Beyond Geography: Africa and Colonial Time in Who Knows Tomorrow

During the summer of 2010 the cityscape of Berlin became an important site for contemplating the role and meaning of “Africa” in current exhibition-and art-making practices. Who Knows Tomorrow, a multivenue exhibition organized by the Nation-algalerie, moved beyond multicultural celebrations of globalism and the overarching geographic and spatial taxonomies that still dominate most African art exhibitions. Instead, the exhibition foregrounded the ambiguous presence of colonial time in the analysis of Africa by emphasizing temporal interconnections and transitional moments. By refusing to emphasize geography or identity as categories of analysis, Who Knows Tomorrow promises an alternative logic for the study of Africa’s relation to the world, suggesting new modes of interpretation that begin to acknowledge the disquiet that the coloniality of modernity continues to reproduce in the study of African cultural production.