How should the ethnographic gems of African art be presented in our time? The Centre for Fine Arts and the Royal Museum for Central Africa have joined forces to offer a bold answer to that question during its summer festival, Visionary Africa. Held at the CFA, GEO-graphics, the festival’s main exhibition, sets out to recontextualise more than 220 objects of breathtaking beauty from the Museum and from other Belgian public and private collections by bringing them face to face with the work of contemporary African artists. These are being chosen by eight arts centres carefully selected from all over Africa because of the active role they are playing in the development of the cultural sector in the continent. The art centres’ interventions are inscribed in a scenography which sheds new light on how to read the relationship between old and new by highlighting the affinities and ruptures between past and present. The project’s artistic director, the internationally renowned architect David Adjaye, will also present his own photographs of African cities. The exhibition will demonstrate the influence that the original context of creation exerts on cultural output. The interplay of these four approaches - the museum pieces, the new works, the platform offered to the arts centres, and the artistic director’s vision - will present the visitor with a new history and with an unprecedented lexicon for mapping African art and culture, the common denominators and the driving force behind this original and modern cooperation and development platform.

Curators : David Adjaye, Anne-Marie Bouttiaux (RMCA), Koyo Kouoh, Nicola Setari.

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Design Museum, London
URBAN AFRICA