Nicolas Premier at SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art, Montreal
By oualie frost
Film, brand, and art project, Parisian-based Nicolas Premier’s exhibition Africa is the Future: Echoes and Responses proposes that a prosperous African future is inevitable, and envisions what that may look like. A video projection greets you across from the entrance, flanked on both sides by images of dusk-lit shorelines pasted onto the inky-colored walls. To your right is a small reading nook with books chosen by the artist and curator to further visitors’ understanding of the exhibition’s concepts. In the room to the left, there is a display across three walls with a series of t-shirts, mock magazine covers, and tablets playing blue-hued videos.
Nicolas Premier, Africa is the Future, 2024, installation view at SBC Gallery (photo: Freddy Arciniegas)
Starting with the film, curator Cécilia Bracmort describes the artist’s method of editing as musical because he samples and remixes video clips like a DJ would. Premier says it is ritualistic, that it goes with phases of the moon and is separated into movements like a classical song. A series of clips, often cutting from starkly red and warm to cool and blue, seem to loosely show Africa’s journey from slavery, through strife, and into the space age. This narrative is intermingled with retro-futuristic images while ambient music and occasional dialogue provide a score.
Nicolas Premier, Africa is the Future, 2024, installation view at SBC Gallery (photo: Freddy Arciniegas)
Moving through the gallery, you find the first part of the exhibition title, “Africa is the Future,” repeated brightly and boldly like a chorus across the wall of shirts. Additional taglines such as “No getting ‘round it” and “intercontinental since the beginning” are included to highlight both the inevitability of an Afrofuturistic vision and the importance of the role of diaspora within it.
Nicolas Premier, Africa is the Future, 2024, installation view at SBC Gallery (photo: Freddy Arciniegas)
On the opposite wall, the satirical magazine covers, accessible yet still conceptually complex, struck me as particularly pointed in their commentary. Set in a four-by-three grid, the covers parody issues of LIFE magazine and are given publication dates in the near future of the 2030s. Mainly featuring dignified images of prosperous Black people, the headlines make fun of the West’s patronizing, paternalistic treatment of Africa in the news, declaring on one that “Africa must restore democracy in California.” Another shouts “Integration: A great challenge for European immigrants.” And a third headline reads “African doctors for America: to the rescue of the abandoned continent.”
One could easily mistake these magazine covers as praying for the downfall of the West, but I don’t think that’s the case. Rather, they poke fun at and problematize the self-superior tone Westerners take when reporting about Africa – the way it is posited as a tragic entity, a place of endless struggle, pitiful and needing outside aid to get by. Premier’s work imagines a world where achievements, excellence, and high standards of quality are assumed of both the continent and its people (though non-Black Africans are not really represented in this Afrocentric exhibition). In this alternate future,the white savior is Black.
Nicolas Premier, Africa is the Future, 2024, installation view at SBC Gallery (photo: Freddy Arciniegas)
Like any good parody, it encourages a critical examination of the lopsided way Western media represents itself. It also reminds one that empires are cyclical like the moon referenced in AITF the film: just as they rise, they inevitably fall. Perhaps in the 2030s, as the magazines imagine, America falls and Africa becomes the next global superpower (inshallah, I would not complain). “The future is already there. It has always been.” Premier’s film declares that Africa has always been the future. Even if the continent never reaches the globally dominant status the magazine covers imagine, this exhibition gives us an opportunity to look and see the possibility.
Nicolas Premier: Africa is the Future: Echoes and Responses continues until November 9.
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art: www.sbcgallery.ca
The gallery is partially accessible.
oualie frost is a casual artist, writer, and activist currently based in Tiohti:áke/Mooniyang (Montréal) whose writing centers primarily around the art and experiences of Black, mixed-Black, and other racialized people, as well as loose cultural critique. They are a former founding member of the Afros in the City media collective, with writing published on various platforms, including Akimblog, the Rozsa Foundation, and Canadian Art.