​"Decolonising Art Institutions"

by Nkule Mabaso

Bio

Nkule Mabaso (b.1988) currently works as curator of the Michaelis Galleries at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. She graduated with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Cape Town and received a Masters in Curating at the Zurich University of the Arts. She is the founder of the Newcastle Creative Network in Kwazulu Natal (since 2011).

Abstract: Decolonising Art Institutions

The Michaelis Galleries is working on a programme of films, photographs, media based works and discussions around the issues of decolonization, and the scopic regime.

"'Africa' has been consistently (re)produced and enacted across a wide range of cultural sites. Just as Frantz Fanon once described the racialisation of subjectivity in late colonial Algeria as being 'fixed by a dye', the performance of 'Africa' through various technologies of observation, reproduction and display has been remarkably consistent and enduring.

In this sense it is important to consider how this 'Africa' has been enacted, circulated and consumed historically through performance (Ebron 2000) and how these historical encounters create the place of Africa in the world. The 'Africa' that the world imagines (often through dystopic images) is always a thing of illusion, magic and contradiction but the performance of this construct and the meanings attached to it has particular temporalities."

(Campbell and Power 2008)

How have we taken ownership of the ideological space that "Africa" occupies in the popular imagination in the face of the complexities of and representing a new decolonised reality? How have we / are we realising our contemporary moments and the self-definition of the continent? Youthful and contemporary artistic standpoints confront the perpetuation of colonialism, neocolonialism, and so on – on film and photography, but also digital media and the internet.

Through this programme we consider a range of visual practices that have contributed to the enactment of "Africa" through the technologies associated with cinema, photography and digital media and computer games. The exhibition will be accompanied by discussions.