Relocating the Centre: Decolonising the University Art Collections in South Africa

Abstract

The collection of art by South African universities was inherent to colonial practice and central to this was a Eurocentric, colonial logic of classification and justification. As a decolonial project, I argue for the relocation of that particular centrality and question the situatedness—the epistemic involvement within a particular space or context—of the philosophies that inform the university art collections in South Africa (Daniel and Greytak 2013; Mignolo 2003; Walsh 2007). I then argue that, because of the legacy of colonialism in Africa, the tastes and aesthetics of art collected by university art collections are still largely influenced by Eurocentric epistemologies and their imagination of Africa (Mungazi 2005). In South Africa, like in many other former European colonies, “the production of knowledge […], has long been subject to colonial and imperial designs, to geopolitics that universalizes European thought as scientific truths, while subalternising and invisibilising other epistemes” (Walsh 2007: 224). Under the guise of neutrality and the universality of philosophies, as shaped by postcolonial theories “provocative arguments have been advanced to the effect [that] African philosophies were very few […] moreover, were a reaction to colonialist imagination of Africa as an ahistorical and dark space that is bereft of humanity” (Mpofu 2014: 1-25). This article derives its theoretical lens from the decolonial advancements pioneered by influential scholars from cultural, feminist, and postcolonial studies, mostly from Latin America and the global South.