Exhibiting Africa

 The way curation has evolved throughout time in mainstream art spaces in the EuroAmerican tradition continues to move increasingly toward interdisciplinary perspectives and modes of engagement. Whilst is it clear there continues to be many ways institutions as vehicles between artists and the public manage this relationship concerning how different works should be thought about, the difference between the Carrie May Weems exhibition and the original Africa: The Art of a Continent is indicative of the ways in which Blackness is art is permissible to engage with.

The overall transition is reflective of moving from engaging with African art objects from an anthropological view with an aim to find sameness and commonalities indicative of difference compared to the West, toward a more nuanced engagement with work that deals explicitly with Blackness (among other views of gender and class) across one artist's oeuvre. This shift to a more complex engagement with conditions and expressions of Blackness is reflective of the many ways Blackness has been theorised not only as this imagined site of projection of Otherness, but a site that requires critical and serious engagement by and from those who engage in Blackness as a localised reality.

The original 1996 exhibition functions almost to put a full stop at the extent of African art and its curation, working to showcase an exhibition of newness, otherness without a truly critical interrogation of each object and how it might relate to its localised geographic and temporal origins, to other objects in the exhibition beyond coming from the continent of Africa. This is a reflection of the idea of Africa holding more meaning as a site for imagination. The latter exhibition, informed by a generation of scholars, critics and artists who through various networking and institutional means have galvanised a platform through which to exert their agency as living archives and expressers of Blackness, provides an engagement that is much more informed by practitioners of Black art. The multidisciplinary nature of the exhibition speaks to the ways in which Black art (visual) is not in isolation to other expressions or engagements with Blackness and places Weems' work in dialogue with her contemporaries as opposed to an atemporal expression of an imagined projected upon site.

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