by Jon Lackman | 23 November 2011 | Africa, Conferences, Contemporary
The Autumn 2011 African Arts (44:3) continues that journal’s tradition of fine reporting on important conferences, with five dispatches from the Fifteenth Triennial Symposium of African Art last March at UCLA, which featured 46 panels. The Triennial’s theme was “Africa and Its Diasporas in the Marketplace.”
Susan Rosenfield writes:
dele jegede, alongside [Sylvia] Forni, and Rachel Nelson provided their panels with optimistic insight regarding progressive alternatives for contemporary African art. Both presenters still warned of this imminent threat of globalization on the African art market, observing that Western aesthetic values cause contemporary art to migrate in a way that jegede described as “eerily reminiscent” of colonialist-era movement. Nonetheless, jegede explored the burgeoning revaluation of the local, arguing that African auction houses and collectors encourage the marketing of indigenous tastes.
Samuel M. Anderson writes:
Several conference sessions were constructed around revisiting broader theoretical concepts of visual culture through African lenses. One such panel looked at Tonye Erekosima and Joanne Eicher’s “cultural authentication” model through a wide variety of visual arts practices … [Another] engaged Bruno Latour’s “iconoclash.” Like cultural authentication, iconoclash attempts to describe the transference of imagery between cultures, but iconoclash is much less systematic, depicting a state of uncertain contradictions rather than a process of incorporation. The panel was divided between two perspectives emphasizing either closure or potential …
This edition of the Triennial was notable for the attendance of many more African scholars than in previous years [whose] presentations demonstrated that approaches to art history education within Africa are as diverse as the continent itself.
