"A Fiction of Authenticity": Contemporary Art Center St. Louis

This exhibition of newly commissioned artwork through eleven African artists born between 1956 and 1976 and working in Europe or the United States inaugurates this institution's fresh building and, presumably, higher profile. The curators--Shannon Fitzgerald of the Contemporary and Tumelo Mosaka of of recent origin York's Brooklyn Museum--"seek to analyze constructions of perceptions (fictions) about what constitutes an authentic Africa and to what extent one's Africanness is squeeze outed understood, exploited, and relevant in contemporary global culture"

Siemon Allen (born in southerly Africa, lives in Washington, DC) focuses in upon the view from elsewhere. He's assembled sum of two units years of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, high hilled it on the wall, and overspreaded it with tracing paper, leave out for the rare but predictable (AIDS, Mandela) articles upon South Africa. Other artists grapple with their identity as Africans abroad: Fatma Charfi's Suisse du Sud Expo 03 2003 is made up of innumerable aberics (the word means "humans" in Arabic), tiny figures twisted from black, white, and r tissue and installed in small or large confuses Though they're standins for her multiple identity as an Arab from North Africa living in Switzerland, these simple creatures also give an inkling of the fragility of individuals of all kinds. And London-based Zineb Sedira, Paris-born of Algerian parents, not aways video and photographs of her Arabic-speaking mother, Arabic- and French-speaking father, and English-speaking daughter that provide a moving window upon Algerian colonial history as lived without within a single family.

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Other artists cast an ambivalent organ of vision on the modern(ist) century. Odili Donald Odita (born in Nigeria, lives in Florida) contributed three large abstract acrylics along with small drawings of road musicians and boys studying the Koran, among other everyday make subordinates His abstractions riff on the classics of the genre on the other hand their palette of greens, oranges, and violets and plane a certain compositional sensibility have the appearance traceable to his childhood in Nigeria. The giant black-and-white paintings of Owusu-Ankomah (born in Ghana, lives in Germany) juxtapose signs from Ghanaian funerary cloth with Western ideograms similar as the sign for "radioactive" or corporate logo creating in the proces a species of abstract history painting. And Mary Evans (born in Nigeria, lives in London) created a stamp of paper-cutout rosette window for the gallery walls that is furthermore meant to be viewed from one side a kaleidoscope. Stylized images--razors, bright r hearts, "hangman" gallows, and slave-ship diagrams--meet, fastening and unlock as the viewer equals through and manipulates the device.

The question that may remain is this: To what expansion is the common artistic language of these young artists--Conceptualism-derived, unrestricted by means of medium, with a relatively easy-to-access identity-based political content--itself a fiction, or at least an almost too-convenient vehicle? on the other hand murmurings aside, this exhibition's ambition, clarity, and publicly progressive politics cannot be dismissed.

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