Critical Interventions celebrates its 10th anniversary and happily welcomes readers to this issue. In the past 10 years, the journal has published a wide range of articles on divergent subjects while sustaining its original mission as a forum for advanced writing on African art history. The inaugural edition posed a key question (“Is African art History?”) and proposed that studies grounded in research in Africa and based on deep knowledge of historical and contemporary experiences of art and life in Africa can illuminate the fields of modern and contemporary art history in ways that are otherwise invisible to specialists in contemporary art in general. Critical Interventions thus aimed to establish an international platform for debates on and questions of visual modernity in and about global Africa. Fast forward 10 years—the journal is now firmly located as a leading venue for scholarly dissemination in the field of African art history. It has achieved this status by promoting the highest standards of critical analysis and encouraging research that engages the intergenerational dynamics of the field, including those that attempt revisionist interpretation of earlier research as the need arises. We are happy to report that the field of African art history is thriving amid great changes to the orientation of its scholarship, mainly in its shift from studies of indigenous African art to studies of the modern and contemporary.
This issue of Critical Interventions extends our focus to the contexts of art and visual cultural production in Africa by investigating key agents of change and also by reviewing the works of artists who cast a critical eye on the changing contexts of their social, cultural, and economic landscapes. The first article by Carlos Garrido Castellano reviews the impact of institutions and the public sphere on artistic agency through an interview with the current staff of 32° East Ugandan Art Trust, a platform behind much of the development of contemporary art taking place in Uganda in the past half-decade. Castellano's interview reveals how this institution has served as a multipurpose location for the practice and discourse of contemporary art in a context where such platforms are sorely lacking. Noting that it is more oriented toward processual than to exhibitional activities, the Trust offers a residency for artists and curators, a workplace for the local artistic community, and an open area for meetings and discussions. The project's space also functions somehow as an archive, gathering catalogs, visual material, and press releases of its own and other spaces' initiatives. Through this ecumenical focus, 32° East has attempted to transcend the elitism with which contemporary art is still associated in Uganda by pushing a concern for and interest in socially driven collaborative practices and public art.
A second article by Courtnay Micots reviews an example of the transformations in Ghanaian architecture occasioned by British colonization of the Gold Coast in the late nineteenth century, using the residence of the Fante barrister Kwamin Atta Amonoo as an example. Micots notes that wealthy Africans in coastal Ghana (in West Africa) first appropriated British architectural styles in the late 1860s during a period of political transition. She argues that although these two-story buildings constructed in brick and stone resemble British architecture, Ghanaian homes actually represent a long-standing tradition of cultural exchange manifested in a deliberately new style of architecture combining local elements with European architectural practices. Her analysis illustrates the long-standing interaction between European and West African architecture in this region that dates back to the Portuguese construction of Fort São Jorge de Mina (St. George of the Mine, or Elmina Castle) in 1482. Micots concludes that rather than simply mimicking British architecture, the grand African homes built during the colonial period serve as markers of political tensions and resistance, as well as sites for the construction of modern African identities by colonized African elites.
Tobenna Okwuosa's article revisits the devastation of the political, social and ecological life of the Niger Delta due to ongoing oil exploration and extraction, using photographs taken in the past decade by three photographers. Their poignant images, he argues, constructs a tragic narrative of oil extraction and the consequences of global neoliberal politics on the lives and environments of Nigerians in the Niger Delta. Okwuosa points out that the exploitation of the Niger Delta follows a pattern established centuries ago with the transatlantic slave trade that continues through a period of Western colonization and persistent subjection of the Niger Delta to a project of Western imperialism and expropriation of the Other's natural and human resources. Citizens of the Niger Delta are excluded from profits deriving from this exploitation and have thus come to see the incidence of crude oil, something that should be a great boon, as a harbinger of doom.
Next is a review of a recent retrospective exhibition by Obiora Udechukwu, written by architectural historian Ikem S. Okoye. OJEMBA, Udechukwu's restrospective, took place at St. Lawrence University from August 15 to October 12, 2016. Okoye argues that the retrospective raised serious, perhaps even troubling questions about Africa and its geographic and political landscapes, its place in global culture, and about the way its contemporary art practices should be or even ought to be considered. Okoye points out that far too little retrospectives of the works of individual African artists occur in the USA, and that this marginalizes African artists many of whom have worked for decades and whose work deserves greater contextualization and exposure.
The issue concludes with a portfolio analysis of artworks by Gabrielle Raaff, based in South Africa. I first encountered Raaff's ethereal paintings in an email announcement for an exhibition of her works in at the Art Hub Gallery in London. I was immediately struck by how the liminal nature of her watercolor paintings accurately reflect the changing social landscape of contemporary South Africa, where established identities have been called into question amid new identities yet to cohere. Three decades after the fall of apartheid, there needs to be a greater discussion of the meaning of racial identity in contemporary South Africa as well as increased dialogue between all races. However, I also think there is room for an artist who contemplates the social context of South Africa through artworks that eschew direct political indictments. Raaff's paintings are important for their insistence on quiet spaces of contemplation, a still eye within the storm of changes accosting us all in a global contemporary where attention spans are shrinking to microscopic levels.
As always, Critical Interventions is grateful to our subscribers, whose support sustains our effort to expand the scope of scholarly publishing in African art history. We thank also our publisher for their dedication to the journal. We pledge to continue to provide scholars of African art history with a credible discursive platform and look forward to the next 10 years with great anticipation.