Real-time Africa

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Africa Remix opened at the Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf, was at the Hayward Gallery in London last spring, and at the Pompidou in Paris during the summer. It will move to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in spring 2006, and Njami would dearly love to take it to Johannesburg after that; there are, strangely, no plans for it to come to North America, but the catalog alone is a worthy investment.

As if the exhibit were not big enough, each venue has added concerts, dance performances, and critical discussions. In London, at least 15 major African musicians played in conjunction with the show, and Senegalese singer Baaba Maal offered his interpretation of the exhibit. At the Pompidou, there were daily events streamed live on the Internet, including a prescient discussion between Stuart Hall and Achille Mbembe about why France is so slow in coming to terms with race and racism.

Afropop music is perhaps the continent's most successful form of cultural expression, and the African Music Bar exhibit, a full-room installation, includes a jukebox with 60 songs, all recorded in the 21st century. A CD called Africa Remix, available from Milan Records, is a collection of 16 of them.

The catalog, published in English by Hatje Cantz and distributed in North America by Distributed Art Publishers (www.artbook.com), has great reproductions, but if you can read French, the Pompidou catalog, published by the museum, has more text, including a miniencyclopedia of African art figures and institutions. There's also a shorter, less expensive bilingual guide to the exhibit published by the Pompidou.

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