Guest Post by Jennifer Bajorek and Erin Haney
The recent announcement of the Guggenheim Foundation’s new “Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative” bears all of the hallmarks of the present era. It is funded by a bank. It has the word “global” in its title. It claims explicitly to challenge “a Western-centric view of art history,” according to the Foundation’s director, Richard Armstrong, in a piece by Carol Vogel recently published in The New York Times. The project will mount this challenge by investing in series of linked-up residencies, exhibitions, acquisitions for the museum’s permanent collections, and public programming with artists, curators and educators in parts of the world hitherto largely ignored by the museum. The modus operandi is encouraging, particularly when compared with late-20th-century attempts to bring non-Western art into dialogue with institutions in the North. The list of regions is long, and includes South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa. One thing it is not, however, is global: Africa south of the Sahara, and thus 2/3 of the continent, has been excluded.
Guggenheim’s map–Where is the rest of Africa?
Photography. ‘Addis Ababa Diary’ by Mahesh Shantaram
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A while back we featured a random photograph of Indian photographer Mahesh Shantaram (I think Achal Prabhala got me onto Mahesh’s work). Email contact led to me asking him if we could post some of his “Addis Ababa Diary” series on AIAC. Shantaram, who also works as a wedding photographer from his base in Bangalore, explained what led him to photograph in the Ethiopian capital: [Read more...]
The Jazz of Samuel Yirga Mitiku
I was in Dubai recently, working on a documentary, and on the way back to Cape Town I visited Ethiopia to see some friends and experience some of the Ethio-jazz music I had fallen in love with ever since I first heard Mulatu Astatke and the “Ethiopiques” compilations. Even though I had high hopes, Ethiopia completely exceeded my expectations. On my first night in Addis, I was lucky enough to see an Ethio-jazz funk band called The Nubian Arc play live. For me the standout performance was by Samuel Yirga Mitiku, a young piano prodigy, who also plays in the acclaimed UK-based band Dub Collosus, known for their blending of dub and Ethiopian traditional music. [Read more...]
Merkato
Merkato is a documentary (view the trailer here) about the largest open-air market in Ethiopia. The filmmakers are trying to raise funds to finish the project through kickstarter.
“THE AFRICA THEY NEVER SHOW YOU”
I’d be interested to hear people’s responses to this video that try to counter Western stereotypes of African economic and social life with its own selective, glossy images of a largely urbanized, clean, ordered–oddly without any people–Africa.
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