Decolonial Perspectives on African Art: Conundrums and Antinomies

Panel discussion with Prof. Dr. Sylvester Ogbechie, University of California, Los Angeles

If you would like to join this event, please contact s.burri@unibas.ch.

Abstract

What does decolonization mean in the field of aesthetics and visual arts? How can we envision it, and how can scholarship in African arts contribute to such project?

Prof. Dr. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie has tackled these questions for many years, arguing that decolonizing knowledge must begin by understanding the very real historical and ongoing expropriation of African natural, cultural and material resources and how it has been converted into wealth in Western collections. He will discuss his argument with us at the zoom-Seminar facilitated by the Institute for Social Anthropology, University of Basel.

Participants are invited to read in advance his essay “Mathias Komor and the Market for African Art in New York”, in Acquiring Cultures. Histories of World Art on Western Markets, ed. Bénédicte Savoy, Charlotte Guichard and Christine Howald (de Gruyter, 2018). Please contact s.burri@unibas.ch to receive the pdf file. It will be the starting point for the panel discussion. Please note that the session will be recorded.

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie is Professor at the department of the History of Art & Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes on the arts and visual culture of Africa and its Diasporas, especially in terms of how art history discourses create value for African cultural patrimony in the age of globalization. He is the author of Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (University of Rochester Press, 2008: winner of the 2009 Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association for best scholarly publication in African studies), Making History: The Femi Akinsanya African Art Collection (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2011), and editor of Artists of Nigeria (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2012). He is the director of Aachron Knowledge Systems, and founder and editor of Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture.

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