Fault Lines

“In geological terms, fault lines reveal themselves as fractures in the earth’s surface but they also mark a break in the continuity of the strata. Fault lines may be a sign of significant shifts, or even of impending disaster, but they also create new landscapes. This [exhibition brings together] the work of a small number of contemporary artists from Africa and the African diaspora whose works trace the outlines of fault lines that are shaping contemporary experience locally and globally. These fault lines have been etched into the physical fabric of our world through the effects of colonialism and postcolonialism, of migration and globalization and their reverberations echo through contemporary lived experience and in the work of these artists working across a range of media from painting and sculpture through to architecture, photography and installation.

The nationalist struggles of the first decades of the twentieth century gave rise in the second half of the century to postcolonial independence and a new self-determination in Africa and beyond that articulated itself in a heightened political consciousness but also in new forms of visual and architectural practices. These new practices sought to negotiate the difficult and, as yet, unexplored terrain between tradition and modernity, between formal concerns and political contingencies. Modernism and modernity are too often defined in Western terms as a decisive break or rupture with the past and yet it is almost always experienced as an uneven negotiation between past and future that can remain unresolved. The artists and artworks [in this exhibition] explore the ambivalent space where tradition and modernity, past histories and future possibilities are mapped out. This is a space which is continuously ‘under negotiation’, shaped by the uneven flows of cultural and economic exchanges between the so-called developing and developed worlds. This is not to say that this is an insubstantial or inconclusive zone but rather that the push and pull of tradition and modernity, past and future, exert differing pressures and are negotiated differently in various geographical locations and at different historical conjunctures. In specific instances, artists and architects have developed what I term a ‘vernacular modernity’; that is to say, they navigate between a national and international consciousness that gives rise to distinctly new forms of cultural production. Rooted in the conditions of a specific location, vernacular modernity is a term that can be applied to the innovative forms of artistic and architectural practice that push the epistemological and formal envelope of traditional forms of modernism…

Globalization and its impact are themes that underpin this assemblage of art works but globalization here is understood not purely in terms of the exchange of global commodities and the erosion of nation states in favour of corporate multinationals. Rather, the patterns of globalization are traced through the experiences of political exiles, disenfranchised citizens, immigrants and refugees, amongst others. This [exhibition] proposes new ways of considering the work of artists from Africa and the African diaspora that resist the construction of an imagined and essentialist construction of Africa, undisturbed by the effects of globalization and migration. Such a worldview inevitably follows the linguistic and political fault lines inscribed into the global landscape by colonialism, setting clear demarcation lines between Africa and the African diaspora, between sub-Saharan Africa to the south and Arab Africa to the North. The fault lines of our contemporary world manifest themselves in the contradictions of everyday life which daily present us with both the closure of opportunity and the possibility of change, at one and the same time. “

From ‘The Revolution Stripped Bare’, first published in Gilane Tawadros and Sarah Campbell (eds), Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes, London: Iniva, in collaboration with the Forum for African Arts and the Prince Claus Fund, 2003. The book was published on the occasion of the exhibition Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes, presented as part of the 50th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer (12 June–2 November 2003). 

Participating artists were: Laylah Ali, Kader Attia, Samta Benyahia, Zarina Bhimji, Frank Bowling, Clifford Charles, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Hassan Fathy, Salem Mekuria, Moshekwa Langa, Sabah Naim, Moataz Nasr andWael Shawky.