We are standing in a building that was built at the turn of the 20th
century. Originally this building was a grain silo and it was from this grain silo
that the exportation of grain went out to the rest of the world. About a hundred
years later the building is decommissioned. It's now a National
Monument, which means it can't be bashed down, it can't be changed, the facade
can't be changed, and so there was an idea to turn this
building into a Museum of Contemporary Art. So we are standing in the Zeitz
Museum of Contemporary Art Africa and our mission really in a nutshell is to
collect, preserve, research and exhibit cutting-edge artifacts from the 21st
century from Africa and its diaspora, so that means artists in any of the 54
states in Africa, artists who might live elsewhere, who see
an african heritage, like african american artists through the history of
slavery, potentially afro-british artists afro-caribbean artists, afro-brazilian
artists, so it's really the discussion and dialogue about art in and from
africa and its influences in the world. It opens in September 2017. We have nine
floors, the museum is quite large, of which seven are open to the public, two
floors are dedicated to the permanent collection, two floors are dedicated to
temporary exhibitions, which means we can host exhibitions from anywhere in the
world not necessarily artists from Africa, so
our creatives can also be exposed to what's happening elsewhere, and then
we've come up with a model that we think works for us, instead of having
departments in the museum we have institutions or centers so each of these
places have their own staff, their own space, their own budget, and this is to
make sure that there's a diversity of voices, a diversity of visions and that
there's not one kind of monolithic curator or person that defines the whole
mission of the museum. So we carefully looked at the traditions within Africa.
Photography was very important to dedicate a center to because of its role
in the liberation struggles from the 1960s to the present in Africa. We felt
that there were some mediums like performative practice and moving image
which were new exciting things we believed our public would enjoy, costume
because so much of body decoration, body modification, body painting etcetera
began on this continent. So we wanted to really try to recognize the creative
components that began or were influenced by this place and then many many many
galleries. We have over a hundred galleries in the museum to exhibit art
from around the world.
we're the first major Museum of Contemporary Art in Africa and I think for a very
long time one of the problems especially in our country, in South
Africa, because of apartheid, was that cultural access was a complex thing. Many
people were denied representation, many people were not encouraged to access
cultural centers, and I think for us was very important to make sure that that
pie that everybody fought for actually was bigger so that there was an opportunity
for each individual to say this is how I want to represent myself to the world.
One of our very important missions is about Africa from Africa by Africa,
and this idea of making a platform, and that's part of what my responsibilities
in this project has been is to create a platform along with the architect and
the founders and the trustees for various people to come forward and to
say this is how we want to represent ourselves to the world, this is how we
want the world to see us, and a very strong kind of force that kept
coming through was that people from the continent want to not control how they
were spoken about, but at least participate in how they story was told,
how they narrative is recorded for the world, and so scale was very important to
do that because if it was small it would mean that it would have to be limited
amounts of people, limit limited amounts of representation, and here we have an
opportunity to really celebrate a much broader spectrum of cultural traditions,
of artistic traditions and of personal visions of artists and curators.
I think it was very important for myself, the curators and the trustees of the
museum, the founders of the museum, to really give the creators from Africa an
equal playing ground, you know, you have the Whitney Museum of American Art you
have the Tate Britain of British art, you know these are institutions which take
as their motivation to collect and record and position artists from their
Nations and we felt it was very important for us
to be able to create that same platform on a high level, so that our artists can
compete in some way and also have the resources, financial, space, logistics,
climate control, to be able to give them the freedom to imagine the dreams
and visions that they want to execute and they want to make reality. So
I think that was very important, I think from a knowledge point of view, you
know, many people are saying to me how exciting is it that the world is
discovering Africa and I don't think that the world is discovering Africa.
I think what the world is doing is they're discovering their ignorance about Africa,
you know, it's them that are being educated it's not… you know,
there's been extraordinary artistic production on this continent. If you look
at the Biennale and so many of the extraordinary artists that have been
represented on the Biennales over the last decades, which have come from this
continent and I think that now what's happening is that the kind of
international art world more and more starting to recognize that perhaps they
missed out, perhaps that they overlooked things so it wasn't that they
discovering us but they discovering a little bit of inadequacy in their view
of artistic production which was a very Eurocentric or northern hemisphere
centric tradition and I think it's exciting that the art world is
recalibrating itself that it's re-looking at things and saying actually, you know
what, perhaps there's a broader conversation perhaps that there's much
more global and regional kind of conversation that's happening and we
can't just focus on specific areas in these art centers
in the northern hemisphere.
When we built the collection for the museum and also the exhibition strategy
we had a very I would say political position that we took. For a very long
time many cultural artifacts were taken from Africa, the Benin bronzes for
instance in the British Museum, many many German museums, is a good example where
it was a punitive mission where these objects were taken to punish the Benin
people and there's many, many examples of this. There's of course great conversations
whether these objects should be returned or not, but that's historical museums
that's historical practice. What we find in contemporary practice now is that a
lot of the objects are still leaving the continent because the world has woken up
to the extraordinary creativity and especially contemporary creativity on
the continent and museums have not been keeping up collections, have not been
keeping up, so there is a real emphasis or an impetus to collect work from this
region from this moment in time, but with the strength of the euro and the dollar
and whatever and the pound and the devalued currencies in Africa what
happens is, the market now advantages these objects to leave. So one of our
motivations was to make sure that seminal artifacts from the continent
would remain on the continent or return to the continent. So from a collecting
and exhibition point of view we've tried to identify very important moments such
as when Edson Chagas won the golden lion in Venice four years ago, the first
time an African pavilion won the golden lion, we bought the entire pavilion and
it will be recreated here. When Kudzanai Chuirai was on not this year's
document but five years ago, we bought the entire installation, when Nicholas
Hlobo presented his rubber dragon in the Arsenale which was really kind of one
of the high points of the Biennale that year we bought that, so part of
that the strategy of the collection was to buy these objects in and to make sure
that they are here and accessible and I think that there's a big difference in
seeing an object, you know, to see Andy Warhol in New York as opposed to in
Cologne, you know the cologne museum has a great collection of American pop,
I think they might have even collected it before the Americans, very forward-thinking, but
it makes a difference in some way to see the artifact in the place it was made,
there's a texturality about it, it's just different. So from the
permanent collections point of view what you'll see when you visit is these
really seminal objects either that you've seen elsewhere in the world and
Biennales and Documentas, on major exhibitions, or that you might
have read about, that you haven't seen yet So it's really a depository of these
really important moments. Mixed in with that, we've made a decision that will
take enormous risks and collect very young cutting-edge artists. So we don't
have this hierarchy with the market itself or collectors desires define the success
or the position of an artist and more it's the quality, the evocativeness, the
the regional context, many different things that can make something relevant
for what we do. I think that there's many many other important aspects to the
way that what you'll see when you get here. What we decided to do was that
in building the collection we wouldn't do encyclopedic collections so one or two
of each thing or chronological, but what we would do is we would try to identify
artists from regions across Africa and the diaspora for which we felt represented a
certain kind of interesting conversation or language or challenge or whatever and
collect those people in great depth. So for example one of our opening
exhibitions is by Nandipha Mntambo from Swaziland and I think we own
60 or 70 of her pieces, Kudzanai Chuirai who has another opening exhibition, from
Zimbabwe, again 65 pieces. I think it's important because
we are in a place in the world where as I said before these museums were not
accessible for the general public, they were very exclusive, slightly
intimidating spaces and our museum has a great job to do to break down the
barriers so that the public understand, this is theirs, this is their cultural
heritage, this is their place and they need to own it. So I think that in that
process we've had to say it's not going to be possible for somebody to come in
and see one piece and understand the artists concerns. We need to
buy or collect large bodies of work. It has also given our curators very
exciting opportunities because it means that they can do entire exhibitions,
entire retrospectives from the museum's collection, or Mr. Zeitz's
collection, which I think gives a lot of freedom to curators as opposed to
having three or four pieces which you have to contextualize in a kind of
almost outside of a general kind of view. I think it helps the public to
understand the artists view, their oeuvre, their production, the conceptual progress
of an artist's career, the insight into how the artist thinks, what their
concerns are, so I think that's going to be something that the public are going
to enjoy a lot. You know, each artist for the opening has an entire gallery
dedicated to them and some of the galleries are enormous, so you will see
major bodies of work of one particular artist grouped together to get an
in-depth understanding of that artist. Obviously because we aspire to be as
representative as possible for African and diaspora you will also see artists
from all different regions. So the Center for photography will be opened by an
artist from North Africa called Mouna Karray, there's three solo exhibitions I
mentioned, Edson Chagas from Angola, Nandipha Mntambo from Swaziland,
Kudzanai Chuirai from Zimbabwe and then of course our big opening exhibition
which will take three floors of the museum is based on the title
of a work by Hank Willis Thomas, the african-american artist, called "All
things being equal" and it's really just an extraordinary indulgence of the
creativity and the prowess and the technical ability of artists who are
somehow associated with Africa. So there's not like a hard rigorous
curatorial premise for the bigger show it's more just to show the strength
and the diversity and the creativity that's happening here right now. I think
this is a very… the opening we hope will be a very celebratory moment for the
continent. So we want… look, nothing that you'll see is going to be easy and we've
chosen extremely difficult, challenging conceptual, political… lots of the work is
very hard for social commentary, identity, politics, issues of violence
against females, and prejudice against the LGBTI communities. So we haven't,
we haven't been easy in the show, but I think that the quality of the work of
the artists that are being made on the continent I think is extraordinary and
that's what we have a responsibility to show for our opening exhibitions, and
then as we move on I think we'll start seeing more and more particular
exhibitions, where a curator has a very particular view and a conversation with
an artist that they want to, but I think the first show really has to represent a
broad spectrum of what Africa is, you know, I mean it's a huge continent.
I'm really looking forward to this museum as that you know so many of us
have had to make the pilgrimage to Basel and to Documenta and to Munster and to
Venice and whatever other Biennales we all visit and for once the world is
going to have to make the pilgrimage the opposite way and I think that's a very
important gesture to say that you know you have to… you now have to make an
effort, you now have to displace yourself, you have to be kind of an immigrant
for two days, a weekend immigrant, you know, just something to understand that
there's places and worlds and cultures and experiences which are not inferior or
superior, they're just different and by being exposed to them, I think when
you walk around the museum, you see the art, by being exposed to them, how it
enriches your view of the world and how you understand a different view of
Africa. You know, Africa for a very long time sold a negative kind of image of itself
and I think part of this project is also to show that they are extraordinary
positive stories coming out of Africa. To build an institution of this
scale with over a hundred galleries, six independent institutions, you know,
I mean 55 curators, it's a major institution and I think just in itself
the scale of that makes a statement not only about the positiveness that one can
see here but also the confidence that I think many Africans feel or beginning to
feel about their place in the world and where they are you know and that we
don't necessarily have to be subservient to the trends from elsewhere that our
production is just as interesting.
We had so many conversations about is there an African model for a museum. You know,
the last time we met was when I was working in Miami and everyone was
speaking at that time in the early 2000s about the Miami model, you know, private
collectors making public spaces or publicly accessible spaces and we've had
a lot of conversations about is there such a thing as an African model. Then
the one thing that we have concluded is that we don't have to play by the rules
of elsewhere. We can make our own rules, we can make our own criteria, you know,
and in that process perhaps innovation can happen because if
you're comparing yourself constantly you know you, just the idea of world class or
international class or international level, you know, we've started to speak
about the fact, well, that doesn't really matter, because we must make criteria for
ourselves based on the values and cultures and the empiric
conversations, the empirical conversations that are happening here and across the
continent, you know, otherwise it just becomes like another Museum of
Contemporary Art following the rules of every other museum of contemporary art.
So we have to kind of invent something, you know, and I think lots of the
challenges that we are facing with engaging a new public and a new audience,
an audience that has been completely excluded dealing with artwork that
perhaps is not known by the rest of the world, these are not problems for us, these
are great opportunities because it means that we can invent ways to engage with
this as opposed to have predetermined solutions which is "best practice", you
know, from other places, you know.
When I was growing up in South Africa you know everything that we studied for
four years in art history was Egypt, Roman, Greece, Renaissance, whatever. We
spent like a day or two on the culture of our own country, own continent and
what I think is extraordinary with this institution is it's going to bring
attention to production on our continent by our people, in our places and it's not
a nationalism but it is a certain kind of pride, it is a certain kind of saying
what we do has a validity, it has a gravitas, it has a reason for
being and I think for me personally that that means a lot because to come from a
moment of apartheid where we were all told how to behave, who we could fall in
love with, who we could sit on a bus with, who we were allowed to eat in a restaurant
with, to a place where we have an institution that says let's celebrate
all these things that make us special and not separate ourselves from everyone
you know I think for me that's an extraordinary thing and I think also to
create an institution where the people of the region can write their own
history, on their terms. I think that the the weight of that opportunity is
extraordinary, you know, and I think, we talk about liberation movements in
Africa, I think this is part of that, this is part of Africa saying we also want to
take back not only our land, not only our governance, not only our
self-determination, but we want to take back our cultural representation as well
and at least be part of the conversation of how we're seen in the world and how we
managed and how we projected. I don't think any culture or any nation could
absolutely control themselves because that's just nationalism that's not
interesting, but at least be participating in your own representation
I think the gesture of that for me is an extraordinary powerful thing.
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