Objects of Instruction Video Tour: African Section
African Section of the Objects of Instruction Exhibition
From Cubism on, African artefacts have inspired developments in modern art, yet modern African artists have had to come to terms with Western orthodoxies imported along with Western political domination. Reactions have differed: in Nigeria the Natural Synthesis movement produced oil paintings drawing upon indigenous traditions, instigating a new nation-building art; in East Africa artists were encouraged to develop a form of modernism drawing upon local visual practices; and in South Africa artists looked to cosmopolitan modernisms, rejecting ethnicity as a cultural resource to avoid its complicities with apartheid.
An earlier form of artistic production also affected by wide-ranging cultural contacts is the illuminated manuscript tradition of North Eastern Africa. Exhibited here are Christian G ( z manuscripts from Ethiopia flanked by examples showing the cultural role of Arabic, on the one hand appearing alongside Coptic in the Christian north, and on the other supplying texts translated into Swahili along the Muslim eastern coast.
