Across The Board

A two-year project, Across the board is an organic and experimental platform, featuring emerging artists and exploring recent artistic practices in Africa. It consists of a series of events inviting local and international audiences to engage with artists, curators and scholars to look into current cultural and artistic production in Africa. Presenting various narratives of art making and knowledge production, contributors address questions around the status of contemporary African art as a field of cultural production. Across the board takes place across four cities, London (United Kingdom), Accra (Ghana), Douala (Cameroon), and Lagos (Nigeria) and will raise questions on politics of representation, institution building, public space/public sphere, and interdisciplinary practices. These events alternatively include performances, screening programmes and artistic interventions in the public space, as well as artists’ presentations and talks. It is also a pioneering and challenging approach to cultural partnership that complements Tate’s collecting activities, developing further the conceptual framework proposed by Tate’s approach to Africa, looking at theoretical aspects and cultural – historical and contemporary – ‘non-collectable’ material.
Across the board has a multifaceted character defined by two key factors. Firstly, it aims to engage local art scenes, having great visibility and a strong social component. Secondly, it generates new dynamic and experimental types of programming at Tate, transforming the institutional framework. Tate Media will support these initiatives by working with the artists and other contributors to capture the events through a mixture of film, photography and text; and to disseminate these via the Tate website and other Tate and Guaranty Trust Bank social media platforms, granting access to these events to a larger audience. A publication assembling some of the contributions to the project as well as seminal essays by prominent artists, academics and curators in the field will be published. This book will explore artistic vocabularies that connect art and society and the crucial relevance of these cultural institutions and visual centres in the build-up of contemporary African art as a distinctive field of cultural production.