Congratulations to my dear brother @salahsmh for organizing the long overdue retrospective of the South African artist Gavin Jantjes @whitechapelgallery, London. The show, titled "To Be Free," after Nina Simone, ended about two weeks ago.
It was the latest of Salah's 3-decades long incomparable work of redrawing the map of modern and contemporary art through groundshifting solo and group exhibitions and publications, and through his work as a professor. Salah, for instance, opened up Venice to African artists when he initiated the "Africa in Venice" program that produced two highly acclaimed exhibitions by African artists in the early 2000s, leading eventually to the now-normal presence of Africans in the International Exhibition and, even more important, approximately 10 national pavilions in recent editions of the biennial. He has been singularly responsible for keeping our journal Nka afloat in the years when publishers and funding agencies had no interest in our vision. And, in his time at Cornell, he has trained quite a few of the scholars working actively in the academy and the museum, quite apart from establishing the Institute of Comparative Modernities at that Ivy League university.
So, why is the Jantjes exhibition important?
Gavin is one of the most consequential artists of the early (1970s) anti-Apartheid movement who, in forced exile in Europe, participated in the making of black international art and cultural networks there in the 1980s. Later in Norway as a curator and scholar, Gavin, perhaps more than anyone else, transformed Oslo into a thriving global contemporary art destination. Since 1994, Gavin has played a major role in building a new, multiracial art industry in South Africa. His work as a painter, printmaker, and multimedia artist is in itself terrific, profound, technically sophisticated and, earlier on, politically intelligent.
And yet, it had to take Salah's curatorial intervention, once more, to give Gavin his due by organizing this exhibition with the institutional backing of @sharjahart, where the show opened earlier in the year before traveling to Whitechapel.
We have seen this before. Ibrahim El-Salahi (b. 1930), arguably the most significant and influential 20th-century modernist from Africa had no major museum exhibition in Britain where he has lived for decades, until Salah, after years of trying unsuccessfully with US and European museums, found an ally in and support from the intrepid @hooralq and @sharjahart where Salahi's magnificent retrospective opened, before traveling to the Tate Modern in 2013.
