November 17, 2007–April 13, 2008, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Tapping Currents acknowledges the prominence of contemporary African art and art of the diaspora in the international art world. The exhibition includes art in the Project Space and a series of eight new media works screened in Atkins Auditorium. Tapping Currents brought the work of these internationally known artists to the museum and the city for the first time.

Tapping Currents accentuates the uniqueness of each work of art, celebrating the artists’ freedom of expression. Whether living in Africa or beyond its borders, each artist has chosen the cultural context in which to create. Identity is no longer exclusively linked to one’s country of origin, but, instead, to how one understands the self through intellectual and psychological processes. Unlike earlier generations, these artists no longer feel the need to deny or demonstrate their African roots. Several themes emerge from Tapping Currents are critiques of colonialism and multiculturalism, and acknowledgments of post-colonial issues.

Gallery Installation

Odili Odita’s Fusion unifies two patterns and two distinct color palettes bursting from an invisible vertical line. Radiating from this vertical flashpoint, the two are one. On another level, Fusion expresses Odita’s conviction that art reflects the multiculturalism of contemporary life. He says, “What is interesting to me is a fusion between cultures. The fusion that I seek is one that can represent a type of living within a world of difference. I believe through art there is a way to weave the different parts into an existent whole, where the notion of a common humanity can be understood as a real choice.”

Yinka Shonibare’s Big Boy evokes a historic era in the 19th century when European powers who had colonized Africa were considering how to further divide the remaining territory. Colonization meant that Africans were governed by others and that cultural indoctrination was strictly enforced. David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary and explorer of Africa, who called for “Commerce, Civilization and Christianization,” legitimatized the practice. Big Boy’s headlessness is Shonibare’s leitmotif when he deals with issues of power. It signifies absurdity, and, as the artist says, “a truly grotesque moment in African history, a moment that to me is highly responsible for the state that Africa is in now.”

Samuel Fosso’s Self Portrait presents his fantasy of a liberated African-American woman of the 1970s. Fosso’s mother took him from his birthplace in Cameroon to Biafra when he was a small child. When the Biafran war broke out, the family lived in hiding in the forest until Fosso’s uncle took him to Bangui, Central African Republic. There, in 1975, at age 13, Fosso opened his own photography studio. In his free time, he began experimenting with self portraits. The staged self portraits, for which he is so famous, developed simultaneously and independently from similar western trends.

Georgia Papageorge’s Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire, Namibia/Brazil is a video of her dramatic, two-part environmental installations in Namibia, Africa and in Brazil. These two geographical locations mark the site of a 135 million-year- old rift between the formerly linked coastlines.

Unseen in the artist’s video are the actual processional ceremonies involving hundreds of people, in which swaths of red fabric are displayed along both seashores. For the artist, the processional is a spiritual experience aimed at healing rifts between peoples. The first installation of Africa Rifting took place in June 2001, in Namibia. The second installation, in Brazil, occurred on September 15, 2001, and was dedicated to victims of the September 11 World Trade Center attacks.

Kwesi Owusu-Ankomah is known for his black and white paintings, such as Movement 34, which incorporate symbols from all over the world interwoven with life-like images of African men. These are utopian paintings representing a harmonious world in which we are all interconnected. It is not important that the viewer be able to decipher these ideograms because they represent a new, global language transcending time and culture. Owusu-Ankomah’s figures represent humankind. Like the idealized human form celebrated in Italian Renaissance art (which inspired the artist), the men symbolize perfection within a new realm.

Also in the exhibition is El Anatsui’s Hovor, an almost alchemical transformation of humble, recycled liquor-bottle tops into a visually compelling sculpture. Liquor brand names printed on the bottle tops link Anatsui’s work specifically to Nigeria, and they often provide a secondary level of reference. Ecomog Gin, for example, is named after a regional military force. Anatsui prefers working with found objects from the local environment, exploiting the inherent colors and reflective qualities of the liquor bottle tops.

Julie Mehretu’s biography has been compared to an atlas. She is truly an artist of the diaspora. Born in Ethiopia, raised in Michigan, educated in Senegal and Rhode Island, she now lives in New York City. Tapping Currents includes her painting, Dispersion, with its multiple, dynamic forms that evoke a sense of geographic migration and serve as a metaphor for the fluctuating realities of globalism.