It’s already a given that Africa is represented in the news, however it’s very difficult for the news about Africa and images of Africa to go beyond the already established contentions and clichés of the continent. The conventions through which Africa is imaged always express incredible deficiency. We’re presented a place that is always in the midst of disintegration and chaos, almost at the edge of disappearing. So we tend to approach Africa with a sense of pity. In reality, there is much more going on. When these artists take a look at the places where they live and work, they see them through a completely different set of lenses, as opposed to a photojournalist who simply descends on the horror. I’m not condemning such people, but these are conventions that have become a pathology, and this pathology is at the heart of Afro-pessimism. The great thing that art does is that it finds ways to upset the conventions of imaging that we have become very attracted to and immune to the same time. This is one of the things that the codes of artistic practice can do: to raise vital questions and to propose new possibilities of meaning, in terms of images of the continent. The works are not celebratory in any way, shape, or form, but they are decidedly engaging in terms of investigation, critical in terms of analysis, and honest in their depictions of the continent’s complexity. (more)