When contemplating a continent with cultures as deep and diverse as those of Africa, the themes of rifting and transformation take on a multitude of meanings, both geographic and emotional.
Two concurrent exhibitions opening at the Fowler Museum at UCLA this coming weekend explore these themes through their display of African contemporary art, offering the UCLA community an opportunity to discover the ever-changing spirit of African creativity.
“Continental Rifts: Contemporary Time-Based Works of Africa” and “Transformations: Recent Contemporary African Acquisitions” will both be on display at the Fowler Museum from Feb. 22 through June 14.
“Continental Rifts” features works of time-based media by five internationally recognized artists. The exhibition presents the media of film, video and related photography to explore the theme of shifting identity. The exhibition focuses on the notion of geographic rift ““ the separation of continents and transnational movement ““ to represent the personal rifting created by separation from one’s home, and the resulting feelings of exile, loss and nostalgia.
“The artists all have very different relationships to the continent of Africa, but they all feel closely connected to it in one way or another,” said UCLA Professor Polly Nooter Roberts, the exhibition’s curator. “Their use of time-based art is a way to reflect upon and express the complexities of those relationships. In our very contemporary and transnational world, people are constantly on the move, and technology further contributes to the globalizing and fracturing of experience.”
The exhibition, which has garnered international attention after being named the College Art Association’s 2009 Annual Exhibition, was inspired by South African artist Georgia Papageorge’s work “Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire, Namibia/Brazil” (2001).
“Africa Rifting,” a video projection piece with sound, features ethereal red banners stretching along the Skeleton Coast of Namibia in Africa and the Brazilian coastal city of Torres. The large projection reimagines the Gondwanaland split ““ the geological event that resulted in the separation of the South American and African landmasses 135 million years ago.
“It is a very monumental work and very dramatic,” Roberts said. “Papageorge uses the endlessly long banners to represent not only geological rifting but also the metaphorical rifting of bloodlines, such as the rifting of people during the apartheid era in South Africa, and her own emotional rifting after losing her daughter to cancer.”
“Muxima,” a 2005 film by Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean artist who has worked in Rwanda and Angola, shows vignettes or cantos of images of life in Angola. The images range from oil fields to colonial monuments, and from AIDS patients to mothers who lost children to war. Throughout the 30-minute film, six different versions of the Bantu song “Muxima,” (meaning “heart” or “soul”) accompany the images to create a vision of the heart and soul of Angola.
“It is Jaar’s belief that we have grown too accustomed to seeing difficult images in our everyday lives,” Roberts said. “However, Jaar also believes that music can regenerate compassion for images. The idea is that as the song “˜Muxima’ is overlaid on the images, we will see them differently and be more emotionally affected by them.”
The second exhibition, “Transformations: Recent Contemporary African Acquisitions,” features eight artists of African heritage whose works are made of recycled mediums and range from sculpture to linocut prints to paintings. The works featured in “Transformations” seek to change the texture, shape and dimension of materials to comment upon the possibilities for resourcefulness and renewal.
Striking examples of the creativity on display in “Transformations” are the recently acquired works “Fading Scroll” (2007) and “Versatility” (2006) by Ghanaian-born artist El Anatsui. “Fading Scroll” and “Versatility” are both monumental tapestries made of discarded metal bottle wrappers, collected in massive numbers and woven together.
“El Anatsui’s works are beautiful compositions that subvert the rigidity of sculpture because they are malleable, but also subvert the malleability of cloth because they are rigid,” Roberts said. “He has taken materials that have exhausted their original purpose and created something luminous, shimmering and new.”
Whether it is through the resuscitation of unconventional materials or the manipulation of time-based technology, both “Transformations” and “Continental Rifts” address issues of change and shifting identity through the ingenuity of African artists.
From a continent that has changed both geographically and culturally, the two exhibits seek to give a glimpse into the multiple meanings and international significance of contemporary Africa.
Roberts said, “There is no single African aesthetic, and this amazing array of media offers us multiple prisms through which to view the thriving and constant creativity of Africa.”