Unisa Press

Sites of Remembering

The meaning of African Art Through Memory

Author: Abebe Zegeye
ISBN: 9781569025147
Number of pages: 259
This book is not available in electronic format

About the book

A richly illustrated, thought provoking and captivating book exploring the meaning and understanding of African art from an African perspective, through African memory. Zegeye challenges us to examine our reference points and to look again as we are taken on a journey through Sites of Remembering.  Beginning in Ethiopia, we see that Mulatu the first Ethio-Jazz musician to study abroad integrated Western music into Ethiopian music, rather than the reverse, and the flavor remains Ethiopian. Still in Ethiopia we are lead through the magical universe of the artist Yetmgeta, whose art is deeply Ethiopian in inspiration. Ethiopian Christianity has developed its own unique religious and cultural practices, which parts of Yetmgeta’s work reflect, having echoes of devotional art infused with symbolism and Christian iconography. The work of highly versatile fellow Ethiopian, Elias Sime is extraordinary and profoundly moving. Workneh Buzu, another inspirational and innovative artist whose work draws from Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, as seen through his collection, Songs of the Angels.

 

Further south, the exploration of Sam Nhlengethwa’s archived art illuminates our understanding of cultural capital and its value and power in social development. The importance of an archive created by an African depicting Africans and African art is an antidote to the influence of the colonial lens. The need to own and nurture cultural capital and tradition is highlighted in the case of the Mbira, and Mbira music, which had to some extent been displaced through the agency of missionaries and colonisers. We are lead past the economic crisis to a crisis of knowledge and it’s social implications. The chapter incorporates a series of interviews with Albert Chimedze, Mbira artist who founded the Mbira Centre to promote the Mbira.

 

Zegeye offers a complex critical analysis in the  chapter covering  Chester Higgins’ diaspora photography which spans politics, art, religion, society and more, and in the concluding chapter on the important exhibition and catalogue of art and essays, Space currencies in contemporary African art. Teasing out colonial and post colonial influences and discerning the nationality of the capital driving and shaping art production and value, is extraordinarily difficult, but always worthy of scrutiny and challenge.

 

During much recent history African art has been curated, and written about by Europeans, and  this book is a valuable contribution to the pool of African writing on African art.

 

Abebe Zegeye has done extensive research on African and Social Identities, and is at present a director of Centre for Research and Development in Learning (CRADLE) based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Table of content

SECTION 1: THINKING

1  Introduction

2 What is contemporary African art?

3 Insurgent memory and African art

 

SECTION 2: VIEWING

4 Mulatu Astatke: The making of Ethio-jazz

  1. The magical universe of Zerihun Yetmgeta
  2. The seemingly seamless subversion of Sime
  3. Song of the Angels

 

SECTION 3: KNOWING

  1. Rethinking archiving: Modes of cultural capital in Sam Nhlengethwa’’s collection of art
  2. Beyond the construction of crises: The voice of an ordinary Zimbabwean

 

SECTION 4: REMEMBERING

  1. Diaspora connections and discontinuities: The photography of Chester Higgins
  2. In place of a conclusion: Re-centering Space Currencies in Contemporary African Art