I hesitate to use the term "Afrofuturism", even though it's one I like, and one which quickly comes to mind amongst these interminglings of mythology, spirituality, healing, and technology. It has perhaps become too broad and harmless, too much of a cliché to be useful now. But there was a moment in the 1990s when it opened up a way of thinking about Africa as the site of something much older and also more advanced than anything the west had known. It was more about music than visual art: one of its precursors was Sun Ra, already singing about space as the place and fusing Egyptian symbolism with an African-American sensibility in the 1970s.
Afrofuturism really kicked off when digital technologies made it possible to make different kinds of music, images, and world views. Not space, but cyberspace, the virtual, nonlinear conceptions of time, ways of rethinking identity, the human, the natural, the technological. Back to Jackie Karuti: body, machine, location.
Whether or not the term Afrofuturism is invoked, something of this 1990s moment of excitement about a truly post colonial future is here in the Kunsthalle too. All the work is recent, but something about the graphics, the colours, the aesthetics of the show suggests that this 1990s moment is one of the key elements of this collective's work.
Which reminds me: does anyone have a copy of Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant than the Sun? It's the book that Kodwo Eshun published in the late 1990s, the one which kicked off my own interest in Afrofuturism and what it has since become, and a book in which writing about music takes on a whole new quality.
Let me know if you have one: I can't seem to find mine anywhere, and this show makes me want to read it again.