On institutional discourse surrounding contemporary african art: redefining africanness ?

Abstract

The study of institutional discourses surrounding contemporary African art reveals the expectations of their authors and the approach of artists on which they are based. The selection of artists seems to be made on the basis of an “africanness index”, a notion invented during the exhibition Magiciens de la terre (1989). The selection of works is based on transverse issues, identified as the issues or challenges that the continent is facing (migration, identity). Thus, the figure of the contemporary African artist appears to be an institutional fabrication, and leaves little room for creators’discourses. At work in the observable institutional domination of artists, and in institutional policies that are at once unclear and striving for uniformity, one can discern a manifestation of a “power of conceiving of the other” and a vision of the African artist as the others of Western art.