HOME   |   AFRICA IN THE PRESENT TENSE

By Martin Herbert

The last time El Anatsui took part in the Venice Biennale, it was 1990 and the Ghanaian sculptor was exhibiting in a show titled "Five Contemporary African Artists." In effect, he was one of a tiny handful invited to represent a vast continent whose territory enfolds, by recent estimates, 53 countries, a thousand-plus languages, and some 900 million people. An impossible taskóeven when one considers, say, the awareness of Africa's diverse regional histories that underlies Anatsui's epic agglomerations of discarded or humble materials. And yet by previous standards, that was a good year for Africa at the artworld's most glittering expo. Aside from contributions by Egypt and, briefly, South Africa, the show constituted the first time that an exhibition from the African continent had traveled to Venice, and it won the First Exhibitors' Prize.

This year Anatsui is back in the city of gondolasóparticipating in a Venice Biennale that, for the first time, features something called an African pavilion. Curated by Africans and showcasing some 30 artists, it's one that might be legitimately termed such. Anatsui's art, though, graces another display: current Biennale director Robert Storr's keynote exhibition in the Arsenale, "Think with the SensesóFeel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense," which includes seven artists based in Africa and five from the African diaspora, in a cosmopolitan reflection of a globalized artworld. Times, these shows suggest, have changed.

In actuality, things have been moving forward for African artists and curators in Venice for the past few years, if painfully slowly. The Biennale has been around since 1895, with little or no African representation in its first century. The 2001 edition was the first to include a project organized by African
curators, Salah Hassan and Olu Oguibe's "Authentic/Ex-Centric: Africa in and out of Africa," but it was independent, off-site, and far from prominent. 2003 saw a greater presence of artists from the diaspora in national pavilions and the "Fault Lines" exhibition, curated by London-based Egyptian Gilane Tawadros, in the Arsenale, but she was still selected by that Biennale's director, Francesco Bonami. And then there's the wider picture, as Storr attests: "I do think a number of recent exhibitions are representative of a sudden burst of attention. And, also, the infrastructural conditions improved for showing African art. So it's an overall change of which this is just
an episode."