NAB XVIII 2019

Feedback
– Art, Africa and the Eighties
The international exhibition Feedback took both a historical and contemporary
look at the 1980s in Africa through art, music, film and archival material from the
Iwalewahaus (University of Bayreuth), the Weltkulturen Museum (Frankfurt), and
the Makerere Art Gallery (Kampala, Uganda).
27.04.2018 –
05.05.2019
Feedback: Art, Africa, and the Eighties was an in-depth,
art-centered study of the 1980s in Africa through an
ambitious exhibition that was both historical and contemporary
in scope. The exhibition, which showcased
also artworks from collections on the African continent,
was part of the research project “African Art History
and the Formation of a Modernist Aesthetic” and a
cooperation with the Institute for Heritage Conservation
and Restoration / Makerere Art Gallery (Kampala,
Uganda) and the Weltkulturen Museum (Frankfurt a.
M). A highlight was the 12-channel video work Till Death
Us Do Part by the world-known artist Theo Eshetu – a
reinstallation of the original of the 1980s which has not
been shown for about 30 years and had been reconfigured
especiallyfor the exhibition at Iwalewahaus.
The exhibition’s complex narrative highlights a tapestry
of perspectives in works by artists at different
stages in their professional careers, drawn from countries
spread across East, North, West, Central, and
Southern Africa. Some of the artists were very young in
the 1980s, and now examined the decade from a temporal
and critical distance, albeit subjectively. Their
contemporary responses were presented in dialogue
with works produced during the 1980s.
With this curatorial approach, Feedback mapped the
trajectory of artistic vocabularies and complementary
discourses in the 1980s, tracing its impact on post-1990
contemporary African art through the works of this
exciting array of artists. In creating this important dialogue
between old and new works, the exhibition provided
a timely assessment of the historical importance
of the 1980s for postcolonial African art.
Feedback explored the social, political, and economic
realities in Africa in the 1980s through the creative
visions of artists, then and now. To try to explain the
significance of that period in Africa’s political history
and art historical scholarship, the exhibition considered
artists’ responses to or engagement with key events
that defined the decade. These events include the spate
of coups d’état, military and civilian dictatorships, and
austerity measures that had a devastating impact on
social and economic conditions, civil conflicts, famine,
the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa,
the rise of civil society, and the emergence of neoliberal
politics and economics promoted by Western-based
multilateral institutions and enacted by African governments
in the 1980s. Scholars of contemporary
African art have argued that the climate of uncertainty
in the 1980s produced a new kind of cultural mobilisation
in many African countries. As art historians Okwui
Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu observed, “Postcolonial
critiques of the state form and neo-liberalism,
responses to globalisation, austerity measures, reform
movements of democratisation, state failure, migration,
and exile” transformed artistic production in the
1980s.
Text // Katharina Fink
Curator // Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi (Cleveland
Museum of Art)
Project management // Nadine Siegert
Curatorial Assistance // Lukas Heger, Christina
Heydenreich, Alexandra Kuhnke, Martha Kazungu,
Lena Naumann
41