The visual culture of African cities has been a topic of many disciplines, especially of art history, history, cultural studies, social and cultural anthropology. The complex subject requires approaches that simultaneously address questions of individual as well a socially shared experience, convention and creativity, imagination and representationn. Recent empirical studies addressed one or the other aspect; however, the often diverging perspectives were seldom integrated into a wider framework or a comparative perspective. This panel brings together scholars from different disciplines and looks at the possibilities to develop a more comprehensive view of visual culture and aesthetic practice in African urban life..
Whoever walks through an African city immediately becomes aware of the stimulating presence of visual media in every street. The well known barber shop sign paintings alternate with advertisements of any other small business. They all compete with global brands like Coca Cola, Guinness, Maggi and the like, but also with political posters and billboards alerting against HIV infection. Less visible but certainly no less influential are other popular media, in particular videos and DVDs produced in Nigeria, India or Ghana and, more recently, the internet. Works of fine art may be confined to special places and audiences, however, actors in the art world intensively participate in other arenas of visual culture, too.
Seen from the actors’ perspective, it is crucial to acknowledge the dissolution of boundaries in African urban life and its visual culture. Aesthetic practice is neither something peculiar to the field of fine arts nor to the popular imagination. Understood in a wide sense, aesthetic practice is indebted to all aspects of visual culture. The vast body of material that had been collected during the last years may serve as a basis to write a history of images and imagination in urban Africa. However, what is still very much needed is a learned conceptualisation of how the different fields of visual culture interact and of what this means to the aesthetic practice of the spectators and artists. Another question that may be addressed in future but already needs to be kept in mind is how the visual interacts with other modes of experience, in particular the oral.
Fine art in Zimbabwe’s contemporary art world is not solely created by local artists, but also by its audience, including curators, art dealers and other mediators. By looking at the interactions in different art worldly contexts and milieus, the paper analyses art production as agency in search for the ‘aesthetic moment’, as a concept to understand the practice of visual arts in Zimbabwe today.
Most artisanal practice, whether sign-painting, woodcarving, metallurgy or other media, is carried out in market sheds, backyards and alleyways as an informal sector activity in African economies, which has two major effects on the field of visual culture. First, it makes very clear the “foreignness” of art/artifact distinctions found in Western aesthetic systems (since everything from sculpture to radio repair is carried out under similar working conditions), and second, it affirms Maquet’s point that the aesthetic locus of a culture may lie somewhere outside the arenas of cultural production where it resides in Western practice. In the case of multicultural urban areas there may be numerous loci, but the point remains that these aesthetic loci have little to do with the arts of delectation found in museums or the institutionalized artworld in general. This paper will demonstrate the workings of Jua Kali, the informal sector mode of artisanal production as it is known in Kenya and the ways in which different aesthetic loci interact. It will also raise the issue of urban-rural distinctions and how they might be reexamined more critically.
Painting in Africa is often split between two audiences: The local customers who buy signboards for advertisements or order portraits of their relatives on the one hand, and the regional, national and international artworld on the other. Addressing the local audience is very much a question of negotiation, based on knowledge that both painters and their customers share. However, painters do not know much about actors in the national and international artworld until they enter this sphere and interact with the latter. This paper addresses the question of how the modes of interaction between painters and their audience shape their painting and their understanding of it. It looks also into how this process affects the genres as a social and at times normative construction of what an artwork can be and what it shouldn’t be.
As former cultural boundaries dissolve into global capillaries levels of marginalisation and tensed identity contestations tend to disrupt African post-colonies. And national media closes to contesting popular opinion. In Nigeria popular citizenship reconfigures and negotiates new identities and opinions about its everyday reality. But this contestation is mediated in the visual culture of popular video film. Behind the back of the state, the popular video film in Nigeria as urban practice inserts into its discourse the experiences, anxieties and perspectives of producers and consumers. This research approaches social change and decolonisation in Nigeria using video texts of reconstructed social practice.
The visuality of African leaders has its own history of production, aesthetics and reception. Whilst obviously embedded in nation building and statehood projects, the visual construction of African leaders has also to be seen against the backdrops of fatherhood and masculinity, genealogy and spirituality, memory and nationalist historiography. By analysing posters from four decades we discuss in our paper the construction of the two most prominent Namibian leaders: Hendrik Witbooi, icon of anti-colonial resistance who died in 1905, and Sam Nujoma, president of Namibia from 1990 to 2005. We pay particular attention to the visual presence of these leaders in everyday contexts like awareness campaigns, consumer advertising, money transactions etc. Apart from the explicit leadership qualities and power positions being advertised in political, i.e. election campaigns, the daily visual presence of these leaders make them guardians of gendered morals, apostles of modernisation and angels of history.