Kunst und sozialer Raum in afrikanischen Städten: Öffentlichkeit, Praxis und Imagination

"Media and Imagination" ist eine von fünf Forschungsachsen am Zentrum für Afrikastudien Basel. Ihr sind Forschungsprojekte und Dissertationen angegliedert, die kulturelle, medienbasierte und künstlerische Praktiken und deren Rolle für die soziale Imagination in afrikanischen Städten untersuchen. Eines davon ist das SNF- geförderte Forschungsprojekt "Art/Articulation: Art and the Formation of Social Space in African Cities" am Lehrstuhl für Ethnologie der Universität Basel. Es untersucht in vier verschiedenen Städten Afrikas, wie KünstlerInnen mit ästhetischen Mitteln Bilder und Vorstellungen des Sozialen und der Gesellschaft artikulieren und in welchem Verhältnis gesellschaftliche Imagination und künstlerische Ausdrucksformen stehen

Playing Around with Money. Currency as a Contemporary Artistic Medium in Urban Africa

In recent years, artists in African cities have shown a striking inclination to use money as a medium for artworks. Money is applied as sculpting material, it is a means of transaction in happenings and a prop in performance videos, and it has a symbolic and iconic function in paintings and installations. It is a marker of both, autonomy and dependence. While it stands for national identities, politics and economies, it also represents a global connectivity with its advantages and pitfalls. The paper presents three artists working in African cities and the diaspora who use money in a variety of ways: Meschac Gaba, Donna Kukama and Gerald Machona. After a close analysis of a selection of their work, it considers the artists’ own place within an internationalizing art world and art market that perhaps is particularly welcoming to the seemingly ‘universal’ symbolic and economic nature of money

Art Practice as a Field of Articulatory Engagements: Fred Mutebi's Promotion of Barkcloth in Local and Global Networks

This essay presents a major project of artist Fred Kato Mutebi that involves a particularly high and diverse number of stakeholders, aesthetic traditions, entrepreneurial initiatives and social engagement. Known since the beginning of his career as an inventive and experimental artist, university-­trained master printer Fred Mutebi started some years ago to explore the ecological, technological, aesthetic, cultural, political, social and economic potential of barkcloth, a culturally significant material with a long tradition in Buganda. By promoting the production of barkcloth, facilitating training opportunities, opening up new creative markets, and emphasising the sustain­ability and cultural value of barkcloth, he successfully links different local, national and international discourses within his practice as an artist and as a social entrepreneur. I argue that Mutebi disposes of a particular mastery in creating moments that render possible articulatory practices, and he does so with regard to different conceptual understandings of articulation. Similar to many other artists in African cities, he has developed a particular repertoire of discourses and cultural as well as artistic practices that feed into a variety of markets and stakeholder interests. As articulatory practice, this repertoire enables him to secure, expand, and source quite flexibly from several economic contexts and constituencies and helps him to operate from a flexible and likewise reliable range of positions to implement his visions