“Ars 11”

“Ars 11” is the latest edition in a series of large-scale, thematic exhibitions staged by Kiasma and its institutional predecessors since 1961. While the topic of the current show is African contemporary art, this is not just a cavalcade of works from that continent. It is a show about a place in flux, seeking its own role and identity in an increasingly globalized world; an exhibition about dreams, and especially realities. A banner above the museum entrance reads “Changes your perception of Africa”—and this exhibition does just that.

Anyone looking for the usual clichés will be disappointed. “Ars 11” is a white-cube exhibition spread across the museum as well as eleven satellite venues. It includes such well-known names as El Anatsui and Romuald Hazoumé among its thirty artists and collectives. But to drive home the curatorial emphasis on a wider range of perspectives, the organizers also include artists neither born nor living in Africa; among these are Chilean-born Alfredo Jaar and Eija-Liisa Ahtila of Finland, two artists whose works address social and political issues such as immigration and ideological conflict.

Pieter Hugo’s apocalyptic photographs from the series “Permanent Error,” 2009–10, challenge romantic notions of pastoral plains and lolloping giraffes. They show us a vast dumping ground where Western computer waste is burned to harvest precious metals, giving off clearly toxic smoke. Of the many videos, the one that most caught my attention is Vita Nova, 2009, by Vincent Meessen. Based on a chapter in Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1957), it traces the story of a Senegalese boy soldier once pictured on the cover of Paris Match, intercutting this with the life of Barthes’s grandfather, one of the founders of the French colony of Cote d’Ivoire. The work is a good reminder of the complex ways the history of Africa is linked to the politics of the Western world.