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
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
Abstract
This intervention focuses on contemporary African art practitioners (artists, critics, and curators) who have pushed for the pulverisation and cancellation of notions of boundaries that confine(d) artists to an “esoteric ethos,” observing contemporary women artists whose practices problematise Africanity and challenge stereotypical ideologies about Africa, art and women in art. Contemporary Art from Africa and its diasporas continues to be a reckoning force in international art circuits, due to the efforts of certain formidable practitioners, particularly women. They have been at the forefront of challenging colonially ascribed positions on art that comes from the continent.1
In this text, we deal with the severance of these stereotypes or “expected” behaviors by focusing on women whose work challenges hackneyed ideas and stereotypical ideologies about African art, gender specificity of media and “esoteric ethos” (ghettoisation).2
1
See in particular, Julie Crenn, “Who Run the World? South African Female Artists’ Relationship to History and Normativity,” Critique d’art 47 (2016): https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.23201 and Terry Smith, “Currents of world-making in contemporary art,” World Art 1, no. 2 (2011): pp. 171-188.
2
Elizabeth A. Bloomfield, “Gender Role Stereotyping and Art Interpretation,” (MA thesis, University of Iowa, 2015), p. 201.
See in particular, Julie Crenn, “Who Run the World? South African Female Artists’ Relationship to History and Normativity,” Critique d’art 47 (2016): https://doi.org/10.4000/critiquedart.23201 and Terry Smith, “Currents of world-making in contemporary art,” World Art 1, no. 2 (2011): pp. 171-188.
2
Elizabeth A. Bloomfield, “Gender Role Stereotyping and Art Interpretation,” (MA thesis, University of Iowa, 2015), p. 201.
