The Art of Hyperbole: Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art

6:00pm –7.45pm

Wednesday 4th December 2013

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design,
Atterbury Steet, London SW1P 4JU

The mixed-media installation, Museum of Contemporary African Art, by Beninese artist, Meschac Gaba, was one of the biggest single purchases of contemporary African Art made by Tate. It was placed on display at Tate Modern earlier in 2013. The work has excited reactions with Jonathan Jones in the Guardian regaling it as “a powerful, surrealistic, anti-museum”, questioning the place of contemporary African Art in today’s metropolitan museum spaces. Is Gaba’s work the apt way of responding to the conditions surrounding the market in contemporary African Art? Or, on the contrary, are Gaba’s hyperbolic gestures just another example of an empty aesthetic?

In this discussion, artist Samson Kambalu, curator Paul Goodwin and author Lara Pawson join a debate

chaired by Dr. David Dibosa.