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20 November 2005, 10:42
SESSIONS eKAPA Kaapstad Press Conference: An inter-zone
of arts, culture, liberation theory, tourism and trade, the Kalakuta Republik
Café at the Pan African Market in Long Street provided a serendipitously
appropriate setting to address one the first questions posed by the media
at Cape Town SESSIONS eKAPA press conference...
Read more here
18 November 2005, 08:58
SESSIONS eKAPA Public Meeeting: Cape Town is contradictory
and contested. ItÍs a city still perceived in many local sectors as a post-colonial
relic and not a "truly African" region. ItÍs also a city thatÍs received
some national notoriety for its cultural apathy. So it's hardly surprising
that "Why Cape Town?" was one of the questions posed at SESSION eKAPAÍs
first public meeting, held last week...
Read more here
14 November 2005, 10:42
Provocations: In less than 3 weeks time leading thinkers
and cultural practitioners will converge at SESSIONS
eKAPA 2005 to discuss the interface between African art practices and
the international art circuit. In the meantime we've put together some quick
quotes, random thoughts and perspectives aimed at provoking gut reflexes,
future dialogues and deeper readings...
Read more here
12 November 2005, 23:56
Biennales 101: There are more than 50 biennales operating
across the globe. That makes for an average of one every two weeks. Just
keeping up with the rotation is a full-time job in itself. But are these
large-scale international shows just tourist attractions or do they have
potential to challenge the centre-first model of global art? We check out
some key texts that are part of the ongoing debate on large-scale international
art events...
Read more here
SESSIONS eKAPA Cape Town Press Conference
The Kalakuta Republik Café, at the Pan African Market in Cape Town at 6pm. An inter-zone of arts, culture, tourism and trade. Merchants from the market are closing shop for the night, while the last stragglers from the day's tourist trade browse the selection of Pan-African literature and music on display. Across the road, a party starting up at the Purple Turtle clashes with the silent high finance skyline of Standard Bank.
Named after the famous commune of Nigerian socio-political commentator Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the Kalakuta Republik Café is at once the hub of the Market's tourist trade and a meeting space for contemporary artists and intellectuals from Africa and the diaspora. ItÍs an ideal venue to spend an afternoon talking art, culture and kak with friends - but this isnÍt just a social occasion. ItÍs the press conference for CAPE's first international art meeting, SESSIONS eKAPA 2005. In the house? Cape TownÍs art press, speakers appearing at SESSIONS eKAPA, members of CAPEÍs Board of Directors and of course the SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 team.
The caf³ also provides a serendipitously appropriate setting to address one the first questions posed by the media at the conference: how will CAPE negotiate the rocky relationship between art and tourism? ItÍs a question thatÍs seminal in the new global art economy and one of the main challenges facing CAPE. How can large-scale international art events present an art marginalised from the hegemonic centres in such a way that it does not simply reaffirm touristic totemism?
CAPE CEO Susan Glanville-Zini was forthright in her reply: "Cape Town has become, and is viewed as a major tourist destination. One of the challenges that was put to us when the project was initiated, was how does Cape Town take advantage of the way it is been perceived by the rest of the world and at the same time take control of how it is perceived and perceives itself?"
A simple answer? Sure. But when you unpack it, it opens up, invoking a multitude of other arguments and strategies. In some ways it recalls the "strategy of proximity" proposed by curator Okwui Enwezor in ArtforumÍs now infamous 2003 roundtable debate on globalism. Enwezor suggested that biennials and artists inscribed in the local might adopt the idea of "the trickster - a mode of behaviour akin to Situationist d³tournement "to confront the power of the market" and stay in the game, while effectively situating themselves outside of it.
At the same time it brings to mind Simon NjamiÍs call for African-based exhibitions that can question both how Africa is seen and how it sees itself: "In Europe we were unpacking the idea of Africa Europeans have. And I think it is necessary as well, in Africa, to unpack the idea of Africa. The ideas imposed on to ourselves. We all have preconceived ideas about Africa, and maybe Africa [has] the most."
After the question and answer session, the debate on the art and tourism spilled out onto the Kalakuta RepublikÍs balcony, where it was watered with the caf³Ís potent brew of ginger beer and fed by a diversity of AfricaÍs food culture... And itÍll undoubtedly continue at SESSIONS eKAPA 2005.
Do you have something to add to the discussion? Drop us a mail, and make sure your voice is heard by registering for SESSIONS eKAPA 2005. Details, prices and information on discounted & free seats available here.
VIDEO
Get the gist: SESSIONS eKAPA unpacked in under 2 minutes
Windows Media Player | Quicktime
SESSIONS eKAPA public meeting
Cape Town is contradictory and contested. ItÍs a city still perceived in many local sectors as a post-colonial relic and not a "truly African" region. ItÍs also a city thatÍs received some national notoriety for its cultural apathy. So it's hardly surprising that "Why Cape Town?" was one of the questions posed at SESSION eKAPAÍs first public meeting, held last week.
It was a small but engaged crowd that gathered at the District 6 Museum in, yes, Cape Town to hear about and discuss SESSIONS eKAPA 2005. After a brief introduction to the CAPE project, SESSIONS eKAPA co-ordinator Julian Jonker ran through the meetings programme and then it was over to the floor.
So why Cape Town? ItÍs a complex question and one without a single answer. "The idea is to post the question of Cape Town as a city that isnÍt an African city and to think through those ideas without being deterministic about what the answers to the questions are," replied Jonker. To which Board of Director member Mokena Makeka added: "Cape Town was the Mother City and at the centre of the birth of colonialism, it therefore presents an opportunity to convert those negative connotations to the city into an opportunity for discussion."
Cape CEO Susan Glanville contextualised the question in terms of where the project came from: "CAPE didnÍt come out of an arts base but rather out of a tourism base," explained Glanville-Zini. "And that provided an interesting impetus to take a step back and ask how a context like Cape Town can look at the challenges that came out of the Joburg Biennale and how can we make a mega-exhibition differently. And I think whatÍs exciting about Cape Town is that it has got this incredible diversity of communities that allows this idea of routes to evolve."
The relationship between the SESSIONS and CAPEÍs 2006 manifestation was also up for debate. "We are hoping to have appointed our art director by the time of the conference," said Jonker. "So the director will be at the conference and this will become a discussion forum for his or her benefit - but it's also for us to think about what we want from next year. "
"One of the important things when you talk about contemporary African art," continued Makeka, "is that itÍs a phrase which is open to contestation and discussion. What is contemporary? What is African? What is art? So the purpose of having the SESSIONS is to create a forum whereby we can surface those debates and use them as a crucible so that the art director can actually use those ideas and draw on them for the manifestation."
Another question interrogated CAPEÍs multidisciplinary agenda. According to the CAPE team, it's designed to engage new spaces, create new networks linking diverse communities and to develop new audiences for art.
Did you miss the public meeting? Do you have a question for the SESSIONS eKAPA team or would you like to add something to the discussion? Drop us a mail, and make sure your voice is heard by registering for SESSIONS eKAPA 2005. Details, prices and information on discounted & free seats available here.
VIDEO CLIPS
Public meeting video clips: Why Cape Town?
Windows Media Player | Quicktime
SESSIONS & the manifestation
Windows Media Player | Quicktime
Why multidisciplinary?
Windows Media Player | Quicktime
Provocations
In less than 3 weeks time leading thinkers and cultural practitioners will be converging at SESSIONS eKAPA 2005 to discuss the interface between African art practices and the international art circuit. In the meantime we've put together some quick quotes, random thoughts and perspectives aimed at provoking gut reflexes, future dialogues and deeper readings.
"People who grumble about art fairs and biennials are the kind of people who grumble about their favourite bands becoming popular" - Matthew Higgs. How has art changed? in Frieze October 2005.
"The main problem, it appears, in organising a symposium, is that one does not attend to listen and learn, but to present an autarkic science, a posited truth which doesn't hold up to scrutiny. "- Simon Njami. Anthropometric Visions in Revuenoire.
"I do think the art world would benefit from a tabloid. To think of the smutty secrets that would emerge - Heat magazine would seem positively Calvinist in comparison." - Sean O'Toole. The State of Art in Jozi in JHBLive.
"What they are is a bunch of rubber stamps who are growing fat and who are very willing to defend the status quo, because for them it means a full stomach and a German limousine… " - Lesego Rampolokeng. Lesego Rampolokeng: Ranting at fat arses by Mark Waller, in Sweet Magazine No.1.
"I think the Biennial in all its rather haphazard forums also called forth some deep-seated fears, desires and sometimes painful questions of how we imagine ourselves as an art community in an increasingly atomised world." - Colin Richards in A third Johannesburg biennale, yes or no? Artthrob, October 1999.
"With some exceptions, artistic interventions in urban or suburban public spaces tend to be reduced to over-signified representations of the City and its contextual icons. They derive their supposed radicalism as 'public art' from the critical discursive potential that underlies the overall failure of the modern urban project and, consequently, the failure of the paradigm of citizenship." - Osvaldo Sánchez in inSite_05/ Curatorial Statement.
"International exhibitions of contemporary art may have proliferated in the past decades, but in a very Orwellian sense these multiple sites of artistic practice are patently not equal, and all of them are ultimately subject to the discursive control of the West." Ordering the universe: Documenta 11 and the apotheosis of the occidental gaze - Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie. Art Journal, Spring, 2005.
"For one thing, as demonstrated by the numerous high-profile exhibitions on the topic, the art world now appears embroiled in a turf war, in which its official institutions (namely, museums, those loci of art-historical knowledge) are imagined to defend their proprietary interests from global "outsiders" and their curatorial incursions. By the same token, something of a colonial logic underwrites the expansion of the art world's traditional borders, as if the art world itself were gleefully following globalization's imperial ndate." - Pamela M. Lee. Boundary issues: the art world under the sign of globalism. ArtForum, Nov, 2003.
"So what does it mean to be an African? We can say, it means being in a state of process. I often say that for me America is solid, Europe is fluid, and Africa is gas - all the same but just at different temperatures." Fernando Alvim in interview with Christian Hanussek (2004).
"My overriding memory of the 1995 Africus Johannesburg Biennale was not the art. Nor is it Wayne Barker's stellar bit of curatorial bravado, The Laager fringe exhibition. Rather it was of Tokyo Sexwale and beer. Lots of beer." - Sean O'Toole, X marks the spot. Mail & Guardian, April, 2004.
"It is easier to be an artist now, but harder to know what art to make." - Adrian Searle. How has art changed? in Frieze October 2005.
"People love to fear the worst about art. Nostalgia and doom-mongering are easy indulgences, and sunny optimism is harder to carry off than it looks. Just bear in mind something Andy Warhol said: 'they always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them ourself.'" Dan Fox. Art is changing - into what? in Frieze October 2005.
"As far as Africa is concerned, colonialism is over. Apartheid is over too. Africans are now the free masters of their own destiny. This is why from an intellectual and political point of view, there is no turning away from the difficult work of freedom. It is very risky work because it involves a transformative relation with our past as a condition sine qua non of our control over our own future." Achille Mbembe talking to Christian Hoeller in Chimurenga Online, December 2002.
"In Europe we were unpacking the idea of Africa Europeans have. And
I think it is necessary as well, in Africa, to unpack the idea of Africa.
The ideas imposed on to ourselves. We all have preconceived ideas about
Africa, and maybe Africa [has] the most." Simon Njami in conversation
with Brenton Maart. Unpacking
identity in ZA@play
"No I do not think curators are artists. And if they insist, then they will ultimately be judged bad curators as well as bad artists." - Robert Storr. Reading Circle in Frieze Magazine, October 2005.
"In the post Documenta period, the honeymoon is certainly over for South African, not to mention African, art and artists. In the build up to Documenta, countless curators were trying to pre-empt the choice of African artists and thus many of us enjoyed an unprecedented freedom and wide margin of error. The chips are, however, now down and Africa is the last place on earth that curators will now be looking for art." Kendell Geers. 2002 Year-end Summary in Artthrob, January 2002.
"The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It's overly educated, it's conservative, it's out to criticise not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience?" David Hammons. 1986.
"I do feel the stakes are much higher today and the object of attack quite different. If the study of the avant-garde is to be useful, then we must expand its locus. What would the history of the neo-avant-garde be like if it were to pay attention to the radical trope of subaltern studies in India; liberation theology in South America; resistance art in South Africa; creolité discourse in Martinique and the Caribbean; Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas's 'Third Cinema'; and many other movements that emerged in the last half of the twentieth century, with an awareness that they were intervening strongly in the field of culture and history simultaneously?" - Okwui Enwezor in Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition. Artforum November 2003.
"What most postmodernist writers and critics have seemed comfortable with is a concept of the international centred in the old hegemonic frame of modernism, which has too often ventriloquised the voices of others from an exclusive position that has offered no space for ideas and critiques from distant corners of the globe." - Gavin Jantjes. Preface - Global Visions: Towards a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts.
"I've learned that transforming the exhibition concept as you've described it isn't as difficult as transforming the habitual ways such exhibitions are seen. If true revolution changes the rules on how to change the rules, then we must arrive at terms that transform the very concept of the exhibition." - Francesco Bonami in Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition. Artforum, November 2003.
"Less so than technical policy solutions, there is a need for a renewed public sphere where alternative ideas for specific urban areas can flourish. Such alternative discourses about the city's potentialities emerge from knowledge-generating collectives, or reflexive epistemic communities, that generate new symbols, new imaginings and new political practices - in other words, homebru alternatives." - Edgar Pieterse. Building with ruins and dreams... Exploratory thoughts on realising integrated urban development through crisis in Dark Roast Occasional Paper Series 19.
"I am a stranger in the country of my birth by virtue of being to European in my appearance and culture. But at the same time I am unwelcome in Europe on account of my being too African. I embrace Africa, a violent and volatile space where nothing can be taken for granted, where the very best of both the First and the Third Worlds blend and clash. A place where you can die for what you believe in or for the small change in your pocket. I am the abandoned product of a failed experiment, a hybrid of cultures and identities, a contradiction in terms. Born into an upside down world at the tail end of the illennium, my only responsibility is to this time and place." - Kendell Geers. The perversity of my birth, the birth of my perversity, September 1995.
"Whatever their legal nature, however fraudulent the intent, the remarkable proliferation of scams and schemes of all kinds across urban South Africa not only point to the desperation people have of finding employment and places to live, but also the capacity of residents to converge in all kinds of combinations and generate money on the basis of almost nothing. While I am not encouraging the elaboration of such illegality per se, it does point to how generative other kinds of experimentations with minimal technological investment could be in converging different kinds of actors under a variety of circumstances." - AbdouMaliq Simone. South African urbanism: Between the modern and the refugee camp in Dark Roast Occasional Paper Series 17, 2004.
"The very large inner-city heart of Kaapstad is teeming with a multiplicity of life, lust, movement, vitality, wheeling and dealing and the unmistakable scent of a city on the edge of its own possibilities. Yet, despite the density of sweating bodies and kaleidoscopic styles, there is also an impossible quiet that can only arise from vigorous agonistic contentions as differences rub each other, mostly the wrong way. In other words, the oppressive silence that stem from consensus and shared visions are no longer all the political rage. Thank God." - Edgar Pieterse. Re-dreaming Kaapstad, in Chimurenga 7 : Kaapstad! (and Jozi, the night Moses died), 2005.
"I don't believe artists are limited to their context, so let's not oppose internationalism to localism and judge the latter as better per se. We should think more in terms of possibility and telepoeisis (imagining the imagination of the other). If your cosmopolitan biennial restricts that form of imagination and limits possibility subsequent to the event then its tired - if not then let it ride." E-mail interview with Vasif Kortun and Charles Esche by Katerina Gregos, in Flash Art, May 2005.
"We have to reinvent the places occupied by art, go beyond the limitations of disciplines, cross over the museum walls, discover the underlying implications in the separation of public and private spaces, and redefine the politics of exploitation, whether sexual, ideological, economic, or aesthetic. Art must contribute to making the world a more habitable place." - Rosa Martinez. Launching site - international museum curator in ArtForum, Summer, 1999.
"I have been extremely concerned by the proliferation of and a curatorial tendency toward a neo-nineteenth-century 'discovery' of the new and foreign artist. The overtraveled curator brings back a "discovered" foreign artist, who is in fact already known in his or her own country; and that foreign artist today likely already has a sense of the global, even while staying physically at home." Yinka Shonibare in Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition. Artforum, November 2003.
"Contextualization remains the name of the game; but without locally-generated artistic references and sources, where is the backbone of a more inclusive and shared discourse? On what grounds do you build local art critical debates? No wonder the art works easily fall prey to superimposed categorization on the international scene-they keep traveling without any luggage! The question on everybody's mind remains: What curatorial strategies work amidst these conditions? What are the criteria for evaluating whether or not a curatorial strategy works anyway? Mai Abu Eldahab. Art in the age of globalization in Bidoun.
"I confess to the naive utopian view that art can have a political impact, if not in the short term, then at least in the long term. Avant-gardism may have become ossified; I, for one, continue to support the spirit of vanguardism. This is why I think that the global exhibition expresses a continuing convergence of the world." - Yinka Shonibare in Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition. Artforum, November 2003.
If you ask me, I would claim that most biennials, however compensatory and impoverished they may appear, are the true sites of enlightened debate on what contemporary art means today, a position thoroughly abdicated by museums. The proposed model of discourse that they insinuate is reticular, and when the dust settles they may perhaps give direction to how we think of, write about, and curate contemporary art." - Okwui Enwezor in Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition. Artforum, November 2003.
Biennales 101
There are more than 50 biennales operating across the globe. That makes for an average of one every two weeks. Hell, just keeping up with the rotation is a full-time job in itself. But are these large-scale international shows just tourist attractions? Do they have potential to challenge the centre-first model of global art and open up new platforms for experimentation and exchange? We check out some key text that are part of the ongoing debate on large-scale international art events.
Global Tendencies: Globalism and the Large-Scale Exhibition, Artforum, Nov, 2003.
Boundary issues: the art world under the sign of globalism by Pamela M. Lee. ArtForum, Nov, 2003.
1997 Ad by Mary Anne Staniszewski. ArtForum, Sept, 1997.
Contemporary Art and Globalisation. Tate Modern and The Open University Study Days, March, 2005.
Continental shift - interview with art museum curator Okwui Enwezor by Carlos Basualdo. ArtForum, Nov, 1998.
Ordering the universe: Documenta 11 and the apotheosis of the occidental gaze by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie. Art Journal, Spring, 2005
The World of Differences - Notes about art, globalization, and periphery by Gerardo Mosquera. Universes-in-universe, Magazine, 1995.
Identity exhibitions: from Magiciens de la terre to Documenta 11 by Reesa Greenberg. Art Journal, Spring, 2005.
Behind the biennale blues by Brenda Atkinson. Electronic Mail & Guardian, December 11, 1997.
X marks the spot by Sean O'Toole. Electronic Mail & Guardian, April 23 2004.
A third Johannesburg biennale, yes or no? Artthrob, Oct 1999.