Africa Reborn at the Musée du quai Branly- Jacques Chirac

Event Description

Art historian Philippe Dagen has designed an original exhibit exploring the relationship between the contemporary world and old African arts since the end of the 20th century. As explained by the museum: “In 1984, at the MoMA in New York, the Primitivism exhibition displayed over 200 artworks from Africa, Oceania and the Americas beside works by Picasso, Matisse, Nolde and Giacometti. In doing so, it positioned non-Western arts as a foil to the Western avant-gardists, credited with giving them their status as works of art. That was the starting point for Philippe Dagen, curator of the exhibition Africa Reborn, which starts by reminding visitors that use of the term ‘primitive’ remains indissociable from colonization of Africa and the West’s appropriation of what it long called ‘Negro art’ and reduced to beautiful use of forms without seeking to understand this art’s meaning and symbols.”