Tanzania makes historic debut at the 60th Venice Art Biennale

Tanzania is for the first time participating in the 60th edition of the prestigious Venice Biennale, one of the longest-running and most renowned international art exhibitions.

Running from April to November, this year’s edition is curated by Adriano Pedrosa under the theme, Foreigners Everywhere.

Tanzania’s pavilion, curated by Enrico Bittoto, explores the theme “A Flight in Reverse Mirrors (The Discovery of the Other)” and delves into four significant eras of Tanzania’s history, from the 19th century to the early 21st century.

Pavilions often require government involvement, either by funding or by approving an exhibition proposal. In the case of Tanzania, Italian curator Enrico Bittoto spearheaded the project. He raised 6,000 euros with the help of Italian sponsors and covered the rest of the costs himself.

According to Bittoto, the government provided a list of ten artists from the Tanzania Federation of Crafts and Arts (TAFCA), from which he selected the three artists participating in the exhibition. TAFCA is an umbrella organisation formed by several groups of arts associations, networks, and institutions.

The three selected artists stood out because they were “more mature in their pictorial evolution.” For Lutengano Mwakisopile, it was his impressive woodcutting printing technique that the curator found to be “very incisive and...decidedly spiritual.”

“Haji Chilonga’s representation of figures through an informal synthesis is remarkable, and Happy Robert’s ability to convey her feelings on canvas as well as being a great storyteller stood out from the other artists,” Bittoto notes.

The fourth artist, Naby Byron, is an Italian native whom Bitto refers to as “a stateless artist or a citizen of the world.”

While Mwakisopile likens the national pavilion to Tanzania’s national team participating in the World Cup, a sentiment echoed by Chilonga, who says he feels proud to be among the first artists to represent Tanzania at the exhibition, one would wonder where the ‘citizen of the world’ fits in this project.

Bitotto says Naby’s particularity in this Biennale is that she is a 'foreigner among foreigners,’ perfectly reflecting Adriano Pedrosa’s message about foreigners everywhere.

The debate on non-natives being part of nations’ pavilions is an ongoing one. What may be viewed as an attempt to complicate the notions of borders and belonging by one person may be condemned as a missed opportunity by another.

Art enthusiast and cultural worker Matthew Maganga emphasises the importance of having local artists and curators in emerging art spaces. He believes these can bring valuable conversations back home.

He wonders if more consideration of ongoing conversations in the local contemporary art scene would have led to different curatorial choices, assumedly ones that would be in better alignment with the current scene.

The Bittoto-curated show is made up of four rooms, one with portraits of four Tanzanian chiefs who fought the German colonisers by Mwakisopile. The second room is inspired by the legacy of President Nyerere and is illustrated by Happy Robert.

The third is with Chilonga’s semi-abstract bright-coloured birds in migration, and the last is by Naby, which is made up of collages that she describes as “depicting a person who has the Tanzanian people and animals in his eyes who together migrate for miles driven by a quest for betterment.”

Bitotto’s curatorial choices were informed by a deliberate reluctance to “copy old Tinga Tinga styles,” as well as not “veering too much towards a western style type of representation.”

Visual artist Rehema Chachage argues that avoiding Western modes may overlook the historical functionality and performative nature of Tanzanian art.

“Historically, art in Tanzania has always been functional, site-specific, and performative. It’s very active. It has never been about hanging beautiful objects on the walls,” says Chachage, who is also a writer and researcher.

Of course, over time, painting traditions that have been embraced by many Tanzanian artists have become a part of the country’s canon. But Chachage’s reminder implies that, in avoiding what Bittoto considers Western-style representation, the exhibition has perhaps presented a flawed understanding of Tanzanian art history.

The hallmark of Tanzania’s contemporary visual art scene is its re-prioritisation of indigenous Tanzanian practices as legitimate ways of doing art and of knowing. For example, in rituals, songs, dances, language, and other performances that ‘involve site specificity,’ as Chachage puts it.

From the feelings-driven exhibition by Turakella Gyando Mwanangu Kua Nikutume to The Empty Grave, a Cece Mlay co-directed documentary on the restitution of Tanzanian human remains stolen by German colonists, the focus is inward.

So, at a time when contemporary Tanzanian artists are resisting creating art for the sake of the outward gaze, the curator’s text stating that “artists must once again take responsibility for explaining to the "other" their past, sharing their present, and, why not, predicting a common future” seems incongruent. Particularly when the “other” manifests in Tanzania’s relationship with colonists at many points of the exhibition.

The legacy and scale of the Venice art exhibition are so significant that a debut may very well serve as a major pronouncement to the rest of the world.

Many would argue that the pavilion should function as a genuine depiction of the country’s art scene, however difficult it may be to condense a whole country’s artistic sensibilities in one show. For instance, the 2013 and 2015 Kenyan pavilions were called off after critics claimed that they did not represent the local scene.

But in a hierarchical biennale, with more than half of the pavilions representing European countries whose artists have the backing of commercially powerful galleries and art ministries, how much can this representation translate to growth?

For individual artists, featuring at the Venice Biennale is an incredible endorsement that comes with great monetary value. Mwakisopile confirms this by saying, “Being a part of this exhibition will add value to my name and my work.”

For countries and their local scenes, however, it begs the question of whether the capital-driven arena of European art institutions is one that African art scenes benefit from being a part of. Chachage suggests that we also ought to consider that, beyond the exhibition in Venice, “the biennale model itself is an outdated one.”

She argues that even African Biennales, including the photography-centred Bamako Encounters, the Casablanca Biennale, the Lagos Biennale, and Senegalese Dak’Art (which she has attended twice), may not be the most suitable for our art scenes.

“You go to Dakar; you probably stay in a very nice hotel, enjoy the city, attend parties, and then, at the end of it, you ask yourself, what was the point? What impact did we have on the Senegalese art scene?”

The independent commissioning of pavilions not only makes them unusual channels for representation but also risks absolving governments (and citizens) of the responsibility to engage with and support their local art scenes.

However, given the material benefits to individual artists, it is neither realistic nor fair to expect them to refuse participation in such exhibitions.

At the very least, Tanzania’s presence at the Venice Biennale should open a dialogue about the evolution of Tanzanian art, national representation, and the future of Tanzanian art on the global stage.