Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the desire for difference and distinctiveness within the global art world. I argue that the significant attention contemporary art from Africa is receiving these years shows that even in a supposedly globalised art world, a crave for the specific and place-bound prevails.

Paper long abstract:

Since 1992, when the first Dak'Art Biennial opened in Dakar and the first African artists were included at the Kassel-based Documenta, the Johannesburg Biennale was introduced in 1995, the first 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair was opened in London in 2013, and the first Also Known As Africa art fair was opened in Paris in 2016. Significant for this attention is that although the art world has extended its reach to all corners of the globe, and that the identity of artists is considered less significant than the art they produce (Harris 2012: 152), a continuous desire for difference and distinctiveness remains. The attention directed towards contemporary art from Africa sometimes inflict ambivalence among artists from Africa, who experience situations in which their art profits from the international attention that contemporary art from Africa receive, but which simultaneously keep them from being recognised as individual artists in their own right. By being exhibited as representatives of their continent, as is the case at the recently opened Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, their artworks become the objectives of an international desire for difference and distinctiveness. Despite conceiving of itself as egalitarian, the artists I spoke with during my recent fieldwork in South Africa thus experienced the increased attention from the art market and museums as an international craving for their individual or (imagined) collective cultural style, treating them as representatives of their region.