Meschac Gaba

The Game Room is one section of Meschac Gaba’s multi-part installation the Museum of Contemporary African Art 1997–2002. The Game Room incorporates three individual works in the form of games. Jeu d’Échec (Chess Game) is a large chessboard marked out on the floor with handmade chess pieces, one set covered in dollar bills, the other in Euros. This work, together with a colourful roulette wheel, displayed on the wall, is no longer interactive. Six Table Puzzles replicate the hand-held puzzle grids in which the player has to slide the squares into position to create an image. In each of Gaba’s puzzles, when the squares are correctly aligned, an African national flag is formed. The flags are those of Angola, Algeria, Chad, Seychelles, Morocco and Senegal.

Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art 1997–2002 consists of twelve discreet but related large-scale installations. These sections are entitled Draft Room (Tate T14004), Architecture Room (Tate T14005), Museum Shop (Tate T14006), Summer Collection (Tate L03229), Game Room (Tate T14219), Art and Religion (Tate T14969), Museum Restaurant (Tate T14220), Music Room (Tate L03231), Marriage Room (Tate T15122), Library (Tate L03236), Salon (Tate L03233) and Humanist Space (Tate T14007). Each of these represents an aspect of what Gaba believes to be a core part of the museum’s function. A number of the sections are interactive and invite participation from the visitor. This discursive element of social interaction is fundamental to the work. The work can be shown in its entirety, or just one section or a group of sections can be displayed.

Although the number of sections was fixed from the beginning, it took Gaba five years to complete the Museum of Contemporary African Art and over the years the sections have been exhibited in different ways. Several of its rooms were included in Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002 and individual sections or groups of rooms have been seen in museums across the world. The work was first exhibited in its entirety in 2009 at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel.

Gaba began working on the Museum of Contemporary African Art in 1997. He considered this ambitious project not as a model for others to emulate but as a catalyst for debate around preconceived notions of what African art is: ‘My museum doesn’t exist. It’s only a question … What I do is react to an African situation which is linked to a Eurocentric problem.’ (Gaba 2001, pp.16–17.) He continues, ‘I don’t come from traditional Africa but from modern Africa: that’s why I ask questions about the education I had. If I create a museum of contemporary African art, it’s because I say that people who gave me that education didn’t give us everything. They shut me up inside tradition.’ (Gaba 2001, p.18.) Gaba challenges ideas of an ‘authentic’ African expression and asserts his right as a Beninese living in the Netherlands to draw on both European and African influences. His museum is not a shrine to the object, but rather a space for social and cultural interaction, where the interconnectedness of art and life is made manifest.

By titling this work Museum of Contemporary African Art Gaba draws attention to the fact that such a museum does not yet exist in Africa. Instead ethnographic museums in Europe and America define African art often by excluding contemporary artists, particularly those whose works break with tradition. Historian Simon Njami describes Gaba’s project as ‘a corrective to the history of past centuries. By once again placing Africa at the heart of universal creation, he is not simply content to affirm a forgotten and negated presence, but stresses his own existence … by staking a claim on the contemporary field.’ (Simon Njami, in Wolfs, Roesink and Visser 2010, p.10.) While this is a key work in the recent history of African art, it is also important within the lineage of critical reflections on the museum by European artists such as Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and Marcel Broodthaers (1924–1976). Although Gaba utilises the language of a Western museum, his approach is modest and the individual rooms containing different kinds of objects – including many that are painted gold, adorned with or made from shredded banknotes – invite visitor interaction. Curators and historians Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu have argued that Gaba’s project evinces ‘a critique not only of the museum as an institution in which cultural value is produced, but also the museum as the symbolic realm in which such value is redistributed as cultural capital.’ (Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art since 1980, Bologna 2009, p.16.)

Further reading
Meschac Gaba, Library of the Museum, vol.1, Breda 2001.
Rein Wolfs, Macha Roesink and Bianca Visser (eds.), Meschac Gaba, Cologne 2010.
Okwui Enwezor, ‘Meschac Gaba Museum of Contemporary African Art (Draft Room)’, in Defining Contemporary Art: 25 Years in 200 Pivotal Artworks, London 2011, p.224.

Kerryn Greenberg
June 2012