Report from My Public Lectures on African contemporary art 2019 Fall

This fall, I got several opportunities of giving public lectures on African contemporary art. One is an omnibus lecture by Kyoto Seika University. The organizer is Prof. Oussouby Sacko, who is the first African to be the president of a Japanese university. The other is a seminar at Taguchi art collection, a leading contemporary art collection in Japan.

These lectures are not only a good opportunity of organizing my thoughts and presenting them, but also a great opportunity of networking with people from the Japanese art world.

Emerging Contemporary African Art by Taguchi Art Collection (September 28, October 26)

Taguchi Art Collection has been a leading contemporary art collection in Japan since it played an important role to introduce Keith Haring or Andy Warhol in the ’90s! It continues finding and supporting a lot of famous contemporary artists all over the world, of course including Japanese artists like Nara Yoshitomo. For example this year, the collection organized an exhibition “Globe as a Palette” which travels 4 public museums in Hokkaido, Japan.

I got to know with Miwa-san, the daughter of the founder, who now mainly works on its selection or organization at Art Fair Tokyo, where I worked as a curatorial staff of Minnnano-Gallery.
There, she told me that she started to feel the necessity to learn about African contemporary art more, as she encountered numerous African artists and diaspora in world-renowned art fairs. She has already been to 1–54 or African countries pavilion at Venice Biennale. We could enjoy conversation on this theme, and she invited me to this incredible chance.

While I prepare the lecture, she frequently gave feedback from the perspective of the art market, always check articles on the topics of my interest and shared them asking me if I already checked it. She was like my supervisor.

I noticed that she always kept herself open to what’s going on out there, ( is with good antenna than most of the professors in my university) and that is the case with people working in the front line of the art market. They seem to have the custom to check “how much this artist/galley/artwork is valuable” when they confront with the new thing. Miwa san and her dealer has the rich knowhow to research artist record or gallery status. They put great importance on the information. (I went on a one-day art tour in London with Miwa san and her dealer this fall. Please check it on my Instagram. I will write about it here later.)

At the second lecture at Taguchi art collection, we showcased works of King Houndekpinkou alongside with Abdoulayekonate and Ozbolt.

I was glad to hear that the audience, including Miwa san, noticed that they had ignored many of the works from the continent as they don’t have information. After they listened to my story and raised awareness to the African artists and institutions, they are surprised that the market is full of artists and news from the African art scene.

(And this African art market feature on Artnet report is an incredible source of information. if you are interested in the scene, this is a must-read article.)

In the lecture, I introduced the “third-generation” of African contemporary art, who are born around the 1980s. In the scene, these young initiatives are so powerful, and the institutions are strategically empowering them and appointing them actively.
This is not the case with my aging country, so they are my role models as the same generation.

I also met a Nishiyama-san from Gifu Fine Art Museum. He curated “Diaspora Now” at his museum, and he is a specialist in Middle Eastern contemporary art. He pointed about that there is an Arabian ethnic art movement beside the Pan African art trajectory in the North African countries like Morroco. Conflicts or communications from this situation can be an interesting research topic.

After I connected with people around Miwa san, I noticed the importance of market and collector for contemporary art, on every instant. These opportunities rose my awareness of organic dynamism between gallery, collector, and museum.
At the same time, I keenly felt that how Japanese humanity academia has ignored this dynamism, by keep describing the art and its history with a biased and limited perspective focusing mainly on university and museum.

Kyoto Seika University Lecture Courses on Today’s Africa (November 8)

This series lecture is organized by Kyoto Seika University and Prof. Oussouby Sacko.

He came to Japan as a graduate student studying architecture at Kyoto University 28 years ago. After he completed his Ph.D., he kept living in Kyoto until today. (I’m 26 yrs old now, so he knows Kyoto better than me. ) He has worked as a teacher in Seika so long and also contributed to social issues related to architecture, way of living or community. Also, he has been engaged in a lot of multicultural communication projects, including the promotion of African art and culture.

The university itself is very famous with its innovative challenge for popular culture, like the Japanese first Manga department, but also art in general.

I gave a lecture on the third class of the omnibus lectures with Dr.Ogata. My part was about African contemporary art. I’m so proud of Takaishi Mizuki, the designer who worked with me again on this opportunity.
The infographic of the “African contemporary art scene since 1989” in the photo below, which helped the audience’s understanding a lot, will appear in the product of another exciting project, which we are working on recently.

Through these lectures, I got to know a lot of people who are already interested in artists from Africa and the diaspora. Some of them have bought artworks, some of them travel the continent. I will keep in touch with these people, by exchanging information and experience. This networking is a great asset for me, and I think academia can be a hub of these people engaging art from various standpoints.