"The vision for this salon is to start the conversation about modern work coming out of Africa."
Ifeanyi Awachie
Africa Salon, Yale University’s first contemporary African Arts and Culture Festival, starts Friday night. It's part of a larger initiative to advance the university’s focus on the continent.
Africa Salon curator Ifeanyi Awachie is a Woodbridge Fellow at the Yale Africa Initiative. She said the Yale Art Gallery has an expansive collection of artistic objects from Africa spanning over 3,000 years of history.
"But the vision for this salon is to start the conversation about modern work coming out of Africa, work that young artists are producing and new questions and new stories that artists are grappling with in their work on Africa," Awachie said.
Awachie recently spoke with WNPR's Diane Orson.
Diane Orson: What are the kinds of challenges you face in representing art that reflects so many different cultures on a continent?
Ifeanyi Awachie: That’s a good question. For this iteration of Africa Salon, we knew we couldn’t cover every single region. And we did our best to, as I was curating the content, to make sure that we have representation from as many different regions and as many different countries as possible. That was a challenge and there are some countries whose art scenes are a bit more visible than others right now.
So we do have a lot of representation from West Africa. Nigeria, for example has quite a booming film industry and is also putting out lots of great music. Ghana has a very visible kind of music scene and a couple of other countries as well. But we were able to find emerging artists from countries that fans of African art and music might not expect. So our headliner "Just A Band," is very well known in Kenya and starting to pick up international acclaim as well.
"Just A Band" describes themselves as "a supremely nerdy music and art collective," and I bring that up just because their work is not only about the music. They are also really known for their music videos, which are sometimes political. So they have this interest in activism and visual art, as well as producing their music, which has a really original sound. You don’t listen to it and necessarily think, "Kenya" or necessarily think "Africa," and [that] was attractive to us, because we’re looking for music that challenges people’s preconceptions of what African music is.
But the Salon is not just music. You have conversation, a range of screenings and performances. Can you tell me a little more about what to expect?
The main part of the program is the conversations that will take place. So it will start off on Friday evening with a discussion broadly about what we mean when we say "the arts in Africa." And we’ll start even a step farther back from that and what we mean when we say ‘Africa’ and what we mean when we say "diaspora."
We’re going to show work by the visual artists featured in the salon. And the visual art component of the event was curated by a museum in New York -- the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts.
Africa Salon is a two-day event with panels, readings, screenings and performances by artists from the African continent and the diaspora. To attend, register at AfricaSalon.org.