Olu Oguibe

Olu Oguibe
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Olu Oguibe

Born in Nigeria, educated in London, residing in the United States and curating and exhibiting internationally, Olu Oguibe is a central figure in the postcolonial debate.Focused on ideas of misunderstanding, place, voice, social justice and loss, his work has been shown in exhibitions in major galleries and museums around the world.He also carries on a parallel practice as a writer, poet, art historian and curator.He co-edited Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, is co-curator of Authentic/Ex-centric: Africa in and out for the 2001 Venice Biennale and most recently received extensive critical acclaim for his book The Culture Game (2003).Oguibe is co-editor of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art in New York and an editor on New York popular culture magazine, aRude.

The participating artists are: Fernando Alvim (Angola - Brussels, 1963), Ghada Amer (Egypt - New York, 1963), Andries Botha (South Africa, 1952), Mary Evans (Nigeria - London, 1963), Meschac Gaba (Benin - Amsterdam, 1961), Kendell Geers (South Africa, 1968), Everlyn Nicodemus (Tanzania - Brussels, 1954), Olu Oguibe (Nigeria - New York, 1964), Barthélémy Toguo (Cameroon - Düsseldorf, 1967) and Ina van Zyl (South Africa - Amsterdam, 1971).
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Olu Oguibe, for example, is not only an artist but also renowned as a curator, the editor-in-chief of Nka (the most important journal on African art) and the winner of the prestigious African prize for literature for A Gathering Fear (1992).

Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, eds.Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.432 PP., 20 color ills., 50 b/w. $37.95 paper.

During the late 1980s and 1990s a number of major international exhibitions and publications introduced modernist art by African artists into the art world main-stream.Among the more notable events were Magiciens de la terre at the Centre Pompidou (1989), Africa Explores at the New Museum and the Center for African Art (1991), the Africa 95 festival in London, the founding of Third Text (1987), and Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (1994), the exhibition In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940--Present at the Guggenheim Museum (1996), and the Johannesburg Biennales of 1995 and 1997.The editors of Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, Okwui Enwezor and Olu Oguibe, have been directly involved in a number of these projects.Enwezor was a coorganizer and Oguibe a writer for the In/Sight exhibition and catalogue.Enwezor is the founding publisher of Nka, and Oguibe was at one time its editor.Oguibe, along with Salah Hassan, was the curator of the Venice Biennale Africa section in 2001.
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Reading the Contemporary collects twenty-two essays written (or published) by Enwezor and Oguibe, and by their close collaborators since the early 1990s, along with a handful of other historically important contributions.Together they make a strong case, both enumerative and analytical, for the centrality of Africa in the study of modernity and modernism.

The book contains four thematic sections.The first, "Theory and Cultural Transaction," problematizes the prominent discourses within the Western art market and the academy that have framed, and often hindered, the reception of art by African modernists.Oguibes "Art, Identity, Boundaries: Post-modernism and Contemporary African Art" begins the anthology with an accusatory tone.It sets up a straw man: a purposeful misinterpretation of an interview between Thomas McEvilley and the artist Ouattara Watts, in which the artist, according to Oguibe, is trapped by a series of primitivizing questions.
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By setting up McEvilley as just another "Caucasian" critic (instead of as a critical ally), Oguibe does a serious disservice to the very valid and still relevant purpose of his own essay, and to his coedited anthology as a whole.