From 29 May. The exhibition Africas. The Artist and the City takes a look at new urban realities through the eyes of its artists, with a selection of 200 works which represent the various plastic and visual genres: painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, video, installations, etc.
The artist and the city
The CCCB presents the exhibition Africas. The Artist and the City, curated by Pep Subirós, forming part of the BARCELONA ART REPORT 2001 triennial, which this year is entitled EXPERIENCES.
The idea behind this exhibition is to highlight the vitality and wealth of contemporary African art, and its close interrelation with the ever-increasing rate of urbanisation of the continent.
The project takes as its starting point a vision of Africa as a seething, highly contradictory reality, bringing together in an intense and sometime explosive mix a variety of temporalities and cultural traditions, concentrating and manifesting the extremes of the problems and potentials of our world.
This situation is particularly evident in artistic creativity, a creativity which is still solidly rooted in its historical, social and cultural bedrock, yet profoundly marked by the transformation of living spaces. If African traditional art is fundamentally a rural art, its contemporary art is basically urban.
The exhibition aims, then, to offer an approach to the new urban realities of Africa through the eyes of its artists. The selection of almost 200 works includes examples of different plastic and visual genres - painting, sculpture, photography, cinema, video, installations - with particular emphasis on photography (both creative and documentary), in view of its importance on the African art scene.
Africas focuses on some of the continent's principal metropolises: Dakar, Abidjan, Lagos, Harare, Johannesburg and Cape Town, and on African presence in Paris and London.
Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB), Montalegre 5, Barcelona