Demodernisms-Art and Coloniality between France and Western Africa 1945-1966

• Applicant: Dr. Daniel Horn
• Subject Area: Art History ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: from 2021 to 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 465269025

The institutional exhibition history and art historical scholarship on “postwar” arts in France after 1945 are lacking in the critical engagement with practices and attendant anti-colonial discourses that were being developed at the time by artists and critics who relocated to Paris from the French overseas territories in French West Africa and French Equatorial Africa, the Caribbean, as well as from Nigeria, South Africa and Latin America. My research project retraces and evaluates the historical interconnections and art theoretical contexts that were developed between such up until now peripheral art movements vis-à-vis more canonized ones emblematic of the late colonial period of liberated Paris. The Afro-diasporic artistic network of the Paris-based journal and publishing house Présence Africaine (founded in 1947), represents a primary source and starting point of my study. Through the research of French and Senegalese archives and collections, and the comparative analysis of artworks, essays, exhibitions, festivals, and their respective global reception history, I delineate and interpret the notion of "demodernism" as a politically anti-colonial and conceptually decolonial strategy specific to this diasporic milieu of Présence Africaine. This involves the discussion about how these diverse artists employed citation, appropriation and modification of already then established Western modernist styles, that in turn evolved from appropriating formalized aesthetics of West African sculpture.The project reconstructs these proto-decolonial practices and discourses, specifically their modification of the concept of primitivism as well as modernist tropes, in the context of contemporaneous existentialist and allegedly anti-cultural art movements of late colonial Paris. The study’s premise of "demodernisms" serves to further re- and de-center a historiography of modern art and its discourses of postwar France, by contextualizing it with the gradual dismantlement of the late colonial French Union and the subsequent new cultural agendas set by West African nation states in the wake of formal independence in 1960. The research presents case studies of hitherto understudied Afro-diasporic practices from Senegal, Dahomey (Benin), Congo-Léopoldville (DRC), South Africa, Nigeria, Brazil, Guadeloupe who were actively shaping avant-gardes in Paris as well as critically reflecting the era of decolonization of their native countries through their work. The project seeks to convey the import of this artistic nexus and period, constitutive to later conceptions of "entangled art histories", of new materialism and object-oriented ontology as applied in contemporary art theory, and to recent transdisciplinary and transnational debates over "cultural appropriation" and agency contingent on racialized visibility, representation and authorship.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants