CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Background to the Study

African art has been in contention with the growing challenges and influences imposed on it by western perspectives on modern art over the years. Among other factors, these challenges are sometimes associated with the ideal indigenous creative communication pattern and its adaptation to this burgeoning global art phenomenon without characterizing a compromised cultural inflection. One cannot ostracize the fundamental role culture plays in society. It is a vital aspect of a people’s very humanity and identity (Teaero, 2002). In Africa, however, art is wholly integrated in the socio-cultural norms of ethnic groups in nations across the continent; in fact, culture is a holistic part of art and vice versa. Teaero (2002) further stresses on the threats haunting this pattern, this shrewd manifestation and dictation of what he dubbed ‘eurocentrism in the African artistic expression when he states:

As an important part of the culture, art has always been traditionally conceived, produced, used, distributed, and critiqued by islanders from their ethnocentric perspectives. Over the centuries alternative perspectives – especially from a Eurocentric viewpoint– were introduced, used, and perpetuated through the school system. (ibid.)

There is a salient need for newer ways of expressing the African traditional ideologies and worldviews in a relevant and updated contemporary language for the purpose of preserving, establishing, and empathically communicating the continent’s cultural identity and ideals. It is also necessary for this ideological approach to be adapted to the evolving twenty-first-century art world. So far, this syndrome, what the the researcher would refer to as an “afro-centric renaissance in modern art”, has affected areas in the visual arts such as sculpture and painting. On the contrary, however, there is an obvious conceptual dearth when it comes to the aspect of employing the multimedia and, more specifically, video art as a medium for expressing and projecting this concept.

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