​Abstract

The subject of the text WORLDWARDS. Artistic Bordercrossers. Contemporary Art of AUST[ria][af]RICA is the result of an empirically and discursively justified argument concerning contemporary visual art work from different regions of the world with special regard to contemporary African visual art. In the past decades, an increasing interest in contemporary visual art of Africa and the African Diaspora can be noticed within the European and North American art world, for which globalization in visual art, transnational mobility as well as migratory movements of artists from African states are a substantial condition. Crucial changes in the production, distribution, and representation of contemporary African visual art can be noticed, questioning the European-North American universal requirement for hegemony within the global Art World. This contributed to the fact that this art is regarded as an unavoidable transcendental point of reference, as part of a global artistic practice. Any discussion on contemporary artists from Africa and the African Diaspora, who are going global or acting to a certain extent on an international level, must be positioned in the present discourse of globalization on visual art. This text deals with substantial events and phenomena, which are constitutive of the changed cartography of contemporary visual art of Africa and the African Diaspora and contributed to its highly visible presence on a global scale. It is concerned with questions regarding processes of belonging and contributing in a (global) world of art, which is still hegemonically structured and at this stage tries to settle the claim to be postcolonial, postmodern, posthistorical, deterritorialized, international up to transnational and global.
This culture and social anthropological analysis focuses on the artists as social protagonists. What do artists, born in African countries and due to their transnational mobility, presently living and working in Vienna, think about the current discourses on globalization of visual art of the globalization of contemporary African visual art in particular and what strategies are hidden behind their artistic practices? The present text drives from an artist orientated approach, examining the before mentioned questions, with reference to the artists Cheikh Niass, Adesola Adebesin and Mara Serigne Mor Niang.