Publications
What does a people, made up of more than 1.2 billion souls living on a continent of more than 30 million square kilometres, have to say about itself? Africa is the repository of a collective memory, the receptacle of civilisations with moving boundaries whose gestures have crossed the centuries. What binds the populations of the African continent is the consciousness of living on the same territory, of belonging to the same history, and of facing the same challenges on the African soil: access to education and health; the respect of fundamental human rights; the right to free movement, self-determination and economic emancipation. Over time, this African consciousness has created a sense of belonging – sometimes tenuous – to the same land, the same people and the same destiny. Pan-Africanism, this collective ideal of political, social, economic and cultural emancipation, is the foundation of an unprecedented project.
Contents
Narratives of Womanhood
- Introduction: Is Writing the History of Women’s Art in Africa, Writing the Art that is Coming? Being African, Woman and an Artist Nadine Hounkpatin
- Conflicting Archives: Reimagining and Visualising Sociopolitical Narratives of Women Freedom Fighters in Zambia Gladys Kalichini
- An Aesthetic and Socio-Anthropological Analysis of Three Generations of Cameroonian Woman Artists Ruth Colette Afane Belinga
- Algerian Women Artists: Between History, Appropriation and Deconstruction of an Image Nadira Laggoune
- An Art of Proximity Rachida Triki
Institutional Narratives
- Introduction: Escaping the Vicious Circle Sonia Recasens
- Breaking Boundaries and Borders: Undoing Stereotypes with the Stereotypes (The Case of Contemporary Art from Africa) 3POINTS . . . (Dorothy Akpene Amenuke, Alice Korror Ebeheakey, Bernard Akoi-Jackson
- Modern Women: Archiving African Modernism Perrin Lathrop with Ndidi Dike
- Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu and Miranda Burney-Nicol: Fragments of Trajectories of African Visual Artists Between Paris and London at the Time of Decolonisation Through the Lens of the Magazine Le Musée vivant. Amandine Nana
- One Museum under the Lens: The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Representation of Women Making Art Karen E. Milbourne
An Art of Proximity
Rachida Triki
Abstract
In Tunisia there has been what could be called a contemporary art movement dominated by the work of women artists for more than two decades. It is expressed by a desire for freedom, by the diversity and the visual innovation of the works and by a diversity of ways of doing things, which have in common a desire for emancipation. This gives rise to creations that break with the usual ways of painting and exhibiting; the artists are no longer concerned that their approach be part of the reactivation of some heritage, and they use new processes to express both their way of being in the present and their desire to create differently. For them new media and the use of various objects constitute an ideal means of artistically materialising real situations, utopias and social or individual fictions. Their approach and choice of materials, while formally close to current Western visual arts practices, are nevertheless distinguished by the originality of their compositions and the questioning that underlies them. These works allow them to stage ways of being in situation.
In fact, since the 1980s, the number of female students attending fine art schools has increased in Tunisia, at a time when art galleries in the capital are booming and the problem of pictorial creation is being debated. Some young women have been able to continue their studies in France or Italy, enriching their artistic experience and exhibiting in groups or individually. Their strength of character and their creative passion have enabled them to overcome socio-cultural barriers that can always be a source of discouragement. They have slowly but surely made their mark in the public space through their innovative approaches. Moreover, the advent of the practice of installations and video art is mainly due to this generation of women artists who have adopted a visual approach that a well-informed public is beginning to embrace.
