Ambivalent art at the tip of a continent

Abstract

The desire for global recognition presented by the team behind the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, around its opening in September 2017, not only confirms that a global hierarchy within the art world still persists. It also results in a paradoxical dilemma for the artists on display. While praising the museum for the opportunities it provides, this chapter shows how the artists exhibited there simultaneously experienced ambivalence in a space where they cannot necessarily express themselves with the same local elements in their artworks as some of them would have liked. The artists are thus caught between vaguely defined ideas about being locally anchored and globally connected, in a setting expecting them to be both at the same time, producing global art that is locally grounded enough to be part of a museum exhibiting art from “Africa and its Diaspora” to international visitors. This is the dilemma the artists face: if they want a chance to show and sell their art to the world, they have to adapt to the Zeitz MOCAA’s rather unclear curatorial definitions of what art from Africa is, and replace some place-specific elements in their artworks with others.

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