Africa Modern - Creating the Contemporary Art of a Continent

The opening of the first major contemporary art museum in Africa offers a moment for celebration, pause and reflection. A new book, Africa Modern: Creating the contemporary art of a continent, edited by Ekow Eshun and published by the KT Wong Foundation in collaboration with Wallpaper*, marks such a moment. Illustrated with Iwan Baan's photographs, Thomas Heatherwick takes us on a behind the scenes tour of his monumental renovation of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town. We join him on his first trip round the building when it was a disused grain silo, dodging bird droppings. We look over his shoulder during extensive feasibility studies, where he wrestled with the extraordinary physical make-up of the structure and its 'extremely hard hundred-year old concrete'. And we celebrate with him on the building's eventual completion as a vast, 80-gallery space. Using MOCAA as a base, Africa Modern visits Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lusaka, Libya and Rwanda, among pockets of the global African diaspora. In doing so, it becomes both an elegy for the continent's cultural heritage, and a window to its artistic future. As the architect writes in his foreword, the book aims to 'celebrate and capture the expectations and thoughts of some of the artists, curators, and practitioners we had always hoped would become part of the institution'.

Softcover. English. KT Wong Foundation. 2017. ISBN: 9781527212572. 297 pp. Good. Book No: 2505522