The wire supplying the current for this artistic production and its reproduction in contemporary media remains a colonial knowledge, with its many faces, expressions, and places. Popular painting became a representation of social drama. Then, perhaps naively, no one suspected the epistemology under which the paintings were being framed both as popular art and as representations ofAfrica, analyzed accordingly as Zairean history and popular culture. These paintings, which had already been made available to the public by the film Maitres des Rues (Voices from Zaire, 1988) and the magazine, Aetuel (1990), would be taken up again by other media, like Le Monde Diplomatique (1992-1994). The media the exhibition put on the western market, in addition to the exhibition itself, and the catalogue, consisted of three postcards and a publicity journal composed of Tshibumba's painting La Mort Historique de LumumbalThe Historic Death of Lumumba and Cheri Samba's Lutte Contre les Moustiquesl Fight Against the Mosquitoes. Thanks to the exhibition, the history of contemporary popular Zairean painting became redefined so as to begin in 1926 with Tshelantendu and continue through to Cheri Samba in 1991. The "Africa Explores" (1991) exhibiton in New York, following the "Magiciens de la Terre" (1989) exhibition in Paris, placed side by side the popular Zairean artists, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu and Cheri Samba without suspecting that it was placing together two kinds of recognition, two encounters, and two images/ representations of the same thing. Today, they are largely circulated by the media films, television, museums, and art exhibitions remain the best distributors of images of Others. Ifnecessary, they institute their own markets, drawing artists, researchers, and audiences. They also bear a certain kind of ethnocentrism. nand ways of thinking current in a society they serve functions, moving from place to place and transforming themselves.
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