WRITING

The researcher Basma Mansour argues that global contemporary art imposes a pernicious paradox on non-Western artists: to be visible on condition of performing a codified, exoticised, consumable cultural identity. This Faustian pact – gaining institutional recognition at the price of staging one’s own difference – turns identity into a constrained spectacle.

In 1995 the Sudanese artist Hassan Musa published a pamphlet titled 10 trucs pour ne pas devenir artiste africain (10 tips for not becoming an African artist). In the form of ironic advice, he warned young artists against the “trap of the stereotype of the image of the African artist shaped by Westerners.” Musa lashed out at an art history written from the Western point of view alone, in which the history of “the Other” is inexorably simplified, idealised and impoverished; a narrative that reproduces the dominant/dominated dichotomy and seeks to assign, under cover of recognition, an exotic identity he refuses to be reduced to. Nearly three decades later, his words may resonate even more strongly. For while global art promises universality with a show of generosity, in practice it requires artists from outside the West to perform their otherness in order to gain visibility. This paradoxical injunction now reveals its full perversity: we are witnessing a worrying proliferation of works that project a spectacular vision of a fixed identity, crystallised in the codes of a recycled orientalism.

Who invents “the other”?

This aesthetic of otherness, now common currency on the international scene, has its roots in decades – if not centuries – of shaping a vision of the Other. Since the colonial era, the West has worked to shape the figure of the Other according to its own fantasies and needs for power. Mythification was at the heart of the system: complex beings reduced to a few traits, rebuilt ex nihilo according to a grammar that serves the superiority of the centre. By replacing the real human with a fantasised image, by substituting a fixed archetype for the living person, it prepared the ground for what Aimé Césaire called “thingification.” Once turned into a thing, the Other could be exhibited, staged, made into spectacle at will. From the “native villages” of the colonial exhibitions to the dioramas of ethnographic museums, the Other was long presented as a mute curiosity, a piece of exotic scenery confirming the European in his position as central subject and master gaze.

None of this has disappeared; only the forms have changed. Since the 1980s the art world has proclaimed its openness to diversity. The Other, once relegated to the margins, is invited onto the main stage. But on what terms? The colonial myth has traded its old finery to keep up with the times. Otherness, a stigma yesterday, has become symbolic capital today. The dominant public treats itself to a thrill of exoticism and admires “diversity,” but this celebration often remains superficial, purely aesthetic, and never gives up its position of power.

“A sort of reserve for non-European arts”

It seems almost ironic to raise this today, so insistently do some people claim the problem has been “solved.” To hear them, the stage of “all equal” is passed as soon as one takes part in the major events. Yet what concrete scenes show are procedures, framings and circuits of legitimation that reproduce old asymmetries under a new varnish. We are seeing a decolonial “tokenism”: museums and biennials, eager to display their openness, multiply projects devoted to marginalised voices, appoint curators from elsewhere, organise “Africa,” “Middle East” and “Latin America” focuses. But the approach often remains paternalistic. The Other is invited to speak while the ground is strictly marked out. The promise of equality through representation masks the perpetuation of the very essentialist logics it claims to fight. So the uncomfortable question comes back, asked here by Driss Ouaamar: “Why must Africa always be assigned a collective aesthetic? Do we talk about a European aesthetic in the same way?” The varnish of inclusive policies cracks. Western universalism remains the invisible norm, the zero point from which everything else is measured. As Hassan Musa notes, African artists are celebrated for their otherness but relegated to “a sort of reserve for non-European arts.” Everything is decided in Europe or North America: funding, conceptual frameworks, target audiences… The artist Mehdi Ouahmane puts his finger on this mechanism when he denounces how the system is “perverted, instrumentalised.” Noble ideas are travestied: social and political emergencies become sanitised objects of study, authentic resistances mutate into institutional protocols. Behind the discourse of diversity, equity and emancipation lies an expected aesthetic, an implicit grammar that neutralises singularity in favour of legibility. The artist stops being a maker of unexpected forms and thoughts and becomes the pedagogical interpreter of an already defined curatorial line, the good pupil illustrating the institution’s thesis.

And because every system inexorably shapes its subjects, a “standard narrative” of the non-Western artist has insidiously taken hold. Just as there is a “standard file” of the legitimate refugee, the artist must now tick the boxes of the prescribed identity. One has to be “the African artist,” “the Muslim woman,” “the queer artist from the East” – embody a legible category, mobilise one’s identity as symbolic capital. These coded themes are the ones the system recognises and rewards. “An injunction to tell our hardships, our suffering,” as Mohssin Harraki defines it, as if pain had become a quality label allowing museums and biennials to display their good conscience. A permanent tension takes shape between visibility and instrumentalisation.

Why does “the other” invent himself?

The great misunderstanding of our time is to confuse presence with power, representation with justice. The contemporary art system, in a burst of self-absolution, has made inclusion its new dogma, its new virtuous finery. And yet visibility remains a necessary condition: the contemporary artist cannot hide in the studio. The outside eye then intrudes into creative intimacy. It dictates its preferences, imposes its expectations, to the point of shaping the artist’s very gesture. These directives are all the more formidable for remaining tacit, as the artist Lotfi Souidi points out. It is not so much a written rule as a felt current, “an atmospheric pressure.” And that is the most insidious trap: sensing this expectation without its ever being stated, internalising it to the point of mistaking it for one’s own intuition.

To be visible you have to be legible; to be legible you have to simplify yourself

Colours, formats, media: everything bends to the codes of a programmed recognition. For emerging artists this pressure becomes formative – and deformative. Then comes the systematic summoning of heritage. Calligraphy, textiles, so-called “ancestral” motifs… All elements that, legitimate in themselves, turn into compulsory passports to recognisability, converting cultural heritage into a bargaining chip on the global art market. This commodification of the “traditional” comes with an aesthetic of excess that the artist Fatine Arafati observes at African art fairs: “This hegemony of the large format impresses me. These monumental canvases, these saturated colours… It is an art that wants to be loud, that wants to be seen. But by adopting the Western codes of the spectacular, this strategy of ‘wanting to be seen at all costs’.” The aesthetics of din becomes a survival strategy. A cry uttered in the language the market already understands: immediate impact, the wow factor. So epigones are born who, borrowing only the aesthetic aspects of artists such as Hassan Hajjaj, reproduce the visual surface – chromatic saturation, repeated patterns, pop folklore – without the deep engagement and critical approach that ground the original work. These imitations merely duplicate its spectacular visual effects without embodying its inner necessity or its political position. The artist thus becomes the unwilling star of an identity one-man show, forced to play the role of the Other forever. The work is now only a set, a scenographic pretext for the voyeuristic contemplation of the artist’s supposed exoticism. The voice of Abdellatif Laâbi should probably be summoned here, who as early as 1966 made the diagnosis: “The cultural heritage of the colonised will be prospected and rehabilitated in this energy of rediscovery. It will be brandished before the eyes of the oppressor as an object of pride. […] The colonised does not yet discover his culture for himself, he shows it to convince the oppressor’s camp. Culture is an object of exhibition.”

An inverted orientalism

But does the work born under the weight of outside gazes necessarily bear the stigmata of submission? Or does it hide, in its folds, a form of cunning resistance, a subtle diversion of expectations? The artist Youness Atbane, a keen observer of the identity labyrinths that hem in creation, sheds light on these paradoxes. “What fascinated me,” he says, “was understanding how North African art is perpetually categorised by a fundamentally Western gaze.” His research led him to a finding: “Since the turn of the millennium there has really been an attempt at anti-orientalism in the world of modern and contemporary art.” Yet this same insurrection secreted, almost in spite of itself, “a new form of orientalism.”

This contemporary obsession with preserving what might disappear – let us call it the anticipated melancholy of the present – insidiously turns the artist into the anxious curator of their own culture. By brandishing their roots to prove their authenticity, artists end up treating the living as a past to be preserved. They become the archivists of their own culture in real time. Resistance to orientalism has produced its own inverted orientalism. In their fierce will to break clichés, some artists have forged a counter-narrative so rigid, so predictable in its systematic opposition, that it has turned into caricature: that of the “postcolonial” artist perpetually busy decoding their own condition, prisoner of a distorting mirror they polished themselves.

The politics of self-representation

1. Dispossession of representation Colonial regimes of knowledge produce and impose images, narratives and categories. The subject is spoken about and kept from speaking.
2. Alienation and silencing The gaze is internalised. Cultural memory, language, authority and the ability to define oneself are lost.
3. Awareness Misrepresentation is recognised as a structure of power. Who speaks? From where? For whom?
4. Counter-representation Refusal of the colonial gaze. Reclaiming the right to narrate, to name, to archive, to remember.
5. Production of counter-representation Artistic, intellectual and cultural practices reappropriate symbols, languages, histories and forms.
6. Claim for legibility The demand to be seen and heard on one’s own terms. A search for platforms, alliances, audiences.
7. Institutional recognition Inclusion in exhibitions, residencies, publications, collections. The subject becomes recognisable as the voice of the othered.
8. Instrumentalisation The counter-representation is extracted as content, reframed as diversity, difference or authenticity, and circulates as cultural value.
9. Absorption The once oppositional gesture is integrated. It serves the institution’s legitimacy and leaves the colonial framework intact.

Meanwhile the system knows how to metabolise its antibodies. What one thought one was thwarting becomes a label. The thematic catalogue is ready: identity, religion, feminism, tradition, memory… You tick the box that guarantees a place in the narrative. And the spiral speeds up: to be visible you have to be legible; to be legible you have to simplify yourself. In doing so, we end up inventing ourselves in the terms of the gaze that hands out stages and resources, becoming in spite of ourselves the agents of our own categorisation. Here we are at the heart of the Faustian pact. From then on the question is no longer only “how not to become an African artist?” but how to remain an artist, quite simply, without being confiscated by the address that precedes the gesture.

And perhaps one day, exhausted from playing this imposed role, the Other – that is, these artists who are stubbornly labelled as such – will free themselves from the validating or invalidating gaze, from injunctions of authenticity as from summonses to universality. In the meantime, critical lucidity remains their sharpest weapon, for dancing on the edge of the volcano without being consumed.

Read on Diptyk