From Masks to Metal Cloth: Interrogating the Aesthetic Regimes of Modern African Art

Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie
University of California Santa Barbara

This paper evaluates the Uli-Revivalist aesthetics of the Nsukka School of artists, who emerged from Eastern Nigeria into positions as significant interlocutors in the global discourse of modern and contemporary art. It engages its use of Uli-revivalist aesthetics as (to paraphrase Ranciere) as a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on art’s role in the production of an intellectual culture: a mode of articulation between ways of making and engaging modern subjectivity, articulating their corresponding forms of visibility and engendering possible ways of thinking about the relationships between local and global spheres of modernist practice.” The paper posits the aesthetic regime of the Nsukka school as a topical response to the dictates of global modernity and examines the impact of a culture of radical politics on the art of leading Nsukka School interlocutors.