THE IDEA OF AFRICA - Kunsthalle Bern 15.10.2010

The Idea of Africa is the title of a book by the Congolese philosopher Valentin Yves Mudimbe, published in 1994, which shows how the way we conceive of Africa can still be traced back to the ideology of the Western colonial powers. The exhibition-project at Kunsthalle Bern is initially prompted by the need to critically revisit this "idea" after the celebration of the 50th year of independence for 17 African countries. It will exist of exhibitions, conversations and publications with multiple genealogies and meanings, which sophisticate any extrapolations of "African" identity, or any suggestion of what makes Africa "Africa." Western literature has long portrayed Africa as the antithesis of Europe, or as "a paradigm of difference." For centuries, Europeans have viewed Africa as the screen on which the wildest desires and fantasies were projected and inscribed. In The Idea of Africa, Mudimbe explores the origins and development of this negative conception of Africa. As a whistleblower against ideologies of "otherness", also in an earlier book (The Invention of Africa. Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge) Mudimbe traces this "invention of Africa" back to Western explorations. At the same time he examines how the so-called "other" writes back, by referencing African scholars who have worked within the limits of imposed language and epistemological frames. The exhibition-project at Kunsthalle Bern focuses exactly on those artistic and intellectual endeavours that trace another history, in which the "idea" of Africa is not already a "given" framed by Western assumptions.

The first leg of the project The Idea of Africa (re-invented) unites two artistic undertakings from Nigeria, which seek to capture and elucidate architectural, political and geographical structures by means of photography. The two different ventures share a documentary approach: the artist collective Invisible Borders sought a confrontation with the political borders on the African continent in the context of a kind of self-experiment, and J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, over the course of several decades, produced a photographic study on the urban development of the city of Lagos. Consequently, this exhibition represents an inquiry into the approaches and ideas found in very specific examples of contemporary photography from Africa and about Africa, in which the perspective of the author and the viewer, as well as the temporality of the recorded realities function as difficult variables.

21 October – 5 December 2010
Kunsthalle Bern
Helvetiaplatz 1
CH-3005 Bern