Memory Lines: Art in the Pan African World
An Essay by Nkiru Nzegwu
Working on the premise that culture-making is memory-making, this essay explores the cognitive character of memory in creative expression in the works of three artists whose visual language and politics of creation validate an African conceptual scheme. It examines the ways knowledge is preserved and historically transmitted through the artists' chosen processes and styles of production, their idiom of understanding, their usage of iconic forms, and their deployment of creative expression in reconstituting identities and announcing new realities.
Since the socio-metaphysical context under which the identified artists create activate psychic vortices, art making becomes more than a simple production of physical objects; it is a process of transforming prayers into objects with which they become synonymous.
Within the global Pan-African world, that is the subject of this essay, art production psychically re-members identities through validating and refreshing experiences. The pivotal argument here is that through art, histories and traditions are vivified and become vessels of memory.