Exhibitions
2009 CAA Annual Exhibition
Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa
Alfredo Jaar, Muxima, 2005, still from digital film (artwork © Alfredo Jaar; photograph provided by the Fowler Museum, UCLA, and Galerie Lelong, New York)
Curated by Mary Nooter Roberts, Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa is the 2009 CAA Annual Exhibition, to be held at the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Opening on February 22, Continental Rifts will be presented in the Getty Gallery, the Fowler Museum’s largest space for temporary exhibitions. On view during the CAA Annual Conference, the show continues to June 14, 2009.
Continental Rifts presents the work of five artists with close ties to Africa: Yto Barrada, Claudia Cristovao, Alfredo Jaar, Georgia Papageorge, and Berni Searle. Contemporary works by artists of African heritage have earned significant attention in recent years, in part because of exhibitions by curators like Roberts and Okwui Enwezor and at international forums such as Documenta, the Venice Biennale, and Dak’Art, the Biennale of Contemporary African Art in Senegal. African time-based arts of video, film, and related photography are among the most defining media of the moment.
The featured artists offer compelling examples of the ways in which new media lend themselves to the representation of complex transnational, postcolonial identity politics resulting from diasporic displacement, shifting notions of “home” and “abroad,” and deep emotional attachments and divides. They complicate the question of “whose Africa?” through such topics as geography, geology, botany, and medicine, and through issues like war, loss, memory, and exile. All five have complex and divided relationships to the continent because of their multiple heritages, because they reside elsewhere, or because they come from other parts of the world but find themselves compelled to produce work about Africa.
Yto Barrada, Hôtel Ahlen, Tangier, 2006, from Iris Tingitana series, C-print, 60 x 60 cm (artwork © Yto Barrada; photograph provided by the Fowler Museum, UCLA, and Galerie Polaris, Paris)
Papageorge’s video uses the ancient splitting of Gondwanaland into Africa and South America as a metaphor for social, cultural, and political ruptures, while also offering a chance for redemption and healing. Likewise, Searle’s video places images of Spain and Morocco on opposite screens, emphasizing not only the body of water but also the physical, emotional, and legal distances between the two continents. Barrada’s work also focuses on Morocco, exploring identity, migration, and dislocation in that country through a video that emphasizes an endangered, native wildflower, and through photographs of Moroccan youths and urban development and entropy. The African-born people in Cristovao’s videos describe their memories and projections of the continent, which they left as children. And a work by Jaar uses music, landscape, and lived realities as launching points for aesthetic meditation.
Mary Nooter Roberts is deputy director and chief curator at the Fowler Museum, where she has worked since 1999, and an adjunct professor at UCLA. She has curated and cocurated many exhibitions for that museum and others, including: Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (2006–7); A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (2003; which traveled nationwide from 2005 to 2007); A Sense of Wonder: African Art from the Faletti Family Collection (1997); The Shape of Belief: African Art from the Michael C. Heide Collection (1997); and Secrecy: African Art That Conceals and Reveals (1993). Her book for Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (1996), written with Allen F. Roberts, won CAA’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for outstanding museum scholarship in 1998. She earned her PhD in African art history at Columbia University in New York in 1991.
A brochure for Continental Rifts, published by the museum with help from a grant from CAA, contains an essay by Roberts and reproductions of works by the five artists. The brochure will be available to all conference attendees, to be included in your registration materials when you pick them up onsite.
A second exhibition of African art, called Transformations: Recent Contemporary African Acquisitions and featuring eleven works by seven artists, including two monumental metal “cloths” by El Anatsui, will also be on view during the conference. The Fowler Museum at UCLA presents the art and material culture of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas, past and present.
Published on November 24, 2008.
