This article examines two projects by artists living and working in Nairobi. It asks questions about how these artists are visualizing or otherwise materializing in their work the specificity of their contemporary geopolitical and geocultural situation in relation to capitalism. How might this specificity allow these artists to elucidate aspects of contemporary capitalism’s cultural logic that are all too often invisible to people living in other parts of the world? How might it allow them to reframe or gain new traction on what Fredric Jameson once called a “radical cultural politics,” an operation that presupposes, in much Marxist and post-Marxist analysis, an ability to represent one’s location within the system of contemporary capitalism?
Contemporary Africa is clearly not a featureless void defined only by its exclusion from the benefits of global capitalism, nor is it an informational “black hole.”
— James Ferguson, Global Shadows
Among the many unexpected insights of Sidney Kasfir’s spellbinding book African Art and the Colonial Encounter is that there has been no substantive change in the concepts, infrastructures, and systems governing the flow of art from the African continent, where it is produced for the express purpose of exportation and sale on the global art market, between the period of what we might call “high” colonialism (Kasfir begins her account with the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 and the start of the so-called scramble for Africa) and the current conjuncture. Whereas the former was characterized by “the specimen-collecting of natural history museums” that was enabled by the acquisition of African colonies by European states in the second half of the nineteenth century,1 the latter has been characterized by a vogue for contemporary African art in high-profile museums and galleries in Europe and North America, and by the increasingly visible presence of African art, artists, and curators on the global biennial circuit.2 Drawing on a meticulous body of comparative, multisited research carried out in Nigeria and Kenya over several decades, Kasfir presents a compelling argument for emphasizing the continuities rather than discontinuities or ruptures in the market trajectory of “primitive” or “traditional” art and that of the “modernist and postmodernist high-art genres” that, today, “form the most discussed and written-about part of the global market for African art.”3
To be sure, the paradigms that once organized and legitimated the collecting of traditional African art in the West and North have succumbed to a certain conceptual static, thanks to the success of the new lexicons of African modernisms and the now ubiquitous category of “contemporary” African art.4 Yet, if we accept Kasfir’s analysis, which has been echoed by a generation of African/ist art historians, including those who (unlike Kasfir) have focused their analytical energies on the modern and the contemporary, this static can be minimized on the macro level—that of the market. In the galleries and collections of Western and Northern museums where it plays out, this static has been mitigated largely through minor shifts in institutional practice and can be played down as a problem largely of periodization and even of semantics. As Okwui Enwezor, Elizabeth Harney, Salah Hassan, Sylvester Ogbechie, and others have pointed out, art objects associated with rural or village-based practices and thought to have been produced by anonymous, long-dead artists (masks, statues, spears, etc.) now happily coexist, in these same museums, with contemporary art produced in radically heterogeneous urban contexts by artists with global brand recognition and encompassing a broad array of genres, media, and styles.5
This coexistence is predicated on the ongoing repression of African modernity in Western (colonial) historical consciousness, and on larger questions at the intersection of postcoloniality and postmodernity, two continents of the mind whose relationship remains, even today despite important work done by important scholars (including Pal Ahluwalia, Achille Mbembe, and Walter Mignolo), perversely undertheorized. As long as these objects stay in the galleries to which they have been assigned—primitive or traditional versus modern or contemporary—the challenges posed by African modernity to the sanctity of colonial knowledge systems or by African contemporaneity to the coherence of neocolonial geopolitics can be conveniently ignored, and we need not rock the boat (or the container ship) of the global export machine.
Kasfir’s and others’ arguments about a radical continuity in the market for African art over time have, or ought to have, theoretical consequences extending far beyond the disciplinary formations of art history and African studies to attain a much broader sphere of contemporary cultural analysis for two main reasons. The first is that art is, in many parts of Africa today, the only commodity produced for global export.6 It follows that contemporary African art can lay claim to a privileged status in any attempt to analyze Africa’s place in the contemporary capitalist system, and in our collective attempt, therefore, to understand contemporary capitalism’s cultural logics on a global scale. The second reason is a distinction that Kasfir effectively makes between the system that was in place, in the colonial era, for sharing profits made from the sale of African art among sovereign European nation-states and the regime that replaced it: that of international nonprofit organizations, philanthropic foundations, and charities, what Kasfir calls “ex-colonial cultural organizations,” and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).7 Both this exceptional visibility of African art as a global commodity and this unmistakable hegemony of the new, nongovernmental regime are, or ought to be, vital factors in any reflection on new possibilities for contemporary cultural analysis articulated from a Marxist vantage point.8
This article examines two projects by artists living and working in a single city in Africa: Nairobi. It pays particularly close attention to how these artists are visualizing or otherwise materializing the specificity of their contemporary geopolitical and geocultural situation in relation to capitalism. How might this specificity allow these artists to elucidate aspects of contemporary capitalism’s cultural logic that are all too often invisible to people living in other parts of the world? How might it allow them to reframe or gain new traction on what Fredric Jameson once called a “radical cultural politics,”9 an operation that presupposes, in much Marxist and post-Marxist analysis, an ability to represent one’s location within the system of contemporary capitalism? My interpretation of these works unfolds against the horizon of a now widely received discourse about a generalized waning of criticality, which it nonetheless seeks to challenge.10 At the same time, it will be informed by analyses of the global art market that have been ventured by African/ist curators, critics, and art historians who have, in recent decades, limned the contours of a collective project that is, despite myriad differences in individual approach, profoundly utopian in nature. This last group—typified by a younger generation of curators, such as Christine Eyene, Smooth Nzewi (who, together with Elise Atangana and Abdelkader Damani, curated Dak’Art 2014), and Elvira Dyangani Ose—has endeavored to rethink the place of Western/Northern exhibitions and global biennial culture as refractive or reflexive spaces that would allow contemporary African artists to interrogate and, in some versions of this project, reconfigure their relationship to global capital.11 The word utopian should be understood in the strong sense here: despite the fact that the collective project is being framed by these curators and by the artists whose work they exhibit from a position “inside” the commercial art world, and one that is deeply conversant with its mores, practices, and institutions, it is oriented by a desire for radical change and by the dream of a future decolonization. One of the works that I discuss can be construed as coming from a position that is precisely “inside” the commercial art world, whereas the second project is not oriented by the market yet is working creatively with new tools and experiences emerging from the specific forms taken by contemporary capitalism in Nairobi’s slums.
What Kind of Cognitive Map Is a Continent
Artist Sam Hopkins, in his ongoing work Logos of Non-Profit Organizations Working in Kenya (some of which are imaginary), reproduces the logos of nonprofit organizations working in Kenya, where the artist is from. As the title of the work suggests, the logos of real organizations are interspersed with the logos of fictional NGOs or nonprofits that Hopkins himself has invented. In the version exhibited at the 2014 Dak’Art Biennale (fig. 2), the logos were silk-screened on canvas, framed and glazed at modest dimensions (20 × 20 × 5 cm each), and wall mounted in three symmetrical rows of eight prints (twenty-four in total).12 In an earlier version of the work, exhibited in 2010 in “Sketches,” a solo show at the Goethe-Institut in Nairobi, the logos were digitally printed on a 3-mm plastic board in grid formation—small enough that there were one hundred of them. Four magnifying glasses were attached to the wall for viewers wanting to study the logos at close range. In neither installation was the viewer given any clues as to which logos were those of a real nonprofit organization and which were fake. Indeed, it is the central conceit of the Logos that the viewer not be able to distinguish real from imaginary.
Hopkins’s Logos can doubtless be interpreted as a critique of the presence of the international aid and development industries in Kenya. Logos mounts this critique aesthetically, through its very form, and by virtue of the fact the logos exist in a critical relation to an aesthetic—what Hopkins himself calls the “NGO aesthetic.” They appropriate this aesthetic precisely by appropriating the visual rhetoric, as well as discursive strategies, of the international aid and development industries, making visible their monopoly on images of Kenya. By choosing to work with the logos of nonprofit organizations—rather than, for example, with documentation of their activities (as has Kiluanji Kia Henda in a parallel context)13—Hopkins’s Logos extend this critique to take aim, beyond the mere fact of its existence, at the decidedly consumerist inflection of the nonprofit industry. An anecdote that the artist recently shared with me about the work’s reception in its initial presentation at the Goethe-Institut, in 2010, only serves to underscore the need for a critical stance on the overwhelming nature of this industry’s presence: at the exhibition opening, he noticed that someone was meticulously copying down, in a notebook, the names of the organizations represented among the logos—under the (mistaken) impression that they were the exhibition’s sponsors.
The situation from which Logos emerges is, in this respect, deeply rooted in the lived experience of Kenyans and in the specific manifestations of contemporary capitalism experienced daily by people living in Nairobi. The banality and the pervasiveness of the NGO aesthetic become even clearer when we consider Hopkins’s larger body of work. Beyond his solo practice, Hopkins has been deeply engaged in participatory and collaborative work, carried out since 2006 with artists and ordinary people living in Nairobi’s slums. This work has, according to the artist, occasionally been funded by nonprofit organizations and NGOs.14 Yet one need not live in Nairobi to recognize the banality and the pervasiveness of the NGO aesthetic. How else to understand the proliferation of bad visual metaphors that have saturated the global image ecology—trees for sustainability, light bulbs for progress, electrification for enlightenment? Hopkins fleshes out this already familiar list with images that perpetuate mystifying gender constructions (young girls must always be poor yet happy, powerful yet in need of “aid”) and Western-centric ideas about friendship between nations. Why not Libya rather than Europe or America?15
A reflection on this aesthetic puts us in mind of Jameson, the foremost Marxist cultural critic to engage with the late twentieth-century “culture of the image” that was the hallmark of the postmodern.16 At first glance, key elements of Hopkins’s Logos do conform to Jameson’s definition of postmodernism. Logos eschews “depth models.”17 It offers “new syntagmatic structures.”18 It delights in simulacra.19 It exhibits an overt self-reflexivity on culture’s (and therefore its own) status as a commodity, which is, according to Jameson, the most fundamental predicate of postmodern culture: “In postmodern culture, ‘culture’ has become a product in its own right,” and “the sphere of culture is the sphere of commodities.”20 This conformity matters because, as I have suggested in passing, the periodization of African art as modern or postmodern (or contemporary) raises larger questions about the challenges posed by African modernity to Western self-perception or self-representation. In other respects, however, Hopkins’s Logos departs from this formal resemblance to the postmodern. Within the logic of Jameson’s Postmodernism, such a departure can be understood to announce either the restoration of a modernist impulse or some other, presumably more radical, departure from the critical impotence of postmodernism. One difference has to do with Hopkins’s use of irony.21 Another point on which this work diverges from both postmodernist and postcritical theories of art is connected with the question of instrumentalization. Here instrumentalization must be framed in the context of a highly specific historical and geopolitical situation—in which art and culture are instrumentalized as much (or more) by the international aid and development industries as by the market—from which (and this is the point) they are not distinct. In a published text, Hopkins describes the origin of his interest in nonprofit organizations, which he traces to the moment that he was cofounding Slum-TV, the well-known community media collective, in 2006, in Mathare. In this text, the artist remarks the role played by his own work in the larger schemes of contemporary “aid” and “development” in Kenya:
During that time I co-founded Slum TV . . . and in the process of doing so I met with many NGOs. I was struck by the very particular language that these NGOs worked with. . .. Often this language seemed to reduce complex issues down to keywords such as Sustainability, Capacity-Building, Synergies, Beneficiation, and Upscaling. Whilst perhaps these keywords are useful in the context of Development, they did not seem suitable or helpful to the art project which we were developing, which was interested in setting up an experimental media project, without anticipated goals and outcomes, in Mathare.22
What in “Cognitive Mapping” Jameson calls the “structural coordinates” of the “global colonial system” pose a problem for representation—and, therefore, it is implied, for contemporary Marxist analysis.23 In that essay Jameson explicitly discusses the problem of globalization in relation to visual and spatial representation, positing an exponential increase, under contemporary capitalism, in the difficulty of pinpointing one’s place in “that great multinational space that remains to be cognitively mapped.”24 He alleges that the structural coordinates of the global colonial system are absent from individual experience and that they therefore escape existing modes of aesthetic representation—for people living in New York (or Boston, or Jersey City, or Los Angeles—the cities included in this initial formulation of cognitive mapping). But they are clearly not absent, Hopkins’s work suggests, from the experience of people living in Nairobi. The Mathare slum in Nairobi in many ways resembles the situation of modern art, which, in the guise of Jameson’s Van Gogh, in Postmodernism, emerged from a world threatened by primitive accumulation in the form of enclosure: “A world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state.”25 But Hopkins’s response to this situation is very different from that of the modernist artist, who attempts to represent the experience of primitive accumulation in isolation from a reflection on the commodity. His response entails a reflection on the responsibility of international actors for the specific forms taken by this brutality, marginalization, and poverty and the status quo that the aid industries and NGO culture, whether wittingly or not, maintain.26 In this respect, Logos demonstrates, with considerable analytical and critical acuity, the ways in which Kenya, including but not limited to the slums of Nairobi, is in no way peripheral to contemporary capitalism and is, rather, an integral part of “that great multinational space” of contemporary capitalism.
We might consider, in this regard, Hopkins’s reworking and reimagination of the “map” of Africa—a recurrent motif in Logos—not as a tool of empire but as a cognitive map of the totality of contemporary social relations. In particular, the representation of the African continent as a giant light bulb, in the “Bright Africa” logo (fig. 1), brilliantly illuminates the complicity of metaphors about electrification as enlightenment with developmentalist logics and, indeed, with the entire discourse of modernization. This discourse is based on ideas about progress and physical infrastructure derived from Western histories and experiences of industrialization, which have as their flip side certain ideas about primitive and premodern colonial others living on “dark” continents. Beyond the dialectical stranglehold that these concepts have on our understanding of the past, they constrain our understanding of the present, at the very moment when those living in extreme poverty are being reimagined as consumers, and when postindustrial reserve armies everywhere are being held out by venture capitalists and early-stage angel investors as the last frontier of capitalism, an “emerging market” par excellence that will have leapfrogged the old, familiar forms of industrial production and of social organization. Is it any wonder that these normative ideas about development, modernization, and infrastructure based on Western histories of industrialization have begun to be discredited and to seem increasingly irrelevant to people living without reliable access to electricity in African metropolises? It could furthermore be shown that many people living in large African cities, and particularly in the so-called megacities, live with rolling blackouts and an otherwise unreliable electricity supply, not because the infrastructural capacities to provide them with electricity are not there (the capacities that the NGOs tend to focus on) but because existing resources are routinely misallocated, usually through government corruption—a problem that, Hopkins’s “Bright Africa” logo slyly reminds us, has proved rather more difficult for NGOs to fix.
To be sure, the imperial history of conventional cartographic representation is not Jameson’s central concern in his discussion of cognitive mapping. Yet I am suggesting that we interpret Hopkins’s deployment of conventional forms of cartographic representation in this work not as an uncritical acceptance of imperial cartographic conventions or even as an ironic commentary on those conventions but, rather, as an aesthetic representation of the distance or gap that inheres between the cultural logics of contemporary capitalism and those of earlier eras. Unlike representations of the continent designed to serve the needs of imperialist and colonialist expansion in an earlier era, Hopkins’s representation of the continent in the “Bright Africa” logo can be seen as a species of cognitive map that is being drawn or envisioned from a place—Kenya—in which the cultural logics of contemporary capitalism require (in a way that previous logics did not) a reflection on the power of NGOs in the arena of culture. As such, this representation successfully locates Kenya as a place that is neither center nor periphery, and that only seems to be excluded from the space of postindustrial capital to those attempting to map the structural coordinates of the global colonial system from elsewhere.
It’s a Pity We Only Exist in the Future
A project by the collective of artists and public space activists Urban Mirror called I (Heart) Nairobi approaches the representability—or, in the Jamesonian analysis, the supposed unrepresentability—of the totality of contemporary social relations from a different perspective.27 Like Hopkins’s Logos, Urban Mirror’s project prompts a reflection on literal maps and techniques of visualization, but it also raises interesting questions about an emergent distinction between a tactics and an aesthetics within a given image culture or ecology, and, as befits the evolution of mapping technologies, it combines an array of mapping and mixed-media visualization techniques with public space activism.28 This distinction between a tactics and an aesthetics, which I do not have time to develop at any length here, is nonetheless worth highlighting because it demonstrates that, if there is a new cultural logic of contemporary capitalism, the category of the aesthetic is necessarily evolving within it. At the same time, Urban Mirror’s project will allow us to deepen our reflection on artists’ concern with the local and with local experience, situating this concern in light of broader concerns about location, although, insofar as the project does not result in the production of an object or objects for export, it is not explicitly oriented by the global market for African art in the way that Hopkins’s Logos so obviously is.29
Urban Mirror is a collective that formed in Nairobi in late 2008/early 2009.30 The collective emerged from a workshop that was held in 2008 in Mombasa, called Urban Wasanii, with artists from both Nairobi and Mombasa.31I (Heart) Nairobi was itself a mixed media project, integrating performance, graffiti or tagging, and myriad forms of audience participation, including, in one of its iterations, crowd-mapping using Ushahidi, a well-known open-source crisis-mapping platform that was developed locally in Nairobi during the postelection violence that broke out after the contested December 2007 elections in Kenya.32
The figure you see in the documentary photographs (figs. 6 and 7) of the I (Heart) Nairobi project is named Upendo Hero. His name means, in Sheng, the “hero of love.” Over several months in 2009, Upendo Hero performed and painted in public places in neighborhoods all over Nairobi—in Kibera, in Mathare (in the neighborhood known as Kosovo), in Ngara Market, and in Westlands—following a particular trajectory and logic: he was to visit, and to tag, places that had been identified by people living in these neighborhoods as meaningful or viable public spaces. He would go to a place that was rumored to be a public space, tag or stencil “I (HEART) NAIROBI” in or on that space, in this way identifying that space as public and making it visible to all. Urban Mirror dubbed him the world’s first “Public Space Superhero.”
The collective participated, along with other artists, in a February 2009 exhibition titled It’s a Pity We Only Exist in the Future, at the Goethe-Institut in Nairobi.33 The diverse artists in the exhibition and their many, otherwise disparate projects addressed complex global issues from a distinctly local vantage point: in addition to NGO-ization, they addressed the impact on public space of the growth of new hybrid private/public forms of property in urban development and the commercialization of the development sector globally. A description of I (Heart) Nairobi that was published in another exhibition catalog makes explicit a further dimension of public and political life in Nairobi to which this project responded: the reign of violence and terror that erupted in the slums and elsewhere in the immediate postelection period in 2007. The infamous postelection violence plunged many Kenyans into soul-searching about the role played by ethnic identity in threatening democracy in their country. The catalog text reads: “‘I (HEART) NAIROBI’ is a project and idea conceived of by [the] public space activists. . .. It was triggered by a local context which sees both a tight control of city spaces by the corrupt City Council and a dominant local and international image of a dangerous city. The idea was to challenge this image in a provocative and entertaining way and probe an emerging urban identity based on a city rather than ethnicity.”34 I think part of what I find so fascinating about I (Heart) Nairobi is that it unites this pushback against manufactured ethnic hatred with the mapping, remapping, or reimagining of public space.
Many factors inform the contested visibility of public space in Nairobi, some old and some new, some microlocal and some “glocal,” in the sense that they are the result of systemic pressures connected with urban development globally. The local vantage point on global phenomena comes through particularly clearly in the words of participants in the 2008 Urban Wasanii workshop. When asked, what is public space?, these were their answers:
Public space in Kenya is something that there is and there isn’t at the same time.
[Public space is] . . . a place where you can find freedom in the public.
[Public space is] . . . a place where I know I can go to share something with my friends, a place also where I can go and just chill.
Public space is: the police will come and start arresting us because there are a lot of us.
[Public space is] . . . something that only exists in the future.
The comparative dimension of the workshop that I mentioned earlier—the fact that participants came from both Nairobi and Mombasa—was extremely important in adding nuance to the discussion of public space, which participants observed functioned differently in each city. For example, they noted that in Mombasa it is possible to identify Maskani, or public spaces, even when they are unoccupied. (Maskani, meaning “dwellings” or “habitations,” is the word that young people in Mombasa use for public space.) In Nairobi, by contrast, they noted that public spaces (or bazes, the Sheng word for public space used by young people in Nairobi) are invisible when unoccupied, and much more difficult to find.
In many respects I (Heart) Nairobi resembled the “I (Heart) NY” campaign of an earlier era, which it deliberately mimicked. At one point, it even included the selling of T-shirts (at Ngara market), stickers, and other “merchandise” branded with the “I (Heart) Nairobi” slogan. Yet that slogan is neither an ironizing of the “I (Heart) NY” campaign nor a pastiche of something coming from New York, and it works, in this project, in a significantly different way. Here, the slogan—or, rather, the slogan combined with Upendo Hero’s live performances, in which the slogan was expressed precisely as a tag—worked as a kind of imprimatur of publicness, as well as a provocation lobbed at those perceived to be clamping down on public space. This performative dimension (in the sense intended by speech-act theory) of the tags furthermore enacted or engendered a spatial tactics in relation to the visualization of public space.35
The performative and tactical dimensions of Upendo Hero’s tags facilitated the incorporation of Ushahidi as a digital platform, which in turn allowed the artists to deepen and extend the scope of participation in the project, without, however, turning the digital platform into an object of technophilic desire. It is, in this respect, essential to underscore the ways in which Ushahidi opened up the potentialities of crisis mapping in the local context, where, for example, users need not have ready or continuous access to the Internet (intermittent access to the Internet is the norm in many African cities). The platform was designed, from its inception, to handle inputs from multiple data streams: meaning that SMS-based text messages (as distinct from later generations of messaging system) sent from a basic phone not connected to the Internet could also be used to map a location, as well as web-based inputs. Multiple data streams are vital in Kenya, where everyone has a phone but not everyone has a smartphone, especially in the slums.36 What software developers call multiple data streams, the artists in Urban Mirror call a “media mix,” and this mix was a big part of what drew them to the platform, for it allowed them to maximize the social element of participation.37 When the artists observed that the inclusion of inputs via Ushahidi was presenting a financial barrier to participation in the project for many people, they made a decision to supplement the digital inputs that were being submitted via Ushahidi by setting up physical drop boxes at various locations in the slum. For those for whom the cost of a single SMS was too high and precluded their participation in the project, the drop boxes made it possible to contribute to the map on a piece of paper.
There are both collective and critical dimensions to Urban Mirror’s I (Heart) Nairobi project. Artists enlisted the participation of denizens of Nairobi to make public space visible in their neighborhood. Using a diversity of tactics, including both tagging and crowd-mapping, that incorporated new technologies, their work had as its telos not a crowd-sourced “map” as an aesthetic or visual or spatial object but the work of remapping and reimagining public space in Nairobi for ordinary people who navigate the city daily. The point is not just the new spaces of negotiation that Upendo Hero’s performances and tags effectively created, but the constitutive role played by a plurality of Nairobi’s residents in this work of collective reimagination, which was here realized without succumbing to technophilic fantasies or the delusion that increased access to data will automatically be converted to a net increase in knowledge of the world or that denser maps will automatically mean more democratic ones.
Both Africanist art historians reflecting on the place of contemporary African art in the global art market and Marxist critics theorizing the cultural logics of contemporary capitalism might find considerable resources in these and other, similar projects coming out of contemporary Nairobi. These projects are deploying new digital technologies not to extend and intensify the global colonial system on an ever more mind-boggling scale but, rather, to respond to this system, in the diversity of its multinational expressions, in new ways. These projects furthermore allow us to glimpse in greater detail the immense imaginative and creative capacities emerging from cities, megacities, and slums of the Global South, which are challenging analytical frameworks arising from modes of aesthetic and cultural production associated with earlier phases of capitalism. Hence the ingenious nature of these artists’ decision to plot themselves within the structural coordinates of contemporary capitalism under the aegis of the “NGO aesthetic” and to begin to develop a kind of tactics in relation to these new regimes of cultural production that are assuredly global, unfolding in the name of globalization, and yet experienced in decidedly local ways. The ingenuity with which this and other local experiences of contemporary capitalism are being expressed and represented both in work produced for export on global markets and in projects undertaken with and for local people living in Nairobi’s slums suggests the inverse of the Jamesonian principle glossed by Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle in their excellent, recent book Cartographies of the Absolute, when they write, “The privileges of domination are accompanied by a poverty of experience and a deficit of knowledge”: there are certain privileges and a surfeit of knowledge with regard to contemporary capitalism that accrues to those living “elsewhere,”38 that place (no place?) for which the word and concept Africa is so often a metaphor.
Figures
I am indebted to Nico Baumbach, Genevieve Yue, and Damon Young, organizers of “The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism” workshop, held at the New School for Social Research in New York, 21 February 2015, from which this article grew, and to the workshop participants for their many perspicacious questions and comments, particularly Jonathan Beller, Brian Larkin, Tavia Nyong’o, Neferti Tadiar, and Amy Villarejo. I also owe a debt of thanks to the two anonymous reviewers for Social Text, whose comments on an earlier version of the manuscript helped me to sharpen its focus. Above all, I am grateful to Sam Hopkins, Alex Nicolic, and Biki Kangwana for the crash course in Nairobi-based art and activism that they gave me over a series of public presentations and conversations about Slum-TV that took place in London in 2008 and 2009, and to Sam Hopkins for his extraordinary generosity in sharing both his work and his ideas in the intervening years.
I take the phrase “NGO aesthetic” from artist Sam Hopkins. Hopkins credits artist Alexander Nicolic with coining the phrase. Nicolic was a cofounder, with Hopkins and others, of the Slum-TV media collective in the Mathare slum in Nairobi.
Notes
Recent examples of the high visibility of African art, artists, and curators in the global commercial art scene and on the biennial circuit include the naming of Nigerian-born Okwui Enwezor as lead curator of the 56th International Art Exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale, titled “All the World’s Futures,” and the creation of an annual art fair dedicated to contemporary African art in London titled “1:54 Contemporary Art Fair,” which ran in its first edition at Somerset House in 2013 and started a New York also in 2015. Also important to note is the opening of a spate of new galleries specializing in contemporary African art in both London and New York in recent years. In London, where October Gallery was once the only gallery routinely exhibiting work by living African artists, the scene has between 2010 and 2015 alone expanded to include Tiwani Contemporary, Gallery of African Art (GAFRA), Jack Bell Gallery, and most recently Tyburn Gallery. The growth of the New York scene during the same time period has roughly paralleled that of London: the trailblazing Jack Shainman Gallery was joined by the Walther Collection Project Space (specializing in African photography), Skoto Gallery, and Richard Taittinger Gallery. The year 2011 saw the creation of a new curatorial position at Tate Modern dedicated to contemporary African art, and 2013 saw two major monographic exhibitions at Tate Modern of two very well-known African artists who had previously been neglected by European and North American museums: Meschac Gaba and Ibrahim El-Salahi, from Benin and Sudan, respectively. On the limits of the “global” museums’ self-proclaimed commitments to contemporary African art and artists, see Bajorek and Haney, “Guggenheim’s MAP.”
For an account of the vagaries of the term contemporary as it has been used in contradistinction to modern, see Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art since 1980.
See the special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly titled “African Modernism,” edited by Salah Hassan, particularly Enwezor, “Modernity and Postcolonial Ambivalence,” and Harney, “Densities of Modernism.” See also Ogbechie, “Ordering the Universe.”
I use the term commodity here in the Marxian sense, to mean an object produced by human labor with an exchange value on the market, and not in the sense of a raw material used in industrial manufacturing, such as minerals obtained by extraction, or an agricultural product. According to the art market information aggregator Artprice, contemporary African art is estimated to account for less than 1 percent of all global auction sales (cited in Bloomberg Media, “Africa Trending”). Despite this relatively small market share, I take the fact that Bloomberg has covered African art as a topic, and the fact that this coverage refers to African art as a “growing asset class,” as evidence of market growth. I am indebted to Sean Jacobs for calling the Bloomberg coverage to my attention.
Kasfir, African Art and the Colonial Encounter, 24. Kasfir underscores the outsized role played by these ex-colonial organizations, as well as by international curators, in creating the market for this art. The former, which include the British Council, Institut Français, Goethe-Institut, and the Gulbenkian Foundation, often operate as NGOs in their former colonies in Africa; the latter’s activities on the continent are frequently supported by international nonprofits and philanthropic foundations, if not by NGOs per se.
This visibility is exceptional compared with other commodities produced in Africa for export on the global market.
Although this waning of criticality was first theorized by Jameson in his famous essay “Postmodernism,” theories of the postcritical have enjoyed a recent resurgence and become strangely influential in the contemporary art world. Among the several prominent critics to have promoted, in some cases ambivalently, the post-critical turn are Nicolas Bourriaud and Claire Bishop, in their well-known work on relational aesthetics and participatory art, and, with a different emphasis, Jacques Rancière. See Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics; Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” and Artificial Hells; and Rancière, Emancipated Spectator. Hal Foster in “Post-critical” has been particularly lucid in his arguments against the postcritical.
A more complete approach to the questions raised in this article would have to take into account the ways in which contemporary artists working on the continent are drawing inspiration from an earlier generation of artists’ commitments to collectivism and to various forms of participation or social engagement that have not been taken up by Western/Northern theorists. These were undertaken in the wake of twentieth-century African liberation movements and were therefore highly compatible with modernism in ways that challenge core concepts of the contemporary discourse about participation articulated from a Western/Northern vantage point. Grant Kester is one of the few to have brought art from the Global South into conversation with the Eurocentric discourse about participation. See Kester, The One and the Many. For a recent example of the new work now being done on African collectivism, see Ose, “Enthusiasm.” Finally, see Toyin Falola’s discussion in “‘Producing the Common’ ” of the influence of pan-Africanisms and the political projects of 1960s- and 1970s-era liberation movements on the Dak’Art 2014 curatorial agenda.
This younger generation has been most active in the curatorial arena. Eyene works as an independent curator, primarily in Europe, and was cocurator of Dak’Art 2012, as well as numerous smaller yet important exhibitions in European venues, such as Focus10 and Focus11 in Basel, Switzerland; Nzewi was appointed curator of African art at Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum of Art in 2013; Dyangani Ose held the position of curator of international art at Tate Modern from 2011 to 2014 and has worked widely both as an independent and institutionally based curator in Africa and in Europe, including as curator of the 2015 Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art (GIBCA), in Göteborg, Sweden.
A subset of the silkscreen prints has been produced in editions, ranging from four to fifteen. Sam Hopkins, Skype conversation with author, 3 June 2014.
See Kiluanji Kia Henda’s, O.R.G.A.S.M. [Organization of African States for Mellowness] (2011–14), which takes the form of photographic documentation of the activities of a fictional NGO, an organization of African states dedicated to solving the problems of the First World. See also The Samaritans, a Kenyan television show. Chandler, “Kenya’s First Mockumentary.”
Sam Hopkins, multiple pers. comm., 2009–10, and e-mail message to author, 15 March 2015. See also Wanjiru, “Sam Hopkins.”
Under Gaddafi, Libya was a significant provider of aid to many other African countries, and Gaddafi himself was beloved by people living all over the continent. I have seen several photographic portraits of Gaddafi displayed alongside family photographs and those of Sufi saints in private homes in Senegal, for example. The first version of Hopkins’s Logos was exhibited in 2010, before Gaddafi was ousted.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid.
Ibid., 6.
A constitutive element of the postmodern for Jameson is linguistic fragmentation, or the decay of language into forms of imitation, appropriation, and mimicry that preclude irony and become, instead, pastiche. Jameson, Postmodernism, 17.
Hopkins, quoted in Wanjiru, “Sam Hopkins.”
Ibid., 356.
There have been many critiques of Northern/Western aid in postcolonial Africa. Economists have tended to focus on the ineffectiveness, as well as the relations of dependence, fostered by North-South donor-recipient relations. See, for example, Collier, The Bottom Billion. To be fair, Hopkins, quoted in Wanjiru’s “Sam Hopkins,” claims not to be competent to judge the value, success, or failure of the four thousand NGOs operating in contemporary Kenya. See also Chandler, “Kenya’s First Mockumentary.”
Hopkins is a member of Urban Mirror. The full list of artists operating as Urban Mirror is Alessandra Argenti, Abdalla Bakari, Vincenzo Cavallo, Ramadhan Chombo, Silvia Gioiello, Sam Hopkins, Abdalla Khamis, Michael P. Obach, Stephen R. Makula, Jackson M. Wambu, and Richard M. Mwawasi.
The idea of tactics that I invoke here owes a debt to the tactical media movement in Brazil but operates in ways that are specific to the work of artists using newer, and different, media in Nairobi.
Another project that is noteworthy for similar reasons is Terry Kurgan’s massive collaborative multimedia and participatory art project Hotel Yeoville, undertaken with new migrants living in the Yeoville neighborhood of Johannesburg. The exhibition catalog, although it does not include comprehensive documentation of the project, nonetheless conveys key aspects of its exploration of the physical, technical, and social infrastructures of new information and communications technologies in a migrant community. See Kurgan’s Hotel Yeoville.
Hopkins curated the 2008 Urban Wasanii workshop—one in a series of workshops bringing together artists from Kenya and from the international Triangle Arts Trust network and sponsored by Kuona Trust—and it was Hopkins who proposed to situate the workshop in a city with a focus on public space. Sam Hopkins, e-mail message to author, 15 March 2015.
Urban Wasanii means “urban artists” in Swahili.
The election took place on 27 December 2007; violence broke out on 2 January 2008. In the presidential election (there was also a parliamentary election), both Kibaki (the incumbent, a member of the Kikuyu linguistic/ethnic group) and Odinga (the challenger, with a Luo coalition behind him) had used ethnicity as an explicit part of their political campaigns, and when the postelection violence exploded, people took up the politicians’ ethnic rallying cries. Many Kenyans were appalled by the interethnic nature of the violence, which they believed was manufactured and manipulated by the politicians.
The description of the exhibition I give here is based on multiple personal communications, e-mail messages, and Skype conversations of Hopkins and Alexander Nicolic with the author, which took place in 2009 and 2010. Nicolic is a founding member of African Maximalism, another collective, which curated the exhibition. See also the many exquisite texts published in the exhibition catalog: African Maximalism, It’s a Pity We Only Exist in the Future.
Quoted in Hopkins and Hossfeld, Sam Hopkins, 78.
The tags were, as an act of visual signification, also an aesthetic gesture or trace. I emphasize this point about the visual dimensions of the tags’ signification because a consensus has emerged in contemporary art discourse about participatory art that images and visuality have been displaced or at least demoted in participation.
The population of Kenya is estimated at 45 million people, and mobile phone penetration is estimated at above 80 percent; smartphone penetration is, however, less than 1 percent.
Hopkins credits the idea to use Ushahidi to Vincenzo Cavallo, a member of Urban Mirror and founder and director of the Cultural Video Foundation, which took part in the 2008 Urban Wasanii workshop.
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