Contemporary African Art since 1980 - lecture by Okwui Enwezor

Afrika Contemporary African Art - a lecture by Okwui Enwezor 27 Apr. 2010 - Africaserver Magazine

7 Candice Breitz, Ghost Series #3 - 1994-1996, copyright Damiani Editore

Earlier this year, Nigeria-bron art historian and curator Okwui Enwezor held a lecture in Amsterdam to present Contemporary African Art since 1980, written by him and Chika Okeke-Agulu. The book is the first major overview on African art and artists from the last three decades.
The lecture did not present easy listening. Yet Africaserver Magazine feels it deserves to be published as it touches on important issues regarding contemporary African art and African culture in general.

In the lecture Okwui Enwezor adhered to the structure of the book, starting with a theoretical underpinning of the study of contemporary African art as a disciplinairy field and a demarcation of this field. He then went on to provide some insight on the relationship between the museum of art and the museum of ethnography before turning to a presentation of works of art from the three decades presented in the book.

This is not a completely literal rendition of the lecture. We have left out references to persons present and other events on the day itself. In some places we have slightly edited the text for purposes of readability.

Almost all illustrations included in this Africaserver Special are taken from the over one hundred pictures Okui Enwezor presented on the night, those in their turn selected from the 400 illustrations in the book (those of course being of much higher quality than the internet allows us to present). We mainly selected reprensentations of works of art Okwui Enwezor commented on during the lecture.
We would like to thank Damiani Editore, the publishing house, for their kind permission to use these illustrations.

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