How Did Meschac Gaba Make His Art More Accessible to People in Benin?

Meschac Gaba, 'The Library' from 'Museum of Contemporary African Art 1997-2002', Image Courtesy of Tate Modern 2013 © Meschac Gaba.

Meschac Gaba was born in 1961 in Cotonou, Benin. He currently lives and works between Contonou and Rotterdam. Gaba studied at the Rijksakademie voor Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (1996-7). Widely exhibited, his work appeared in Documenta 11 in 2002 and at the Liverpool Biennial in 2010. Gaba'southward Museum of Contemporary African Fine art 1997-2002 at Tate Mod  (Level 2) runs through to 22 September 2013. The exhibition is open every day from 10am – 6pm and until 10pm on Fri and Sabbatum. Admission is free. It is curated by Kerryn Greenberg: Curator (International Art) at Tate Modern.

An imaginary museum enters Tate Modern. A monumental installation past Meschac Gaba consists of twelve rooms. Each contains objects peculiarly constructed or constitute, and invites a different fashion of relating, and a different kind of interaction or performance (inside the space of a museum). In the Museum Store we tin exchange money for commodities (from T-shirts to books). The idea of money is threaded through Gaba's Museum most visibly in decommissioned banknotes, transformed and re-imagined. Relationships betwixt money, commodities, marketplaces and global circuits are re-staged in installations that speak to Beninese markets, and trade routes that cantankerous continents, oceans; and the spaces produced by technology. Of grade, these relationships and these histories are not just beneficial and are woven into systems of exploitation, corruption and abuse. There is a playfulness to Gaba'due south Museum but it is also in dialogue with politics and power.

'Art practices produce sites of substitution and dialogue across the world; and these exchanges take place in-betwixt countries and continents'.

Gaba'southward Architecture Room allows us to build our own museum or structures, out of wooden blocks. The objects I see throughout the rooms are simultaneously recognisable and unfamiliar. I recognise music tapes from a time before iPods, and the pleasure of recording and mixing music. Merely the tapes and the music I hear also invoke the sounds and images of markets that I visit when travelling to the African continent. The instruments laid out on the floor are not necessarily known and produce the sensations of curiosity and the impetus to acquire. The Salon with music, chairs and tables invite us to relax or talk; and perhaps play the piano in the corner. On a estimator is an adaptation of a game (Awélé) that any of us are invited to play. The Art and Organized religion Room tell a story virtually the relationships between visual images and belief systems that crisscross fourth dimension, and geography. A Tarot reader proposes a reading; producing a space of marvel or discomfort depending on what you believe. Objects for the purposes of worship sit down alongside those that form part of the language of tourism, kitsch, and consumerism.

The Library draws attending to different kinds of knowledge and ways of telling a story. A long wooden table invites us to read or appoint in dialogue or fence. The books stacked on the surrounding shelves do not presume their audiences. Rather the selections propose commutation or dialogue: books most Gimmicky African fine art rest alongside those near nineteenth century European painting. There are books for adults and for children; and we can read them freely. An installation constructed out of chandeliers with candles and burnt books refer to a maxim: 'when an quondam person dies, it is like when a library burns downwards'. Oral traditions (including proverbs) are woven into the visual histories and noesis systems that shape the African continent as a whole. Outmoded computers fastened to bicycles lead us to virtual spaces that certificate dialogues about current practices in African fine art. The bicycles and the computers speak (with much humour) to the ways in which cognition travels, is useful or becomes defunct. Nothing tin be taken for granted and nosotros adapt, move and transform with the passing of time.

In the Library nosotros can sit alongside a coffin and listen to an account based on imagination and story-telling: Gaba imagines his dead male parent's vocalization as he tells us about his son's journeying every bit artist, and their human relationship. In 1996 Gaba left his dwelling house in Benin to study at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Listening to the imagined voice of Gaba's begetter is a moving and poignant experience that we all, as human beings, facing our own mortality (and the mortality of those nosotros love) tin can relate to. It is too an installation within a larger whole that constructs a narrative about what it is to be an artist working in the earth today. Travel, leaving home and migration is an accepted part of the experience of being an artist, a curator, a scholar or a writer. Art practices produce sites of exchange and dialogue across the globe; and these exchanges have identify in-betwixt countries and continents. The art world (as a sphere of circulation, exchange and intellectual life) cannot function equally a world demarcated by borders and rigid boundaries. In the Marriage Room Gaba again invites united states of america into a private globe; his marriage at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Personal objects such every bit wedding photographs, a video of the ceremony, gifts and the bride's clothes speak to how art, life and the experience of being human are continued and interwoven.

As a student at the Rijksakademie, Gaba was struck by how African art was presented, curated and imagined in the museums he visited. Museums filled with images and objects of ethnographic and anthropological involvement; the pillages of war (or the idiosyncratic individual curiosity of collectors) discrete African objects from their context, their rituals and their meanings. Objects such equally masks (made for the purposes of ritual and animated operation) sit immobile and removed from the sounds, bodies, audiences and embellishments for which they were produced. The glass cabinets of the traditional museum display suspend these objects in time refusing them apportionment, movement and transformation. Like every other role of the world, visual practices across the African continent shift and change over fourth dimension: there are histories about twentieth and twenty-first century art (produced beyond the African continent) that counter assumptions nigh what African art is, and tin be.

Gaba'south Museum, in its entirety, stages questions that go to the middle of tensions that continue to circle African Art. The term 'Africa' is also often a repository for many different kinds of visual practices that sally out of a continent equally vast and circuitous every bit whatever other. Gaba's Museum states what should be taken for granted. It disrupts the idea that African visual practices are merely about the product of cultural artefacts, which are imagined via the circuits of tourism, anthropology, and museums. There are innumerable artists, curators, collectors and scholars working in the arena of gimmicky African fine art. But depending on who is looking and speaking they adventure invisibility. Gaba's Museum of Contemporary African Art stages a number of questions: What is contemporary African art? Where are the museums for gimmicky African art? What does this art look like? Are categories such as 'African' valid? Are categories and labels necessary? Who decides what contemporary should be and what it should look like?

In a Fiscal Times article titled 'Africa'southward bright glare', Jackie Wullschlager writes about Meschac Gaba and Ibrahim el-Salahi at Tate Modern. She begins: 'Name an African artist. Proper name two more than. It'due south a struggle: African fine art all the same has the nearly minor presence in the earth's museums, biennales, galleries. And when we exercise see information technology, likewise oftentimes it lacks the context for united states of america to make sense of it'. This paragraph is emblematic of the space into which Gaba inserts his Museum. Wullschlager's space makes numerous assumptions: about the identity of the 'we'; and about the significant of the 'globe'. It erases the existence of endless curators, scholars, writers and artists. She quite simply imagines that they do not exist. Wullschlager inserts herself into an arena that is highly charged, securely political and finely tuned to the nuances of language and its violence. Earlier this year, writing nigh 'Trade Routes', a grouping exhibition at Hauser & Wirth she similarly erases the importance of the work and the identities of the artists concerned referring to them every bit 'non-white'. The artists she refers to are reduced to the category of a non-person and a category that cannot exist without an imagined pare. A skin that is 'non white'. How do artists categorised in this way experience about this reduction and this erasure? I doubtable that in this example their voices and their practice as artists were considered secondary to the matters at hand: how to bargain with the perplexing problem of that which appears strange, different and impenetrable.

Gaba'south installation doesn't claim to have all the answers to the questions he poses. This in itself counters the supposition that everything can be explained, analysed and categorised; or indeed that information technology should be. At no point in the Museum is in that location an attempt to shut down debate. These are spaces that anyone can freely enter (at that place is no charge) and nothing in the installations themselves excludes. Gaba's Library does not reproduce a dogma that places Africa and the West in opposition to i another. Rather it searches for points of connection, sharing and dialogue. While this is an ideal (given the ongoing prejudices and conflicts of the world nosotros live in) information technology is at least an imaginative effort to consider something else. Fifty-fifty if this attempt is temporary it speaks to art as a space for reflection and imaginative possibility.

Review originally published in FAD, 17 July 2013.

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Source: https://writinginrelation.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/meschac-gaba-museum-of-contemporary-african-art/

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