Contemporary African Art To Flourish (CAATF) is a sound-based artwork loosely based on the game Broken Telephone. In the game, messages are whispered from one person to the next, down a long list, and often change radically from the original because of what is lost in the whispers. With CAATF, I send a message around the African continent via ‘Google Translate,’ having a computer program translate from one language to the next. Here technology, language, and the spaces between them are highlighted as always playing a role in where and how we find meaning.
The message I send is the first paragraph of the preface of the book, Contemporary African Art Since 1980, by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, which begins “Contemporary African art is flourishing.” The authors write about the position of contemporary African art in a global context, and the shift away from a system where only a few institutions determine and shape the discourse around African art.
CAATF is a kind of experimental study of some of the non-institutional forces that shape art and discourse. It is a telling and re-telling of a "story" that implicitly asks, “What is changed, and what remains, in translation?” How do our stories and ideas shift and change when they move through groups and individuals, techniques and technologies? What are the implications of that change? Interestingly, Enwezor and Okeke-Agulu’s text is largely transformed, but its tone of authority remains intact.
2012, 1:49
