Abuja Millennium Tower and State Phillistinism

Just when you think you have seen or heard it all, the Nigerian authorities decide on a project that in all its stupidity and myopia reflects that kind of profligate frittering of the nation’s wealth by the bureaucrats. Although there had been rumors, but the recent announcement that the Federal Executive Council has voted to build the so-called Millennium Towers and Culture Center, Abuja, a 53 Billion Naira (roughly $450 Million) project is shocking beyond belief. Of course it would be nice—in some foolish sense—to see the contrast between the primordially massive Zuma and Aso Rocks hedging Abuja and the shimmering glass-clothed tower signifying that state our national progress. But, frankly, one cannot help but shudder at the indecent amount of money the Nigerian state is willing to spend on ONE structure commemorating an already old millennium. Some important critiques of this project, looking into the design, and the urban landscape into which this structure is to be fitted, but also the lack of public debate on the design and contract award, have been written by competent observers such as Nnimmo Bassey, but what makes the whole project insane is that it is being done in the name of culture. What, whose, which culture is this complex of glass towers meant to celebrate or serve as its icon?

A much more serious concern is the fact that in its original masterplan (and the subsequent incarnations), the designers of Abuja did not imagine arts and culture as important. No national ethnographic museum, no modern/contemporary museum, no music hall, no theatre, in short no purpose-built structures to house any of Nigeria’s rich material and visual cultures past and present. Of course it was state priority to build the national mosque and church. Then someone one day thought: “ahaa, people are building millennium towers in parts of Europe and the US, so why cannot the giant of Africa that has ambled through the 20^th century, its engines lubricated by the oil from the delta, have its own tower?” Or it might have been that state officials, confronted by the spate of religious crisis in parts of northern Nigeria wondered: “why don’t we find a very expensive wedge to separate the charged, awkward space between the mosque and the church and dedicate it to the millennium and culture? I digress… But to imagine that the Federal Executive Council is building this half a billion dollar tower says much of the philistinism that infests the Aso Rock and its environs. As it has been described the Millennium Tower will have “space for a museum,” one “big” 2000-capacity state of the art auditorium, and a couple more smaller conference halls, and a library. What could anyone seriously mean by “a museum?” Did no body tell Abuja bureaucrats that with the money they plan to plunk into this Tower, they could build at least four quality, well-designed, homes for art, ethnographica, music and theatre, that is if, as I suspect, the so-called Millennium Tower is not another opportunity for large-scale theft of money that belongs to the citizens of Nigeria. It all sucks big time!

AFRICAN PAVILION AT THE 52nd VENICE BIENNIALE – 3 views

For those who have followed the debates around the African Pavilion at the 52^nd Venice Biennale before the exhibition itself, especially those who had no opportunity of seeing the show in Venice, nor of monitoring critical responses to it in the international art media, here are three excerpts from reviews by three major international art magazines: Flash Art, and Art in America and Frieze. These reviews point to the gains and losses of the African project in this year’s Venice. Whether one agrees or not with their authors, these reviews reflect important critical opinions on Robert Storr’s African project and the curatorial merits of show itself. Read on:

"The African Pavilion"

Months before it opened, critiques of the inaugural Africa Pavilion were circulating online. On 9 October 2006 disagreements between curators Olu Oguibe, Okwui Enwezor and Salah Hassan over the Biennale selection process went public at the Africa South Art Initiative website. On 27 February 2007 news of Simon Njami and Fernando Alvim’s winning curatorial proposal, ‘Checklist: Luanda Pop’, an exhibition drawn largely from the Luanda-based Sindika Dokolo African Collection of Contemporary Art, prompted questions about working with a private collection, while artnet.com alleged ‘unsavoury’ business activities against Sindika Dokolo, the Congolese collector behind the collection.

By 7 June, when Robert Storr and Njami met to discuss the Pavilion in a keynote dialogue organized by the Arts Council England-funded International Curators Forum in Venice, tensions were high. Njami went on the offensive, confronting Storr, demanding clarification as to why his team had only two months to prepare and why promised MoMA funds had been withdrawn. Storr attempted to placate Njami with the prospect of stronger pavilions in the future; Alvim, sensing the imminent closure of a window of opportunity, stood up and shouted at Storr, vented his frustration at his team’s treatment by the officials in Venice and marched out.

You may say that there is always melodrama at Venice, and that these disputes are the latest in a long line of similar grievances. But these discontents are more than that: they reveal the painfully restricted space practitioners are still obliged to inhabit in order to create platforms through which the complexities of African contemporaneity become visible, audible and speakable.

Underlying the fractiousness was the sense that the very idea of an African Pavilion was impossible, that the very name raised expectations no single exhibition could begin to fulfil. The notion of one pavilion that could function as a platform for a continent was guaranteed to satisfy no one and to displease everyone.

Filmmaker and theorist John Akomfrah precisely identified the thinking behind the Pavilion. It was, he said, a prime example of ‘the hubris of overcompensation’. The understandable desire for an institutional presence at Venice becomes exaggerated into a claim to represent a continent. The need to compensate for historical exclusion from the Biennale leads to overinflated and unconvincing rhetorics of essentializing inclusion.

Another curator might have been able to exploit the fictionality at the heart of the African Pavilion and work with aspects of impossibility and fabulation. But that would have been a very different exhibition; as it was, ‘Checklist: Luanda Pop’ was a curatorial blend of conceptual laziness and inchoate ambition familiar from Njami’s deeply flawed 2005 touring show ‘Africa Remix’.

There were indelible moments: Kendell Geers’ Seven Deadly Sins (2006) itemized the biblical vices in ultraviolet neon signage; its inverted Gothic font and black-out rooms were involving enough to shatter the didacticism of its Old Testament source material. Mounir Fatmi’s Save Manhattan 03 (2006–7) – a silhouetted skyline constructed from rumbling loudspeakers – had an immediacy that would have benefited from a room of its own.

Many people complained about the congestion of the show, much like the grotesquely overcrowded ‘Africa Remix’. I was distracted less by this than by the redundancy of the exhibition’s wretched title. If the term ‘checklist’, which sounded like a working title someone forgot to delete until it was too late, had been dropped, then the notion of Luanda Pop might have come into focus and provided some much-needed conceptual clarity.

There was a modest proposition trapped inside the grand narrative of the Africa Pavilion. The notion of Luanda Pop hinted at a small-scale show on the associations, potentials and legacies of the Lusophone urban imaginary, which would have been an intriguing prospect. Atelier (2007), Paulo Kapela’s assemblage of Angolan election posters, street signage and campaign mementoes, was rich in connections; Yonamine’s The Best of the Best (2007) was a corner of arthouse film posters, from Rainer Werner Fassbinder to Samuel Fuller, translated into Portuguese and printed on tin, exceeding the graphic density evoked by the curatorial vision of Angolan neo-Pop.

Not all of the ten sequences of Alfredo Jaar’s 36-minute digital video Muxima (2005) conveyed the pathos perhaps intended; the multiple renditions of the titular folk-song failed to cast the requisite spell needed for a video-essay of this kind. Meditations on Luandan streets named Avenida Lenin and Rua Commandante Che Guevara did, however, succeed in evoking a bygone era of Soviet and Cuban solidarity. Most powerful was a sequence of a pair of feet walking slowly through a field; the camera then moving up to a face studying the ground in deep concentration. Giant crops surround the figure. Nothing happens until a detonation triggers landmines and a realization that remnants of old wars persist into the present.

Moments such as this, gleaned from the excess, asked large questions within an intimate frame. Momentarily you could imagine other exhibitions, secreted within the unconvincing grandiosity of the Pavilion, and begin to fantasize about the singularity of the solitary work hidden within the hubris of overcompensation. (Kodwo Eshun, Frieze Art Magazine (London), Sept. 2007)

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Curatorially, the exhibition seems contradictory and disjointed, bing a curious mix of extremely formal work, on the one hand, and socio-politically engaged work on the other. The installation was unimaginative and lacked inspiration, a linear predictable sequence where one artist follows the other in classical manner. Particularly disappointing was the African Pavilion “Check List Luanda Pop” which, though a good idea, was shrouded in controversy as it came from the private collection of Senegalese (sic) collector and businessman Sindika Dokolo, whose family has been accused of shady business dealings. Given the fact there was an open call for proposals from curators, it does seem strange that a private collection was selected to represent the continent. The show seemed as though it was hastily brought together and not based on thorough research. An exotic “footnote” to the Arsenale, it was a superficial, indexical presentation of artists well-known internationally like Kendell Geers, Yinka Shonibare, Chris Ofili, and the obligatory Basquiat with some interesting unknown figures in an installation unmindful of the artists. Each one was mostly represented by the token work and the overall feeling was like a summer gallery group show: messy and incoherent. (Katerina Gregos, Flash Art International (Milan) July-Sept. 2007, p. 64)

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The show that stirred the most advance debate, Checklist: Luanda Pop: The African Pavilion,” turns out to be a lively though mostly mainstream assortment of contemporary art from around the globe, with a celebrity-heavy list that includes both black and white artists who were born on the continent or are part of the African diaspora (Ghada Amer, Chris Ofili, Marlene Dumas, Yinka Shonibare, Kendell Geers, Minette Vari, Jean-Michel Basquiat) along with some others (Andy Warhol, Alfredo Jaar, Miquel Barcelo) whose connection to the continent is tenuous at best. Among the artists who don’t yet have marquee names, Loulou Cherinet is showing White Woman (2002), a staged and frequently lewd dinner conversation among a group fo black men, who also share some more philosophical observations about the meaning of marriage in a life spent traveling between Europe and Africa. Bili Bidjocka continues his ongoing book-and-archive project, Pourquoi Faire?, which invites visitors to inscribe responses to suggestively free-associative questions (La Beaute est convulsive. Pourquoi faire?) in a large blank book. Set up in a chapel-like space with a surveillance camera projecting the book and the moving hand high on the center wall, the work has the effect of turning visitors into scribes, if not prophets, who record the articles of an unspecified faith.

As if a homogenizing, pan-Africa approach were not enough to set off some critics, the work in “Luanda Pop” all belong to Sindika Dokolo, a businessman from the Congo who is now based in Luanda. In the exhibition handout, Dokolo specifies that his is an African collection, not a collection of African art (hence Warhol?), and that he intends it to be a basis for a projected Center for contemporary art in Luanda. That plan is endorsed in an accompanying statement by the president of the Republic of Angola (who happens to be Dokolo’s father-in-law). At the very least, accepting the exhibition can be seen as inadvertently placing the Biennale in the service of Angola’s business and government elite. It’s hard to imagine a title of official “national” representation being similarly granted today to a European or U.S. private collection. (Marcia E. Vetroq, Art in America (New York), Sept. 2007, pp. 145-146).