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On Papus and the Temporalities of Guinean Modernism [Forthcoming Paper]
Aboubacar Bangoura, known as “PAPUS” (b. 1968)
My research takes Guinea seriously as a case through which to reconsider the temporal and formal assumptions of the postcolonial canon of African modernism. It is part of a larger project tracing the largely undocumented history of Guinean visual production since independence. Papus, whose practice emerges in the 1990s, is a necessary figure for this inquiry: a recognized “doyen” of contemporary Guinean painting and a surviving link to an artistic lineage whose earlier formations have left little trace. His practice and his involvement with Comp’Art allow me to ask what Guinea’s apparent absence from histories of 1950s–70s African modernism reveals about the canon’s temporal assumptions.
Abstract
How might we theorize a history of Guinean modernism when much of the history one seeks to recover remains undocumented? Born in 1968, Papus may seem an unlikely figure through whom to approach the modernist histories of the 1950s–70s. Yet his paintings of a changing Conakry, rendered in a distinctive realist vocabulary, provide a crucial entry point into a longer Guinean painterly tradition whose earlier formations remain poorly documented. His founding role in the Comp’Art collective further situates his practice within an ecology of artistic production that invites comparison with earlier formations across the continent.
Guinea presents a particular historiographical challenge. Following independence in 1958, Sékou Touré made culture central to the construction of the nation, building state institutions around theatre, dance, and music. Previous scholarship has treated visual art as marginal to this cultural program, and it has consequently received little attention.
Rather than treating Papus as a belated modernist, I read his realism, his urban imagery, and his career within the Comp’Art collective as evidence of the changing conditions of artistic production in Guinea after the end of Sékou Touré’s regime. His career also points to forms of patronage that emerged within an increasingly constrained economy, as artists negotiated new relationships with private patrons, businesses, and other non-state actors. The paper thus asks whether Guinea’s apparent absence from the canonical narrative reflects not an absence of modernist practice, but the emergence of different institutional, economic, and temporal conditions through which modernism took form.