ON MY MIND : Let’s do more to incorporate young artists in art industry

Dar es Salaam is a dynamic centre of visual arts in Tanzania, with new spaces and networks for exhibition and discussion. Sustained by artists and art-lovers, they receive very little if any public support.

Here I focus on the ideas which one young artist, Rehema Chachage, shared with me, and explore what her story tells us about the embryonic arts industry and its potential contribution to our society and economy.

Who is Rehema Chachage? Rehema is a young 29-year-old visual artist who does innovative work in photography, video production and sculpture. In a 2014 interview, Rehema described her exploration of gender, alienation, poverty, and loneliness. “In particular, [she] seeks to note the changing existence of the African woman in societies that are consistently transforming.”

What are your dreams? “Just like most artists, the dream is to one day afford to live and work full time as an artist, but I also dream that one day Tanzania will claim a place in the art world, globally – at the moment there aren’t that many Tanzanian artists coming out and playing the ‘big leagues’ (i.e. exhibiting internationally, being auctioned for lots of money, etc) as there are from our neighbours Kenya, and other African countries”.

Where have you exhibited? Rehema has exhibited widely in Tanzania and worldwide. Only 22 years old, she held her first solo Graduate exhibition ‘Hana na Haba’, in Cape Town in 2009. Two others have followed in Dar es Salaam in 2011 and 2012, and one solo exhibition, held in Japan in 2012. Her work has been featured in more than 21 group exhibitions in several countries in Africa, Europe, Asia and South America. Selected exhibition titles give an idea of the kind of issues explored– Global City-Local Identity, WOMAN, Still Fighting Ignorance & Intellectual Perfidy, Where we’re at! Other voices on gender, Beauty Salons and the Beast, Concerning the Internal.

Challenges? Rehema mentioned four. Financial – “...finding that balance between the need to eat and the need to create...it is a really hard balance, because often the need to create gets overpowered.” Patriarchal gender relations [my interpretation] –“when life happens – husband, family, etc, we tend to lose many [young female artists] along the way”. Lack of a supportive ‘infrastructure’– “Everyone is really a one man army, you have to be your own everything – promoter, critic, researcher, curator, etc. I get most of my opportunities online...a huge percentage of my time is spent on the internet looking for and trying out different opportunities and funding avenues.”

Local organising to mobilise resources and support one another? Artists network and reach a wider audience through spaces provided by cultural centres like Nafasi Art Space and by creating their own spaces. Rehema initiated Kuta-na Sana under the aegis of Nafasi Art Space in 2014, a platform for mentorship, exchange and mutual learning, dedicated to new developments, dissemination and exchange of ideas and knowledge around contemporary art practice. It encourages exchanges between emerging and established artists as well as local and international artists, expanding networking opportunities and introducing, encouraging and assisting them to take advantage of opportunities (local and international) that will put them and, eventually, Tanzanian contemporary art in the radar.

What are the implications for society and economy? To my mind, artists provide society with alternative ways of seeing and understanding reality, often in a more engaging way than writing or speaking. Art also provides a way of documenting and expressing who we are. In the globalizing homogenizing world we live in, visual arts can become expressions of diversity and humanity. The arts also make a direct economic contribution, providing meaningful employment and livelihoods, and are a potentially rich growth sector with links to tourism, the local and international commercial art market, book publications and exhibition spaces.

Despite many exhibitions and presentations around the world, Rehema Chachage does not have any of her work on display right now in Tanzania. She and many other talented artists lack a permanent space to share their work. And we on our side are missing the opportunity to see and be enriched by their art. Both the government and the private sector have a responsibility to provide resources for artists to create their own training, studios and exhibition spaces. Economists and policy makers need to broaden their understanding of industrialisation to embrace and support the arts.