In September 2020, Zeitz MOCAA announced a five-day online Radical Solidarity Summit linking artists, writers, curators and activists. Its programme addressed Pan-African resistance, publishing, collective practice, urban space and possible cultural futures during the pandemic. Participants included Achille Mbembe, Nontsikelelo Mutiti and Emeka Okereke, while Ghana’s blaxTARLINES KUMASI was invited to take over the museum’s Instagram account during the 14–18 September gathering.
ART AFRICA previewed a February 2020 collaboration between Aspire and Paris-based auction house Piasa. The Cape Town sale was advertised with 198 lots by 139 artists from 27 countries across Africa and its diaspora, spanning modernism, contemporary art and photography. Works by Chéri Samba, Marlene Dumas, Uche Okeke and Rotimi Fani-Kayode appeared in the selection. The article presented auction estimates and expectations, rather than completed sale results.
Hyperallergic’s Claire Breukel considers Environment and Object: Recent African Art, a publication developed by curators Lisa Aronson and John S. Weber. She finds its attention to materials and artists’ social and ecological surroundings a useful alternative to familiar stereotypes. While valuing the historical context and an interview with Chika Okeke-Agulu, she questions the absence of contributors based at African universities among the book’s essay writers.
Hyperallergic·
Johannesburg Art Gallery, photographed in 1988. Historical venue context, not a view of the 2007 Africa Remix exhibition. Photo: Janek Szymanowski / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.Janek Szymanowski · CC BY-SA 3.0
Africa Remix arrived at Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2007 with work by eighty-five artists from twenty-five countries, according to ArtThrob's contemporary review. Landi Raubenheimer examined how photography, video and installation unsettled familiar views of Africa and raised questions about belonging. Her discussion included Samuel Fosso, Zineb Sedira, Joël Andrianomearisoa and Moataz Nasr. The review records the exhibition's South African presentation, listed for 24 June to 30 September, rather than its earlier overseas tour.
The Museum of Modern Art’s March 1935 announcement proposed an exhibition of 603 African objects from museum and private collections. Sculpture and masks were to appear alongside musical instruments and everyday objects such as spoons and headrests. The release related African artistic forms to modern European art. Read today, it documents both the planned exhibition and a period museum viewpoint that needs critical historical context.
By AFROSCOPE Daily·Source: The Museum of Modern Art·
