image from South African Art Times
“Contemporary African Art Since 1980“, by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu. perfect timing, i want this book.
check out the link and some sample images from the book. the David Goldblatt picture is so powerful…
Archive for the ‘africa’ Category
african art since 1980
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009“Forgiveness is not for sissies”
Friday, December 11th, 2009South Africa Is Divided on Gesture by Educator
For a speech about reconciliation it could hardly have been more divisive. Jonathan D. Jansen, the new head of the University of the Free State, spoke of the “place of infamy” just 100 yards behind him, the residence hall where four white students last year made a racist video that incited outrage across the country.
Those students had been expelled, but now the new rector announced that they were welcome to return, pardoned of any further campus discipline. The young men may have been racially troubled, he explained, but the bigger problem lay with the university, which itself was racist.
- read more on nytimes
yes, it takes much courage to forgive; but is Jansen in the position to do the forgiving?
“Those boys treated us like we were no more than toilets and now we are being treated that way again by Jonathan Jansen,” one of the workers, Rebecca Adams, complained.
as much as i admire desmond tutu, it seems to me rather easy for someone on the podium to be all theoretically generous and to practice ‘forgiveness’ in a messiah-like fashion. but those who were at the brunt of such discrimination is not ready to do any forgiving soon – and understandably so.
achille mbembe: the invention of joburg
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Lindsay Bremner, Rita Barnard at Slought Foundation:
The Invention of Johannesburg [mp3]
“In many senses, there is no metropolis without a necropolis. Just as the metropolis is closely linked to monuments, artifacts, technological novelty, an architecture of light and advertising, the phantasmagoria of selling, and a cornucopia of commodities, so is it produced by what lies below the surface. In the case of Johannesburg, the underground is not simply a technological space emptied of social relations. It does not exist only in an abstract realm of instrumentality and efficiency. In fact, it always was a space of suffering and alienation as well as of rebellion and insurrection. The French equation between underground space and revolution or insurrection (the dream of radical equality evidenced in the signifier of the Catacombs) holds in the case of Johannesburg. [...] Johannesburg clearly shows that one of the characteristic features of a metropolis is an underneath. [...] The underground is not to be understood simply in terms of an infrastructure and various subterranean spaces (sewers and drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, storage vaults and so on). The world below (the underworld) is also made up of lower classes, the trash heap of the world above, and subterranean utopias. Like the nineteenth-century European city, the vertical and racial segmentation of the Johannesburg urban world was given structure and order by what it relegated beneath. As far as Johannesburg is concerned, more than the surfaces of the vertical city with its skyscrapers, the underground seems to hold the keys to unlocking the secrets of its modernity.”
- Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, “Introduction: Afropolis,” Johannesburg: the elusive metropolis (2008) [more at slought.org]
…
i really wanted to attend this lecture in person, but alas classes got in the way. for those who know my work, Mbembe’s writings really influenced me, especially for eGoli, 2008. not to mention the invaluable one-on-one critique i got with the generous Lindsay Bremner, who took time off just to speak to me about the piece, as additional input from a ‘non-fine arts’ and slightly more theoretical point of view.
achille mbembe on how to think of africa
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009Carte blanche à Achille Mbembe. Conférence du 28 janvier 2008 organisée par le Groupe d’initiatives et de recherches sur l’Afrique de la Sorbonne, avec Achille Mbembe, Jean-François Bayart, Richard Banégas et Saïd Abass Ahamed.
the video is in french, but it’s not terribly hard to catch what he’s saying (despite my rusty french) as mbembe speaks quite clearly.
soft power
Friday, October 30th, 2009have been reading up on the notion of ‘soft power‘ recently. apparently it was Lǎozǐ who came up with the concept initially in Dàodéjīng 道德經 in 7c BC, then adopted by Joseph Nye and Steven Lukes in a modern sense.
china’s been pushing this soft power thing hard, setting up Confucius Institutes all around the world (it was only recently that i knew such a thing existed). just how effective they are is not yet known.
having spent way too much money at Ikea yesterday, it occured to me that the furniture giant is totally exercising ’soft power’ for sweden – selling swedish design, meatballs, groceries and books. i had never eaten at Ikea before so i gave it a taste; it was surreal.
i even got some ’swedish salmon roe’ in a tube:
then i went home and read about the ‘sybiosis of sweden and ikea‘.
this sort of thing is probably what china is aiming for; but what can it market to create such attraction towards all things chinese? at the moment it seems like they are selling ‘confucianism’, not without some paradox: