of objects, exhibit spaces, and markets. meschac gaba's museum of contemporary african art

Of Objects, Exhibit Spaces, and Markets: Meschac Gaba’sMuseum of Contemporary African Art

Phyllis Clark Taoua, Taylor Kathryn Miller

Transition, Issue 119, 2016, pp. 188-200 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

Access provided by University of Arizona (7 Apr 2016 18:51 GMT)

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tra/summary/v119/119.taoua.html

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188 DOI 10.2979/transition.119.1.23 • Transition 119

Room from Meshac Ga-

ba’s Museum of Contem-porary Afri-can Art. Tate

Modern installa-tion 1997–2002.

Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and STE-

VENSON Cape Town. © 2015 Tate, London.

Taoua and Miller • Of Objects, Exhibit Spaces, and Markets 189

Of Objects, Exhibit Spaces, and Markets

Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art

Phyllis Clark Taoua Taylor Kathryn Miller

Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art was on display at the Tate Modern from July to September, 2013 and was subsequently acquired by the Tate.

To the unsuspecting Tate Modern visitor the Museum Shop room with-in Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art might seem indis-cernible from an ordinary stock room at The Gap. Bold screen-printed t-shirts drape over sterile wooden hangers, hung squarely like commer-cial quilting. Necklaces and belts fashioned from what appears to be papier mâché adorn androgynous mannequin segments. Select items are thoughtfully arranged on stacked softwood pallets. Yet, a closer look reveals this scene to be more than an hom-age to carefree fashion. This room is part of an innovative exhibit space in which found objects from the streets of Cotonou, Benin, take on new and subversive mean-ings by virtue of the carefully orchestrated contexts in which they are placed. Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art is an installation comprising twelve rooms, which he created over the course of five years, from 1997–2002. His inspiration for this bold project is twofold. Gaba felt that his Africa, the world that he knew and that interested him, was not known in the West and, since there were no appropriate exhibit spaces for showing his version of contemporary African art, he decided to create his own. As Ousmane Sembène once said, “when a man re-fuses, it means that he takes responsibility himself, because that which you refuse, you must accomplish another way by your own strength.” Sembène’s do-it-yourself ethic applies here: Gaba’s desire to document daily life in the streets and markets of Cotonou went hand-in-hand with

“When a man refuses, it means that he takes responsibility himself, because that which you refuse, you must accomplish another way by your own strength.”


the need to create a space adequate to the task. His approach was that of a conceptual artist with a playful, irreverent point of view, rather than from the editorial perspective of a curator.

The twelve rooms in Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art are devoted to specific topics that relate to his over-arching interest in money, objects, and markets. In each space he plays with the idea of money and the dynamics of a marketplace, whether it involves food in the Draft Room, form in the Architecture Room, or interactive participa-

tion in the Game Room. Aspects of ritual and daily life are explored in the Art and Reli-gion Room and the Marriage Room, where he creates spaces for personal storytelling and reflections on diverse faiths. Gaba displays a chandelier of burnt books in the Library and the kind of old cassette tapes he grew up with in Benin in the Music Room as part

of his engagement with the status of cultural production in the age of digital natives. While the Museum Shop underscores the consumer-driv-en nature of galleries and the symbiotic relationship between art and markets, the Museum Restaurant is both participatory and performative as it features chefs who prepare meals that can be eaten on the premis-es. Summer Collection and Salon provide indoor spaces for conversation and introspection, whereas the Humanist Space encourages meditation on Gaba’s provocative installation outside, beyond the confines of the Tate’s concrete walls.

Meschac Gaba declared, “My museum doesn’t exist. It’s only a ques-tion. I have my internal conflicts and I am looking for answers.” These twelve rooms raise many questions indeed. Taken together, they pose a fundamental question, “What should an exhibit space for contem-porary African art look like?” Gaba’s is a mode of artistic expression intended to challenge the canonical thinking and ethnocentric prej-udices that have surrounded African art for far too long. In addition to interrogating the very idea of a museum, Gaba’s ground-breaking installation confronts the problematic Eurocentric impulse to look at Africa through an exclusively ethnographic lens without also examin-ing, for example, widespread inequalities resulting from unfettered global capitalism.

The relevance of Meschac Gaba’s enterprise is immediately appar-ent when we consider the striking fact that there are still no museums of contemporary African art in Benin today. In 2014 Chris Dercon, who is currently the director of the Tate Modern, led a panel discussion with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Simon Njami entitled “Contem-porary African Art: Where Did We Come From, Where Are We Going?” at the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle. Their conversation signals the urgent

“My museum doesn’t exist. It’s only a question.

I have my internal conflicts and I am

looking for answers.”


need to create new spaces for artists working and living in Africa, which has become a more fruitful debate in recent years thanks, in part, to Meschac Gaba. In Europe, the exhibit spaces that are conventionally open to the display of African art objects remain largely invested in ethnographic paradigms as we see in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. Dercon suggests that Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art establishes a tension between the ethnographic curatorial impulse and an innovative aesthetic regime that is thoroughly contemporary. The promise of future institutional innovation that such a tension opens up comes from Gaba’s creative, playful, inquisitive sensibility as a con-ceptual artist. However, the fact that the Tate Modern displayed and eventually acquired the Museum of Contemporary African Art as part of its permanent collection in 2013 carries its own subversive potential. The exhibit serves as a means for the artist’s own contemplations to engender conversation and debate, as well as to subvert the ideas and values of market capitalism by redefining the concept of a museum and our understanding of what art can be.

It was during his studies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam that the Museum of Contemporary African Art was first conceived. In an effort to conceptualize alternatives to the prevailing European aesthetic re-gimes, Gaba began his museum with the Draft Room. In this space, intended as an introduction to the exhibition, the muse-umgoer is presented with banknotes and other metaphorical items for barter. Gaba explains this emphasis, “I want to talk about devaluation. In the Salle Esquisse [the Draft Room] that I’ve projected for my Museum of Contemporary African Art, I take cut-up banknotes, Dutch ones among them, that people will buy as objets d’art. So, I revalue these cut-up banknotes and give them a value as works of art. Devaluation destroys money. The cut-up notes I sell [for] more than their face value.” His inspiration stemmed from the devaluation of the Franc CFA, the French-backed currency in Franco-phone West Africa, during the early 1990s. France’s devaluation of the Franc CFA triggered an economic crisis across the region. According to Gaba, “The ensuing neo-liberal economic policies thought nothing of their disruptive impact on the lives of Africans.” Many merchants and community members shared a sense at the time that, “[The govern-ment’s special development funds did] little to ease the pain of West Africans. But although devaluation had been predicted for years, nei-ther African governments, nor France did much to prepare the public for the coming shock. The result has been an exchange of accusations

A large plate with a sizeable nest of chicken feet rests upon a plastic bucket. Plastic bags of portioned chicken pieces are sprawled out on the gallery floor on a plain white sheet.


of hypocrisy, betrayal, and economic incompetence.” As viewers move through the Draft Room, they can maneuver around a four-legged wood-en table topped with piles of banknotes weighed down by tiny stones. Nearby, plastic bags filled with shredded banknotes and cylinders full of compressed money are symbolic reflections on value and exchange. Also scattered throughout the Draft Room are various parts of chickens. In an unplugged freezer capped with a transparent lid, whole ceramic chickens fill the drawers. A large plate with a sizeable nest of chicken feet rests upon a plastic bucket. Plastic bags of portioned chicken pieces are sprawled out on the gallery floor on a plain white sheet. By navigat-ing these displays viewers are reminded that, “In capitalist economies, production frequently outweighs consumption, and food is regularly frozen, discounted, or left to rot.” The juxtaposition of decommis-sioned banknotes next to “wasted” food prompts the visitor to question the interrelation of production, consumption, and cost.

The Museum of Contemporary African Art explains that in the Architec-ture Room, “. . . visitors are encouraged to propose their own architec-tural structures using the wooden building blocks on the blue carpet. The models are constantly in flux, being adapted, demolished, rede-signed and rebuilt.” There is a ladder in the middle of the room that was empty as the installation of the space first began. In the Game Room, the viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to a roulette wheel crafted from

Room from Meshac Ga-

ba’s Museum of Contem-porary Afri-can Art. Tate

Modern installa-tion 1997–2002.

Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and STE-

VENSON Cape Town. © 2015 Tate, London.


a bicycle rim, mounted on a plywood board. The board is painted in the colors of several African flags that are interspersed with a rendition of the United States flag. Drawing an art historical comparison, the cu-rators note, “Like Marcel Duchamp, Gaba appropriates found objects, confounding expectations and challenging us to recognize what we are seeing as art. The countries represented have each struggled with democracy but the way the flags are painted makes it almost impossible to discern which nations are being referred to.” Gaba plays with the imagery of nationhood and his irreverent treatment of where political communities begin and end unsettles the once sacred narrative of national liberation. These flags have been distorted from rectangles to squares through dismantling and reconstruction, which evokes the political games at work in the drawing of African borders in the process of decolonization.

Also featured in the Game Room is a series of six tables, each with slid-ing puzzles of an African country’s flag. Visitors can arrange the pieces to create the emblems of Algeria, Angola, Chad, Morocco, Senegal, and Seychelles. A museumgoer might not realize which nations these collections of colors and shapes represent, nor their sociopolitical implications; they may solely participate in the games for the sake of pleasure or to challenge a contend-er. Gaba’s puzzles enlist the museumgoers’ participation as a means of questioning the notion of sovereignty, as Stephan Müller states in Meschac Gaba. “[Gaba’s] African-ism is not related to any flag, nor to a na-tionality (even though he did play with the idea of flags, even though he does work regularly in Cotonou), but to greater humanity. It is a way of behaving and looking at the world, rather than asserting a claim of identity.” Ad-jacent to these tables is a life-size chessboard painted directly onto the museum floor. Half of the thirty-two chess pieces are decoupaged with dollar bills and the other half are covered with euros. In this game of chess, participants may employ competing strategies and assume the role of powerful Western agents that have exploited Africa. This game works as a metaphor for the choreographed pursuit of economic and strategic advantage as well as the rational art of political deception.

Gaba demonstrates a keen interest in the materiality of his symbols. There is a particular disposability to many of these objects from the salvaged wood pieces for table legs to the damaged bicycle rim for the roulette wheel. This reflects his experience in Benin, which, as a society, “operates more or less exclusively on the business of trading . . . [and has] evolved as a quintessentially mercantile economy,” as Ivor Powell

In this game of chess, participants may employ competing strategies and assume the role of powerful Western agents that have exploited Africa.


describes in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Powell has also suggested that, “In such an economic climate what is bought and sold, exchanged or bartered, is less significant than the fact of the transac-tion. Surplus value—not in the classically Marxist sense of capitalist exploitation by captains of industry, but nonetheless not unrelated to this—comes to be the stock in trade, as value abstracted from and not directly predicted by labor or the production of economic value in the first place. The real currency here, surplus value itself, is entirely abstract; what is being bought and sold is hardly more or less than buying or selling itself.” For Gaba, it is not the actual relic or painting within his installation that is of utmost importance but the ideas and histories the objects convey in the narrative contexts he creates. Shred-ded banknotes are rendered useless as official currency but function ironically as valuable emblems of market systems. Müller writes, “In Gaba’s museum, there is no relationship between things which is not also and above all a social relationship. The rooms of his museum are devices offering an experience which is at once visual and practical. Ga-ba’s practices are offered both as a way of thinking and a way of acting, an art of representing and an art of using. The model of the game is a good example of this dual function . . . And, as in all games, in Gaba’s projects too the outcome depends upon the skill of the competing players and the moves allowed by the situations. What is at stake is always money, represented by Gaba in its alternating processes of increase and decrease of value.”

In the Marriage Room, a wedding dress, high-heeled shoes, and purs-es are hung on whitewashed walls as symbols of the social ritual of mat-rimony. On one table, four black and white ceramic cups and saucers adorned with Keith Haring’s illustrations appear like a set for sale. On another table, a bridal bouquet of artificial white and pink roses with verdant foliage rests in everlasting bloom. Since a living bloom would surely wilt with time—as might the love relationship it symbolizes, we are left to ponder whether we can combat a flower’s natural passage with plastic replications. With a diverse array of items, the Marriage Room documents Meschac Gaba’s own marriage to the Dutch curator, Alexan-dra van Dongen, in a museum in Amsterdam in 2000 as Steve Pantazis signals in his review of the exhibit in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art. Ephemera from the event including the marriage license and guest book are displayed in Gaba’s exhibition for the world to observe. In this room, Gaba’s project of documenting his vision of life, his experiences of Africa on the streets and in the markets of Cotonou, intersects with self-reflexive autobiography and extends to include a pivotal moment in his trajectory as a migrant in Europe. In the Marriage Room, an un-derlying tension surrounds the issues of immigration and globalization. At the time of their nuptials, immigration was not a polarizing political


issue of direct relevance to their lives since the Dutch economy was flourishing. However, at the time of the Tate Modern’s exhibition in 2013 as Pantazis observes in his review, many European countries were increasingly resistant to immigration due to the global recession, the implementation of austerity measures, and an influx of asylum-seekers from Africa and the Middle East. Gaba enjoys the privilege of an ex-pat who can move back and fourth between Benin and Europe legally and who chose to study and marry in Europe. Thembinkosi Goniwe notes in his 2011 essay in African Identities that, “Africa is subjected to a site of marginality and absence. Thus, it becomes challenging to speak of the African continent as a site in which globalization of cultures and artistic production of various nations takes place. The site in which globaliza-tion actively occurs is apparent in the West, and for African art in the diaspora; in fact the art of Africa is represented by African artists living and working in the West. Western Europe and North America continue to be dominant art centres wherein the African diaspora has become the Africa that is removed, distant, and dislocated from the physical African continent.” It is precisely in this sense that Gaba’s project to document his own life and the experience of other West Africans can be seen as an effort to combat the marginalization of African perspectives.

After studying for years in Amsterdam and exhibiting in Norway, France, the United States, and Brazil, critics and viewers have ques-tioned whether Gaba has retained enough of his “African-ness.” Visitors of Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art are confronted with the artist’s dueling sense of rootedness in Africa and rhizomatic growth in Europe as Müller remarks in Meschac Gaba: “The Meschac Gaba who is working today is no different from the young man grappling with his earliest experiences several years ago. What has changed about him—that is to say, in his perception of the role of an artist in society—is that his horizons have expanded. He has moved beyond the strict limits of a national scene to the globalized complexity of the space that is inter-national art. Like the American writer James Baldwin realizing he was “black” only after leaving Harlem, I would claim that Meschac Gaba became aware of his African identity after leaving Cotonou. Europe became a vast field of investigation.” Artists like Gaba are faced with a paradox: as Africans living in Europe, they contend with pressures to assimilate into European society and to conform to artistic canons and aesthetic paradigms in order to “succeed” in art school as well as with expectations that they should portray their “real” identity or “roots.” Idowu William has observed in the article “Post-Colonialism, Memory, and the Remaking of African Identity” that, “[The] existence and de-mands of the globalizing world order makes identity a precarious and an endangered concept. In the world today, it is less fashionable to talk of identity but rather ‘identities,’ since an individual is not and cannot


be known only be reference to one point of entry. Multiplicity defines each person in the world today. This is why Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers that “limiting the configuration of identity of an individual to one set of factors such as race, gender, religion, and culture is to create ways in and through which the identity of such individuals is eventually restricted.” Meschac Gaba has creatively responded to these challenges as a conceptual artist who interjects bits and pieces of his life and the quotidian experience of his fellow West Africans into the fictional space of the museum. His Museum of Contemporary African Art uses art as a language for negoti-ating identity and offers a new narrative outside the confines of old discourses on African “authenticity.”

In the Art and Religion room, ritual objects and icons from a variety of religions including African animism, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity are sparsely arranged on plywood shelves. The Jewish tallit placed right alongside depictions of the Hindu deity Gane-sha and other objects for worship visually defy cultural hierarchies and oppositions. The viewer might be struck by the banal presentation of such holy symbols; the relics themselves are simply placed on shelves and can be viewed from many angles. The room works as a shrine, not to the physical objects themselves, but to how identity is inter-twined with faith and how different systems of belief can peacefully share a common space as the curators note, “The coexistence of many faiths and the reality of syncretism in Benin are clearly referenced in this installation with the arrangement of the objects emphasizing the similarities between people rather than the differences.”

“You know, my museum of contemporary African art has no walls. I want to show artists that you can show work everywhere, you can do it on your own,” Gaba said, “It’s an empty museum, but rich in philos-ophy.” In fact, he provides a space for meditation in the Library Room, complete with desks and lean-to shelving. Perhaps understanding our increasingly globalized world could occur by reading the scholarly works and art catalogues on display in this gallery. Visitors may peruse some sixteen hundred texts and contemplate the themes addressed within the museum in relation to the world outside. Gaba’s Library Room resembles a West African market more than a European version of this institution. Bits of decommissioned banknotes are scattered throughout as miniscule decorative dots. Stacks of palettes obstruct direct walkways and round wooden cable bobbins function as tables. Copies of the Qur’an are interspersed on these tables with different versions of the Bible. Two bicycles with vintage computer monitors strapped to the handlebars stand out against a bare white wall. Gaba’s library space explores issues of mobility and access; the bicycles with computers mounted on the handlebars function as metaphors asking


how people, ideas, and information travel. Two chandeliers adorn the ceiling, each constructed from wrought iron. One consists of burnt books, which is an allusion to the African proverb, famously cited by the Malian writer Amadou Hampaté Bâ, “When an old person dies, it is like when a library burns down.” The viewer is invited to consider the value of storytelling, particularly inter-generational storytelling in addition to the European practice of archiving printed material. In one corner, a coffin contains an audio recording of Gaba recounting his life, which plays on a loop, as he imagines what his father would have said about him from the grave. Similar auditory expressions fill the Music Room, where a track by Gabonese composer Pierre-Claver Akendengué replays on a cassette. The hall is sparse but three large tambourines made from enamel plates, similar to those used by women in Catholic churches in Benin, hang from the ceiling, evoking voices and songs of past generations as they dangle overhead.

The Museum Restaurant room of the exhibition presents social inter-action and community as an essential part of Gaba’s vision while ques-tioning our consumer-driven society. The curator’s note explains, “On seven occasions during a two-week period visitors were able to book for dinner prepared by a different artist-chef. The artists each offered hearty family meals prepared on site in Gaba’s Museum Restaurant and some of them intervened in the space. On the final night, Dutch artist Rudy Luijters cooked a chicken he and Gaba had slaughtered earlier

Money Mar-ket in Mes-chac Gaba’s Draft Room, Museum of Contempo-rary African Art. Tate Mod-ern installation 1997–2002. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist and STE-VENSON Cape Town. © 2015 Tate, London.


in the day . . . The Museum Restaurant continues to be activated in this way with emerging artists being invited to participate. When not in use, the public is welcome to occupy the space complete with lanterns and plastic tablecloths on the trestle tables.” The replaceable, vivid plastic tablecloths drape simple cafeteria-style tables. To what extent does an active restaurant constitute contemporary African art? The way Gaba documents his experience and simultaneously asks questions about how to represent it encourages visitors to reflect on what counts as con-temporary African art. As noted in the exhibit catalogue, “By inviting us to look at the world otherwise, and to leave behind established con-ventions, he provokes a wish in us to reconsider all the many concepts

that have been somewhat hastily erected as many undeniable truths.” The Museum Restaurant is a picture within a picture; a model for interpersonal communication and active participation within the larger framework of the austere institution of the Tate Modern.

This is not unlike the Museum Shop, where Gaba and his contemporaries from the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam contrib-uted sculptures and limited edition objects for sale and display, encouraging dialogue

amongst museumgoers and sparking questions about materiality and functionality. Many of the t-shirts and postcards are printed with simple bold colors and patterns frequently found in American malls. But this store is unique in that it also resembles a West African market, as the inexpensive products are set right alongside high value items on simple, raw wooden displays in a seemingly informal yet deliberate manner. Gaba’s Museum Shop has not taken the place of the Tate’s store, but it questions the financially important yet ancillary role of gift shops in museums. The addition of a second store accentuates the profit-orient-ed nature of cultural spaces in capitalist societies and leaves the viewer to question the value of artwork versus commodities. The Summer Col-lection room has a similar emphasis where articles of gauzy cotton and silk clothing hang across something resembling a laundry line. Visitors must maneuver their way around the fabrics, where streams of light from large windows act as stepping-stones across the otherwise barren floor. As is noted on the Tate exhibit site, “The clothes are neither obvi-ously European nor African. Rather they are imaginary hybrid creations utilizing a recycling aesthetic, while referencing haute couture. Fashion is a symbol of status and wealth, a creative form celebrated seasonally with fashion shows around the world and retrospectively in collections and exhibitions. For Gaba, fashion provided another avenue to explore

He creates spaces that are grounded

in utilitarianism and simplicity but toy with

the ethereal and utopic; and, spaces that are distinctly rooted in

his African heritage.


systems of value and the everyday elevated to art.” With this space that is part restaurant, part arcade, part market, and part couture showroom, Gaba continues to challenge the notion of what a museum can be. He creates spaces that are grounded in utilitarianism and simplicity but toy with the ethereal and utopic; and, spaces that are distinctly rooted in his African heritage and simultaneously participate in the global community.

The Salon was created as a room to “meet, read, play, listen to music, and relax.” Yet, relaxation and fun are not only encouraged within the Tate’s walls. One hundred bicycles, painted gold and flaunting minimal clean lines, are stored within the Humanist Space. Gaba’s Humanist Space blurs the boundaries between a museum’s walls and the outside world. A popular form of transportation in African and European cities, the bicycles are intended for use around the city and remind visitors that one can observe society with as much attention and care as they would a painting within a museum. These lessons are fun, as museumgoers can integrate exercise and fresh air into their learning experience, but the bikes are not the museumgoers’ to keep so, at some point, they must return to the Tate.

Whether inside or outside the physical walls of the Museum of Contem-porary African Art, the visitor is reminded of the hegemonic parameters of the museum as an institution. “[This museum] is only a question,” Gaba stated, “It is temporary and mutable, a conceptual space more than a physical one, a provocation to the Western art establishment not only to attend to contemporary African art, but to question why the boundaries existed in the first place.” Each room presents symbols in situations that raise questions about West African commerce and its intersections with Western capitalism. Banknotes are used in so many forms throughout the exhibition, revealing the artist’s obsession with money and markets and signaling the pervasive influence of the World Bank and the IMF in African affairs during his lifetime. We see this most starkly in the life-size game of chess with the pieces covered in dollars and euros but this metaphor for neo-liberal capitalism gains its viral potency from all the bits and pieces of money throughout the twelve rooms of the installation. All the various situations in which merchandise is displayed from plastic chicken in freezers to an array of quotidian objects give the exhibit a compelling conceptual coherence that documents the inescapable effects of global capital on the lives of people in West Africa and beyond.

To some extent, this exhibit leaves us with open questions, inviting us to consider what still remains to be worked out. Simon Njami has emphasized the forward-looking aspect of this innovative museum space in his review “The World in Twelve Rooms,” “[Gaba] confirms his will to turn the page of a no longer applicable history by staking a claim


on the contemporary field, that is to say, the here and now—a position that is resolutely meant to face the future.” As an archaeology of the future, this installation paves the way for new forms of art and new venues for display, particularly of contemporary African art, both inside and outside the museum. Gaba’s fashion show of synthetic wigs, worn on the streets of Cotonou and then displayed with video footage at the National History of Immigration Museum in Paris from June to Sep-tember 2015, continued to challenge the static Western concept of a museum space. Pantazis’s review notes that, “Gaba sends the message through this unconventional concept that African artists do not need an actual building to exhibit their work but instead should have the courage and vision to define themselves and show their work around the world.” Meschac Gaba’s emphasis on performance and play in his Museum of Contemporary African Art, whether preparing and sharing meals inside or riding bikes outside on the street, challenges the con-servative mindset of conventional museums where curators are experts and visitors cannot touch anything, where traditions are revered and archives are guarded. There can be little doubt that those who control the levers of power within Western institutions and museums will come away from Gaba’s installation with new ideas for dialogue, new reasons to deliberate, and ultimately a set of probing questions that may help deconstruct unproductive ideas of the past. Ultimately, Meschac Gaba has given African artists and leaders in the African art community much to think about in terms of the kinds of spaces that must be created to display contemporary African art in the future on the continent as well as around the world.

of objects, exhibit spaces, and markets. meschac gaba's museum of contemporary african art

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