Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora
Until September 11

When the Hayward Gallery mounted their massive show, Africa Remix, early this year, they hoped to show us that images of war and starvation were not all the continent had to offer. Instead we were shown a vibrant and dynamic Africa, bursting with ideas and creativity.

In the few short months since then, war and starvation have found their way back to the top of our collective vision of Africa. That’s a good thing, of course, if we can truly make a difference for millions of impoverished people. But while we’re busy thinking about cancelling Africa’s debts, we should consider the massive debt that we have to pay to Africa.

That’s because Great Britain and most of her G8 cronies were among the 14 countries at the Berlin Conference in 1884, where the African map was crudely carved up and shared out. Much of the continent’s current trouble can be traced back directly to the day those arbitrary, straight-edged borders were drawn, with no regard to the social and cultural realities on the ground.

National identity is, understandably, a pretty touchy subject for African artists. The Hayward’s catalogue was full of hand-wringing angst about the appropriateness of grouping such a disparate array of people together under one cultural banner. Now Edinburgh has bagged the first UK showing of another major contemporary African exhibition, whose hand-wringing index is even higher.

Looking Both Ways, organised by New York’s Museum for African Art, is devoted to eleven African artists who live and work outside the continent. These “diasporan” artists have left for various reasons, ranging from civil war to artistic ambition. To meet with international success, it is more or less necessary for African artists to leave their country, an experience which will find much sympathy in Scotland.

While some artistic exiles feel a deep connection to their home, others prefer to blend into the global mainstream. But the mainstream has other ideas: many of the artists in this show have found that, outside Africa, they are expected to reflect publicly on their Africanness. They have become the “other”, and are expected to make that their subject.

This is where the hand-wringing starts; should the artists play up their origins or dismiss them? And does it help to mount an exhibition which further plays the African card? This exhibition’s uneasy self-justification echoes that of Africa Remix: there is no such movement as African art, the curators say, and our disparate mix will prove it.

Ten of the eleven artists in the Edinburgh show were also featured in Africa Remix. Nothing was made of it at the time, but almost half of the 86 artists shown there were diasporan. You could spot the difference from a mile off: the international art scene may be diverse, but it breeds a certain kind of approach to making art, and offers easy access to certain kinds of materials. There was more uniformity amongst those who had left Africa than those who had stayed.

So, Looking Both Ways is very much set in the context of western art. It deals not simply with the experience of being African, but more specifically with the experience of being African in the USA or Europe. And, sometimes, more generally, with the experience of being caught in the limbo between two lands.

Allan deSouza’s Threshold Series is a case in point; a bank of small, framed photos show futuristic airports and other in-between places, empty of people and gleaming with chromed promise. They are conveyor belts for human beings, their universal style of design disguising their geographic locations. In these spaces, everyone is a nomad.

Zineb Sedira’s seven-screen video installation, On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, continues this theme. A flight from London to Algiers is documented from start to finish, and while the images are brutally mundane, Sedira gets across the feeling of being everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, stretched impossibly between two continents.

Yinka Shonibare, nominated for last year’s Turner Prize, dominates the upper of the two exhibition floors with a typically theatrical tableau. Scramble for Africa represents the Berlin Conference, and in colourful style inspires disgust. Fourteen mannequins are dressed in Shonibare’s trademark African fabrics, arguing over a 19th century map of Africa.

The fabric, which everyone understands as quintessentially African, was actually an import from Holland and Manchester. So, while the 14 non-African nations divvied up Africa’s borders, they rebranded its cultural identity too.

This revision of Africa’s constructed image is also at the heart of Hassan Musa’s project. His series of paintings on printed fabric, called Who Needs Bananas?, recalls the 1920s Parisian star, Josephine Baker, in her famously provocative poses. Dancing in nothing but a string of bananas, Baker shrewdly exploited the stereotype of primitive sexuality associated with African women. Musa disapproves of contemporary African artists who bow to the same stereotyping pressures, producing consciously African work to please the market.

The most alluring work in the show is that of New York-based Wangechi Mutu, whose photomontages are brought to life with glorious passages of ink. Her hybrid female figures are a deformed cross between pin-up girls and scientific specimens. The mutant creatures, in their high-heeled shoes, sit on toadstools and have blotches and protrusions everywhere.

These beautiful gargoyles are suggestive of modern woman’s self-mutilation in the name of beauty. But they might also recall the days – horribly recent – when Africans were caged for public spectacle. Only five years ago did Spain return the stuffed body of an African man which had been in their museum since 1916.

That’s the kind of history these artists all have to deal with. Their great grandmothers might have been paraded as medical specimens around Amsterdam. Their grandfathers might have been stuffed and captioned. When the wounds are this fresh, no wonder identity is a thorny issue.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 26.06.05