"China - Africa" ​​at the Pompidou Center: "a story that concerns us"

Text by: Siegfried Forster

How to compose a global history of art history? Today, it is no longer enough to integrate extra-Western arts into the narrative of Western art. Wednesday March 4 opens at the Center Pompidou-Paris "Chine-Afrique". The exhibition explores the relationships between many elsewhere - which also upset us.

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China - Africa is not a river exhibition with a hundred works, but rather an open window to discover a research laboratory. A dozen artists from Africa, China, but also from France, Taiwan and Thailand, offer very conceptual works to deconstruct the imaginations around the notion of China - Africa . Interview with Alicia Knock, one of the two exhibition curators.

RFI : 30 years after The Magicians of the Earth who had broken down the borders of Western art, does China - Africa wish to become in turn an exhibition of " rupture " ?

Alicia Knock : China - Africa is indeed part of a story that is also that of the Center Pompidou, where there were The Magicians of the Earth in 1989, but especially Africa Remix in 2006 and Modernities plural in 2013, which was trying to redefine and to open the concept of modernity to extra-western territories. So China - Africa continues the story and tries to take it back. It is a question of affirming a line of work which reflects on the articulation of extra-Western narratives.

Are you particularly interested in modern and contemporary African art?

Yes, this project is also a manifesto in this sense, since China –Africa is also interested in a transnational history. When we are interested in a story that seems to be anchored geographically, ultimately, this always leads us to question ourselves. At the start, what really motivated us to launch this project was to question a link that seems to put us aside - we, the western world. China - Africa , it is the story of an initially ideological, political friendship, which is part of Marxist history, since the Asian world and the African world went hand in hand to try to get out of Western interference and colonization. It is the story of a friendship that tries to break free from the Western world and the colonial paradigm.

How does this affect us in France or in Europe ?

It is a story that takes place in the western colonial context. This story concerns us. One has the impression of talking about something that is far away - this alliance of two South, of China and Africa, of Asia and Africa - and that it is a story that does not concern us more, but, in fact, it concerns us.

The exhibition project gives pride of place to a work of historical contextualization. It is not intended to be exhaustive, we are not in a geopolitical notion, but we seek to anchor the history of this link which goes much further than an economic presence of the Chinese in Africa, which dates back to ten 'years, and we hear a lot in the media.

The project will show us, in a non-exhaustive way, that this history exists and that it crossed the whole XXth century. It even goes back further: the work of Musquiqui Chihying refers to the presence of 15th century Chinese coins from the Ming dynasty in Kenya. This work tries to replay, to translate this archaeological discovery which shows that the Chinese presence was real in Africa for many centuries. And she tries to translate it for the current context of the Chinese presence in Africa.

Compared to the history of art, what does it change if we only consider the relationship between China and Africa?

One has the impression that it is a story which is autonomous, but one sees that there is a whole anchoring in the Western colonial device. For example, one of the works that open the exhibition is that of Kiluanji Kia Henda. The Angolan artist films a stuffed antelope from the Natural History Museum of Luanda that he is talking about. This antelope - one of the national symbols of Angola - tells the history of this country. At one point, she meets a Chinese investor who wants to buy it for her nightclub.

It is clear that this Chinese presence in Angola, this interruption, is part of colonial history. The Natural History Museum of Luanda alone is a colonial device in itself. The artist titled the work We Shall Return after a poem by Agostinho Neto, the first president of independent Angola (1975-79). He speaks to us about this need, at the time of decolonization, to get hold of a national history, to rewrite it. So this Chinese presence is precisely at the pivot between the colonial heritage and the Chinese presence. So the question of China - Africa revolves around a past which concerns us and which continues to concern us. Today, we are in systems where these colonial interferences have been transformed and are perhaps less visible, but they are still present. We are concerned, since we all also live in a form of reconfiguration of our identity at a global level.

Have there been any discussions around the title, for example naming the exhibition Africa - China instead of China - Africa ?

When you call a China-Africa exhibition, it's true, you can't get away from what it means. "Chinafrique" exists and it is formulated to also respond to "Françafrique". We are part of a story. On the other hand, we hope that we do not come out of the exhibition route with a suitcase word like “Chinafrique” to speak of this somewhat colonial presence of China in Africa. This exhibition reflects on how we can redefine this relationship. It's like a call. I think art has a capacity to make things more complex.

The exhibition The Magicians of the Earth made visible an entire artistic territory outside the West. The China-Africa exhibition, what does it want to show ?

This exhibition is really part of a work that we are trying to do in the service of contemporary creation at the Center Pompidou. For five years, we have created acquisition groups dedicated to regions, be it Africa on my side or Southeast Asia next to my colleague Yung Ma, co-curator of the China- Africa . For example, one of the works in the exhibition is a work that I was able to buy from the museum. Swimming pool , by François-Xavier Gbré, tells the epic story of the Bamako Olympic swimming pool, built by the USSR, at the end of the 1960s, for the African Games of 1969 which never took place. The swimming pool has fallen into disrepair and was recently renovated by the Chinese. This story clearly shows that we are moving from one geopolitical area of ​​influence to another and that this whole story, which seems to be bilateral, is in fact multilateral. And it also replayed geopolitical history, with the communist presence in Africa, whether on the side of the USSR or of North Korea and China. But it all comes together.

So this project is a way of articulating an art history that is plural. It allows us to write a story continuously, without enclosing the artists in specific geographies. This appellation China - Africa sends us back to geography to get us out. We are trying to recompose a global story.

Who is for you an emblematic artist for the role of Africa in this China-Africa relationship ?

What interests me in this subject are artists who do not answer the subject exactly, but who ask us a lot of questions. And to ask questions, you have to be several. So, I think that it is not a subject that can be represented by an artist individually, but rather by a polyphony of questions and proposals.

How does this relationship between China and Africa question our Western point of view ?

I don't know if today we can really oppose Africa and Europe. Perhaps that is what makes us no longer in the history of Earth Magicians . We are no longer in the confrontation of geographic blocks, we are in a shared history.

Often African works and artists circulate well in international circuits, but much less on the African continent. Have you planned to take the China - Africa exhibition to the African continent and to China ?

We would like this project to be able to move, especially in Africa. We would not necessarily want it to move in the same way, but rather understand how to move these concepts, this reflection, and how to make it positive in a context that is no longer the context of the Center Pompidou, from the great national museum to the center from France, in Paris. One of the artists, the Zambian Anawana Haloba, lives in Norway, but she very often returns to Zambia. She is thinking about a project at Livingstone. Zambia has a very strong history compared to China. It was one of the first countries that China invested. His work speaks of this very early presence of China in Zambia, of the construction of the railway line, the Tazara Express, which links Lusaka and Dar es Salaam, and which was built in the late 1970s by the Chinese.

► China - Africa , exhibition at the Center Pompidou-Paris, from March 4 to May 25.

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