Out of Adversity, Visions of Life

A cyclist passes an ad for the African Photography Biennial, one of the continent’s oldest survey exhibitions, in Bamako, Mali. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast

SALIF DIABAGATÉ, an artist here in this nation’s financial capital, stands by a pile of sodden debris outside his bungalow studio. He reaches for a bit of sticking-out cloth, gives it a tug, then pulls until he frees some canvas painted with symbols and words. He spreads it out, creased and dirty, on the ground.

“I made this to look like a traditional hunter’s shirt with amulets and talismans,” he says, pointing to small pouches sewn on the painting’s surface. “The soldiers must have thought it was dangerous. Bad magic.”

The soldiers were government troops who, a year earlier, had broken into the studio and bivouacked there when violence gripped Abidjan during the climax of a decade of civil war. Mr. Diabagaté, now in his early 40s, was in Berlin for a show when “the crisis,” as it is called, erupted. He couldn’t get back until it was over. By then the damage was done. The soldiers had burned his sculptures and dumped his paintings in the rain.

Could this one be salvaged? Probably not. He’d have to focus on making new work, though no one was buying. “Art is what you give up,” he says, “if you’re trying to hold on to cash.”

Even in stable times life can be hard for artists in West Africa. Not that art ever stops being made. Cities like Abidjan, Dakar in Senegal, and Bamako in Mali are saturated in it. Murals cover public walls and the sides of trucks and buses. Pottery, metalwork and weaving, in styles new and old, fill open-air markets. Portraits of jazzy beauties, Sufi saints and culture heroes (Che, Mandela, Obama, Madonna) are for sale everywhere.

But the elements that in the West make a healthy contemporary scene — galleries, museums, collectors, journals, critics and a steady, responsive audience — are in short supply. And the degree of isolation of individual artists from others across the continent and from art developments worldwide is almost inconceivable to an urban Westerner who takes instant global communication for granted.

Both despite and because of such isolation, local artist networks coalesce occasionally into tight and efficient collectives like Huit Facettes in Dakar, more often as loose affinity groups of fellow art students and friends. For a visitor, like this art critic on a monthlong trip in Africa, such groups can be difficult to find in cities that have nothing resembling art neighborhoods. But they’re there.

So are a few alternative spaces, conceived on a Western model, often with Western backing, like Raw Material Company in Dakar; Appartement 22 in Rabat, Morocco; and Zoma Contemporary Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Raw Material, run by Kuoho Koyo, a curator from Cameroon, encompasses a gallery, a library stocked with foreign catalogs and magazines, and a cafe-bar. It’s more than just an urbane hangout. You could practically live there.

And there is one large-scale mechanism for artists in West Africa to show their work: the broad, typically biennial surveys of new art. Bankrolled by government money — much of this comes from France, which still wields powerful cultural influence over its former colonies — these showcases are designed to grab global attention and bring in the larger art world.

Yet even in these ostensibly international forums Africa and its artists remain oddly set apart. The two oldest still-functioning events of this kind in Africa, Dak’Art in Senegal and the Photography Biennial in Bamako, are restricted to exhibiting primarily artists from this continent (or, rarely, foreign artists of African descent). Partly for that reason attendance stays small. From outside, these shows are seen as provincial; at home, they’re viewed as events for foreigners.

And whether they’re strong or weak — the 2011 Bamako biennial, in late fall, was strong, visually ambitious and cosmopolitan in its thinking — they suggest some basic questions about contemporary art here and across the continent.

What, for example, does the “African” in African contemporary art mean, if anything? Is African, as a brand, an asset or a liability? Must art signal its African-ness — make reference, say, to traditional forms or African subjects — to succeed in an exotica-loving global market? Likewise, can updated versions of traditional African forms — ceramics, for example, or performance — be presented as contemporary, without forfeiting, to Western eyes, an aura of authenticity?

In the end these questions fold into a more general one: How can 21st-century Africa, on its own terms, join the larger world? AT LEAST AT ONE TIME AND IN ONE PLACE African contemporary art meant something positive and functionally specific: in Senegal during the immediate postcolonial era, the arts were a cornerstone of a national developmental strategy.

Under the label Negritude, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the Paris-educated poet who became his country’s first president in 1960, promoted an aesthetic that blended African culture, black racial consciousness and European Modernism. Artists who adhered to his racial philosophy and his approved painting style — semi-abstraction incorporating tribal motifs — got lots of exposure. Senghor pushed their careers hard at home and abroad.

After he left office in 1980, however, the state support ended. Resistant art trends had sprung up, and Negritude fell into disesteem. Critics were calling it a tool of power politics designed to aggrandize a leader. They viewed its celebration of blackness, simultaneously ingratiating and isolating, as neo-colonialist in its effect, calculated to keep African art from integrating internationally.

More than half a century later Negritude’s uneasy ghost lingers. But many younger artists born during the Senghor years are fed up with its latter-day incarnation, Afrocentricity, which they find constricting and retrograde. The Senegalese painter Soly Cisse, who was born in 1969, exhibits internationally and divides his time between Dakar and Europe, points to an art education system that has Negritude veterans as its high-ranking teachers. “Art is a way of looking at the world, whether you’re black or white,” he says. “Identity in Africa is a prison.”

Walk through the streets of Dakar, Abidjan or Bamako and the first impression is of wide-open vitality: of unrushed, everyday busyness, constant but rarely chaotic. Ask a question, and you’re likely to find yourself in a fast-moving conversation, which will often touch, volubly, on local and national politics.

That vitality came through in the recent Bamako photography biennial, which took place well before the recent military coup and rebel separatist incursions that have thrown the country into turmoil. Subtitled “For a Sustainable World,” it was an intensely, topically African show. Many of the most vivid images were of ecological nightmares in progress throughout West Africa. A separate North African section documented the inebriating first days of the Arab Spring. The photographs made clear that no one is more alert to Africa’s problems and promise than Africans themselves.

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Photography has an interesting history on the continent. It arrived in the mid-19th century and was soon being used by Africans and Europeans alike, interchangeably, often for commercial purposes. So it doesn’t come, as oil painting does, with cultural baggage. Photography is equally Western and African, always modern, and in the digital age easy to distribute and market.

For those reasons, among others, it was the medium that finally put contemporary African art on the market radar a few decades ago. The specific images that caught on were portraits of urban Africans taken from the 1940s through the 1960s by two Malian photographers, Seydou Keita (1921-2001) and Malick Sidibé, now in his 70s. Both men worked out of cramped storefront shops in Bamako — Mr. Sidibé’s studio is still in operation — making the city a natural site for the biennial.

Yet the show itself demonstrates a basic bind that a lot of African artists find themselves in. The biennial started in 1994 as an informal collaboration among several French and Malian photographers who, working in teams, took Mali as their subject and exhibited the results in Bamako, then in Paris. The Paris show was a hit, and the French government agreed to finance the project as a biannual event. But with sponsorship came guidelines: The biennial would be all, or at least mostly, African.

The decision raised protests. Why must African art continue to be corralled off into an ethnographic corner, pigeonholed by place of origin, particularly when the medium being used is culturally neutral? Isn’t an all-African show yet another example of how the global — that is, Western — market espouses diversity but insists on separation, imposes isolation in the form of acceptance? (These questions were not lost on some of the show’s organizers, who a few years back changed the official exhibition title from “Biennial of African Photography” to “African Photography Biennial.”)

But there were solid counterarguments too — for example, that opportunities for African artists to show their work are so few that the biennial should be devoted to providing them. Even more important, an all-African show would, ideally, allow Africans to control their own image, to replace the Afro-pessimism commonly seen in the international media with a nuanced vision of the continent. By projecting such a view African artists could both affirm their origins and claim their place in a global society.

And nuanced the 2011 biennial was, as it took you from cyber-revolutionaries in Tunis to e-waste dumps in Accra and on to fantasy Africas, future and past. The show would have looked striking anywhere. In Bamako — a huge, impoverished, low-rise village of a city on the Niger River — it looked both on target and strikingly anomalous, spread over a half-dozen locations and out into the streets in the form of bannerlike enlargements.

The artists, flown in for the opening, huddled and buzzed, connecting up with at least a few curators and collectors, and with African colleagues they otherwise would never have met. The biennial itself wasn’t getting much traffic, though: early reports of terrorist attacks in northern Mali were starting to keep travelers away. But with a spinoff exhibition due to open in Paris, Africa’s boundaries seem to be expanding. The mood was upbeat. ABIDJAN HAS BEEN UPBEAT TOO. In December its skyscraper skyline was ablaze with Christmas lights. Worrisome parliamentary elections went smoothly. People talked about a country in recovery, speculating that the city would soon again be the French-style metropolis, with galleries and boutiques, it was before the crisis.

But signs of damage lingered in burned-out buildings and bullet-pocked walls. And there is evidence that African art’s worst enemy can be Africa itself. The Museum of Civilizations of Ivory Coast near the center of town was closed, ostensibly for inventory taking after it was looted of millions in art during the crisis. At one point recently its main exhibition hall was completely bare except for a few carved masks in storage boxes and a jumble of Christian Lattier sculptures on the floor.

Lattier was Ivory Coast’s greatest 20th-century artist. Born in 1925, he studied in Paris, where he broke with the French academic practice of modeling in plaster and began weaving figures from copper wire, a technique used in traditional African art.

After independence he settled in Abidjan and taught here until his death in 1978. Unattached to any Western movement or style, and undervalued in his home country in his time, he was a man of conflicts, cultural and personal. You sense this in his sculptures, made from rice-sack hemp hand-twisted into cords wrapped around armatures, of freakish animals, crucifixions and sardonic riffs on traditional African masks — or rather on Picasso’s riffs on such masks. Talk about international networking: Lattier was an African and a Modernist quoting Picasso quoting Africa.

Lattier also turned out public sculptures, the best known being an giant relief called “The Three Ages of the Côte d’Ivoire” for Abidjan’s international airport. When the airport was renovated in 2000, the relief was taken down and carted away. For years it lay, a tangle of frayed cord and rusting metal, on a patch of grass outside a government building, the Palace of Culture. (It was recently moved to the National Library.) Periodically Salif Diabagaté will bring interested visitors to see it.

On one fall visit he surveyed the wreck, checking for termites and sweeping away a pair of discarded trousers left draped over the framework. Lattier, a star of a high, half-forgotten cultural moment in Africa, is his hero. He remembered seeing “The Three Ages of the Côte d’Ivoire” at the airport as a child: “I was blown away by it. Someone told me that there was nobody left who could do that kind of thing. So I decided I wanted to be an artist.”

For years he has planned to restore the piece, though no one asked him to until the government started to show interest some months ago. His Abidjian dealer tells him he’s crazy, tells him to make his own art. But saving the Lattier is a personal matter. It’s about preserving African art history, which is also his own history, and assuring the future of both.

The project will require huge amounts of time, money, labor. With luck the government will come through with its promised support. Before the crisis, when he was selling art here and abroad, doing the job out of love seemed possible. Now it is beyond his means.