Name/Title
A Fiction of AuthenticityDescription
A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad is an exhibition and catalog that presents new work by a selection of the most prominent African and African diaspora artists working in Europe and the United States. The artists represent an important generation of artists born before or during the postcolonial era in Africa, between 1956 and 1975.1 Their work, creative strategies, and formal vocabularies considered within this context challenge prevailing notions - fictions — about Africa and the largely Western desire for an authentic African art.
This exhibition connects artists employing diverse art-making strategies informed by equally diverse histories. Each individual's transcultural narrative stems from the continual flux of globalizing impulses and an international inter-connectedness unlike that of any other time in history. This exhibition seeks to analyze constructs of perception (fictions) about what constitutes an authentic Africa-within that continent and abroad. It will consider how these fictions have skewed what it means to be African and to what extent one's Africanness is expressed, understood, exploited, and relevant in contemporary global culture.
Works by eleven contemporary artists in painting, photography, sculpture, paper, installation, video, and performance address the situation of postcolonial African subjects and interculturalism, exile, and diaspora. Each artist was invited by the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis to create new work in response to A Fiction of Authenticity. Having relocated to urban centers like Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Brussels, Belgium; London, United Kingdom; and Washington, DC and smaller cities such as Lilienthal and Ludwigshafen, Germany, and Bern, Switzerland, each artist has positioned himself or herself outside of Africa but remains connected to locations in Algeria, Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Tunisia.Book Details
Author
Contemporary Art Museum St Louis