Oguibe, who have produced a succession of exhibitions and a body of writing on the modern and contemporary art of Africa. South African artists featured strongly in these exhibitions, and local critics joined the debates that took place in the catalogues and journals such as NKA and Third Text. David Koloane, for example, curated Moments of Art as part of the 1995 exhibition Seven Stories at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. In 1999, essays by Koloane and Colin Richards were included in the seminal collection Reading the Contemporary. The catalogue of the Enwezor-curated The Short Century featured contributions by Rory Bester and Marilyn Martin. Yet within South Africa there has been scant exposure to the work debated – a jarring disconnection between international and local realities.
(6) Sans, Jérome, ‘Toguo Digests the World’ in Barthélémy Toguo: The Sick Opera (Paris: Paris-Musées, 2004), 14.