Contemporary, controversial and coming soon: Cape Town’s vast new art museum
The invites have been sent for the opening night, the displays readied in 80 galleries spread over nine floors, and 24,000 tickets have sold out in a matter of minutes. For a few short days there is quiet.
The calm will not last. In Cape Town, on one of the world’s most recognisable waterfronts in the world, a vast new art museum, the biggest ever in Africa, is about to open, creating the biggest buzz in the continent’s collective creative world for many years.
The Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) has already been described as “Africa’s Tate Modern”.
This is, observers say, to underestimate its importance.
Housed in a converted grain silo overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, against a backdrop of docks, the city and Table Mountain, the new museum is one of the most striking buildings to have been constructed in Africa. It is also the continent’s first such institution devoted to contemporary art.
“It really is significant … [And] the significance is not just for my lifetime … but in 200 or 300 years from now,” said Kudzanai Chiurai, a 36-year-old Zimbabwean artist whose work is being shown in one of the new museum’s inaugural exhibitions.
The museum, built with $38m (£29m) of private funds but open to the public, will house the collection of the German businessman Jochen Zeitz, along with a series of temporary exhibitions. The opening, nine years after the project was launched, underlines the massive new global interest in African art.
“Before the first world war the most exciting artists were French; in the 1990s they were Chinese. Now the hot new place for contemporary art is Africa,” gushed the Economist in May.
South Africa, where many of the continent’s most important contemporary artists work and live, has a vibrant scene with successful dealers who have built a global presence.
But there has been little public support or appreciation of contemporary artists and many struggle to find recognition.
Source: theguardian.com