There is an old belief that the camera steal souls through pictures. Even the language around it speaks to this – images are either “taken” or “captured”. From a colonial standpoint, photography captured images of people and places considered “other” and warped them through a Eurocentric lens. The Tate Modern’s breathtaking exhibition, A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography, counters the camera as an imperial device and instead brings to the fore the eclectic approaches to photography of 36 photographers from across the continent, and across several generations.
Split into three sections across seven rooms, the exhibition is a stunning meander through today’s perspectives on African history, culture and identity. The moodily lit rooms of Identity and Tradition feel like an aesthetic wink at the ways portraiture is traditionally presented in the west. True, there are portraits of kings and queens courtesy of George Osodi’s Nigerian Monarchs (2012-22), but these are placed alongside the sweeping large-scale textile of Zohra Opoku’s Queens and Kings (2017). Royalty is recontextualised as an ancient symbol of communal structures and practices.
Screenprinted in blues, reds and blacks across a huge patchwork of recycled tablecloths, figures emerge from Opoku’s landscape of abstract patterns, faces obscured by thick crowns of leaves and dressed in a mix-up of the Kente cloth of Ghanaian royalty and second-hand clothing. It feels like an apt metaphor for the fragmentation of traditions within an increasingly globalised world.
In the Counter Histories section of the show, the focus is on how the colonial gaze can be overturned, and alternate realities and histories reproduced. In her Ke Lefa Laka series, Lebohang Kganye creates a personal meditation on history by inserting herself as an apparition into old photographs of her deceased mother. Kelani Abass’s Casing History (2016-2017) re-appropriates a letterpress by replacing the letters in each box with digital images and letters from his family’s archive. There is also a queering of the lens, through the pastoral charm of Sabelo Mlangeni’s Country Girls series (2009), which documents the tenderness and joy of gay life outside of the big cities, in the South African countryside.
Santu Mofekeng’s The Black Photo Album/ Look at Me (1997) offers a moment of rest, and a chance to sit and really consider looking and understanding imagery. A slideshow of photographs of black families, taken around the turn of the century, are interspersed with questions such as “do these images serve as testimony of mental colonisation?”
With these questions, about how history is presented and recreated, you step into the final chapter of the show, Imagined Futures. Works such as Andrew Eseibo’s Mutations explore the rapid development of Lagos, while Fabrice Monterio’s The Prophecy (2013-2015) contemplates pollution and waste, by parodying fashion images, piling them high with plastic waste and rubbish.
Towards the end of the exhibition is a work that really brings home the universality of so many of these artists’ concerns. Leonard Pogo’s video work Primordial Earth (2021) is a tender exploration of what the last day on earth could look like. For if nothing else, we have this world in common.
