Contemporary African art

Western scholars and curators have made numerous attempts at defining contemporary African art since the 1990s and early 2000s and proposed a range of categories and genres.

The global presence and entanglement of Africa and its contemporary artists have become a widely acknowledged fact that still requires and provokes critical reflection, but finds itself beyond the pressure of self-justification.

However, this reception, too, has its roots in an exotic and mystifying view on African culture from a dominant western position, as Rasheed Araeen argued in his response to Magiciens de la terre.

[4][5] Therefore, although this exhibition and many that followed had a strong influence in creating a kind of a common understanding of what constitutes contemporary African art, it is true that it has been and still is subject to discussions and controversies.

Almost every exhibition following Magiciens de la terre offered a taxonomy or system of categorization that helped to reflect the very notion of contemporary African art, but they failed to recognize the postcolonial need of giving up the Eurocentric epistemology.

[13] Rejecting these categories, collector André Magnin proposed grouping similar works into sections named "territory", "frontier" and "world" in his survey book Contemporary African Art, thus placing them into "imaginary maps".

[17][7][18][19] Such Eurocentric attitudes have been revealingly criticized by theorists such as Olu Oguibe,[17] Rasheed Araeen,[4] Nkiru Nzegwu,[7] Okwui Enwezor or Salah M.

The exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, directed by Clémentine Deliss and curated by Chika Okeke-Agulu, Salah M. Hassan, David Koloane, Wanjiku Nyachae and El Hadji Sy (London, 1995) is a case in point.

In their book, Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu discuss contemporary African art by its approaches and guiding topics, rather than trying to define categories on the basis of styles, markets or traditions.

For instance, Lizelle Bisschoff defines it as "artistic work or practice that uses digital technologies as an essential part of the creative and/or presentation, dissemination and exhibition process".