Chimamanda's Interview in Bookforum

BF: Are the people of Nigeria still grieving and processing this war?

CNA: A lot of people haven’t dealt with it at all, in part because we haven’t dealt with it as a collective nation. Nobody learns about Igbo culture in high school. You’re told that a war happened and nothing else. Igbo people have a sense that we’re supposed to pretend nothing happened. Now there is a new Biafran movement that’s been going on for about ten years. Mostly, it’s the poorer people in Igbo villages and rural areas who adopt things from Biafra and fly the Biafran flag. When I told people I was writing about the war, they thought I was crazy. They’d say, “You are just looking for trouble, you are encouraging violence.” I still get a few angry e-mails from people who feel I shouldn’t have written about that war. But then I do get pleasantly surprised by the many people who are asking questions about that period because of the book, people whose parents had been through the war and never said anything to their kids. Sometimes I get stupidly emotional. I did a reading in Nige­- ria, and a woman came up to me and said, “Because of your book, I can finally talk about what happened to me, and I thank you.” And then I start crying [laughs].

(Excerpt of interview with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)

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Chimamanda s interview in the December/January 2008 issue of Bookforum, the literary magazine of the most influential contemporary art magazine, Artforum, is one more indication of the extent Half of a Yellow Sun, her award-winning novel set in Biafra during the war of 1967-70, has insinuated its story into contemporary consciousness. Thanks to this novel, Biafra, and the still-unaccounted-for, systematic mass murder of thousands of Igbo in Northern Nigeria in the months before the war—which remains a taboo in Nigerian political discourse—has returned calling for reexamination. As Chimamanda rightly points out, there has not been any effort by the Nigerian nation to grieve for the thousands of innocents murdered by fellow citizens in 1966, before the war. A pall of anxiety remains, while many Igbo await the process of healing of a nation.

The responses within and beyond Nigeria to HYS particularly the new interest in the story of Biafra and Nigeria of the 1960s is an encouraging sign that, perhaps, literature might actually provide the basis for open discussions about that dark period in Nigeria's postcolonial history. Already an important opportunity was missed when in the early 1990s an exhibition of war-time work by Biafran artists (works that circulated in Europe at the time and had just been repatriated to Nigeria after more than two decades) planned to take place in one of foreign cultural centers in Lagos was canceled after it became clear that the authorities might deem the show a dangerous attempt to open unhealed wounds. Then and even now Nigeria—the authorities and significant section of the citizenry—fail to learn from history: that old wounds cannot heal unless they are opened, cleaned and treated, carefully. Which is why the recent colloquium on literature on Biafra, which featured readings of HYS, and other works by Cyprian Ekwensi, Chukwuemeka Ike, and Ken Saro-Wiwa among others is a bold, courageous gesture on the part of CORA, the organizers of the Lagos Book Festival. These are signs that there might afterall be a gradual movement towards beginning a process long overdue. In which case Nigeria owes Chimamanda for helping weave the fabric of the nation, by writing a book of compelling, powerful fiction!

"Africa Remix" and the Hunger for Contemporary Art

The tremendous response and reception of Simon Njami's touring show, Africa Remix at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG) where it showed between June and October says a lot about the inavailability of important contemporary African art exhibitions on the African continent. With more than a hundred thousand visitors, several media reports/reviews, and many critical reflections on the show by South African commentators, the show indeed attained a truly blockbuster status in South Africa. Given that none of the previous shows of comparable significance, including Africa Explores (1991), Seven Stories (1995), The Short Century (2001) never made it to the continent, Africa Remix is a landmark show simply because having originated in Europe, it succeeded in showcasing the work of contemporary African artists to an African spectatorship and audience who usually encounter (that is if at all) the work of artists inside and outside the continent only through media reports, published sources, and hearsay. Except you lived in Dakar whose Biennale is a different kind of event anyway. Having been involved in two of these shows, I know that it is problem has a lot to do with the absence of infrastructural and financial resources inside Africa (JAG spent at least $450,000 to host Africa Remix) on the one hand and hard commitment and vision on the part of officials in the abysmally few institutions in the continent that can actually host important contemporary art shows (Nigeria has no space for such exhibitions but now wants to build some stupid, half-billion dollar Millennium Tower for culture--see previous post on this--instead) . This is why I must use this space to express my eternal gratitude to Clive Kellner, the curator of the JAG and Steven Sacks, the Director, for mustering the resources to successfully bring Africa Remix to South Africa and publish the JAG's outstanding version of the exhibition catalogue. This is hoping that this precedent will be sustained at the JAG, and that institutions in other parts of Africa will see this as a challenge, as it is impossible to overstate the case for direct encounter and experience of the work of significant contemporary artists by "home-based" critics, scholars, curators and, perhaps most important, practising artists most of whom are unable to travel to see art from beyond the confines of their places of residence.

Congratulations Clive and the JAG!; congratulations to Simon and his curatorial team!

Biennials and their Lagos critics

I cannot help but discern a certain dunderheaded nationalism when some Nigerian, especially Lagos-based, artists comment on contemporary art. A few years ago, (following New Energies, a show organized byEl Anatsui at the Goethe Institute, Lagos) the big question, believe it or not, was whether installation and conceptual art were too alien, in other words too western to be condoned in Nigeria! If not that the "anti-installation" critics were also people one otherwise had reason to respect, I would not have given any much thought to that debate. But I did, in a lecture at Jazz Hole, in Ikoyi Lagos, in the summer of 2001 (published in The Guardian of Lagos a month later). This time around, a few commentators, including my good friend Olu Ajayi--a fine painter and current president of the Lagos chapter of the Society of Nigerian Artists—fulminate against art curators and biennials. In a recent report published in The Guardian Online (accessed Nov. 9, 2007), the paper’s art critic Chuka Nnabuife maps the biennial debate, describing it thus:
“WHENEVER the word 'biennale' is mentioned in a gathering of Nigerian artists, a hot debate ensues. Artists take positions behind factions that appear like old foes: ‘them’ against ‘us’.”

As in the past, the arguments made by Nigerian critics of biennials have often reflected a hermit or siege mentality, the illusion that Nigerian artists are the better if left alone, without any supposedly “foreign” contamination emblematized by “installation art” or “biennials.” There is sometime pathetic, incredibly reactionary about contemporary artists who refuse to speak or understand the language of contemporary art, yet paradoxically miffed by the fact that curators of international exhibitions ignore their sometimes pretty but usually unambitious paintings and sculptures. The Nigerian art market is no doubt a large and thriving one, with local patronage that has produced a significant number of artists that can be rightly counted among Nigeria’s relatively small middleclass. So long as this local clientèle is satisfied with the canvases and fiberglass and wood sculptures produced by many a Lagos artist, all is well. Yet, the Lagos artists must also live with the fact that there is a world of contemporary art out there, to which is connected a zillion communities of artists, critics, curators, museums, institutions from Sao Paulo, Alexandria and Bamako to Beijing, Tokyo and Rome, from Los Angeles, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires and Dakar to Mexico City, Edinburgh, Mumbai, Istanbul and Sydney; a world the Lagos artists, should they care, have to speak to in the language of contemporary art. It is a matter of choice. Good thing though that there are a several photographers in the same city committed to exchange with other artists elsewhere; and artist-teachers like El Anatsui at Nsukka, and Tony Okpe and Jerry Buhari in Zaria who, against odds, continue through their work and teaching to expose young artists to the possibilities contemporary art, beyond staid notions of art canvassed by some Lagos artists.

Given the tone and tenor of the debates in Lagos, it should not surprise me that the longstanding, though somewhat insubstantial, campaign to initiate a Lagos biennial will either not succeed in my lifetime, or (God forbid!) if it does will be perhaps even a noisier version of Libreville's Bantu Biennial established years ago to promote the purportedly unique Bantu cultural identity of central African countries.

Cyprian Ekwensi (1921-2007)

I am deeply saddened by this news of the death of the pioneer Nigerian novelist Cyprian Ekwensi this week. He was 86. Ekwensi, the author of arguably the earliest major novel in Nigeria (People of the City, 1954) and other vastly popular novels--Passport of Mallam Illya, African Night's Entertainment, Lokotown, Jagua Nana, The Drummer Boy, etc--that, as secondary students in Nigeria in the 1980s, captured, intrigued, and liberated our fertile imaginations and youthful fantasies. His simple, uncomplicated plots, while a subject of longstanding critique by literary scholars, was the very reason we read, and re-read his incomparably entertaining works. He was the people's novelist!
Ekwensi was scheduled to participate in the key event of the Lagos Book Arts Festival (which begins this week), by reading from his novel on the Biafran War, Divided We Stand published in 1980. The CORA-organized Festival and its colloquium, Constructing the Nation: Stories Out of Biafra, will now serve as a memorial to a man who used his unpretentious yet prodigious fictive imagination to instill in me and a zillion others the love for the novel and for literature. Rest, Old Man; travel safely.

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).

Lecture news

I will be giving the fall 2007 Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor lecture on the work of Candice Breitz, the South African artist currently living in Berlin, next week. Come if you are anywhere near the incredibly beautiful Berkshires! It is open to the public.

For announcement in ArtDaily.org click here