You wouldn’t think that, with a title like ‘Contested Terrains’ and a replica AK-47 in the window, this exhibition could wind up being such a muzzled affair. Yet, Tate Modern’s Level 2 show of four artists working in Africa is curiously tepid. Frustrating too. I loathe the trend for endless interpretive material but I can’t be alone in wanting more than the elegant formalism offered by Adolphus Opara’s lightbox photographs of Yoruban religious elders. What is all that paraphernalia for? And what’s it supposed to do? The handout tells us that ‘indigenous philosophies and belief systems that influence daily life have been either ignored or disparaged’ but stops short of saying what those belief systems are and how they are enacted.
To photographs of decrepit mining compounds and structures, Congolese artist Sammy Baloji has added archival images of officials and labourers. Past and present collide, along with ambition, reward, imperialism and exploitation. But we all know that buildings and towns, and (by implication) countries and continents, carry the traces of their histories, and I’m not sure that Baloji’s images make more than a general point.
Ditto Kader Attia’s two-screen slideshow, ‘Open Your Eyes’, in which images of vessels and bodies, variously cracked and repaired, are shown side-by-side. Attia, at least, adds layers of meaning in the form of texts that refer to modernity, the body and otherness.
The show seems to want to impart complex, individual narratives but ends up providing neatly-packaged images and objects – like Michael Macgarry’s AK-47 studded with cleat nails to become a kind of fetish object – that, having grabbed your attention, fail to say much about anything. What’s needed is less art, more Africa.