CONTINENTAL SHIFT

Nigerian Modernism at the Tate Modern presents a jubilant panorama, whether visceral or playful

- Mark Hudson

Tate Modern, London

Long seen as the poor relation of the international art world, modern African art has undergone a massive surge in prestige and commercial interest over the past two decades. The realisation that contemporary art had to expand its focus beyond Western Europe and North America has seen curators falling over themselves to include artists from this painfully neglected area in major exhibitions and biennales. Tate Modern staged its first retrospective by an African artist, Sudan's Ibrahim El Salahi, in 2013. But this is the first major exhibition devoted to the development of modernism in a single African country. It focuses, not surprisingly, on the so-called Giant of Africa, the country in which one in four of all Africans live, in the pre- and post-independence era: when Africans were striving for cultural emancipation as well as political and economic liberation.

Nigeria, with its well-developed higher education system – certainly in comparison with its neighbours - plus its array of extraordinarily rich traditions for artists, writers and musicians to draw on, and a vibrant urban popular culture, provided the ideal stage for the development of a truly African modern art.

Exhibitions of non-Western modern art tend to shy away from showing the first gropings towards modernity from artists working in isolation from the international art world, on the grounds that they can be seen as "folksy" and "parochial" – exactly the qualities detractors have tended to highlight in modern African art. This show, however, lets the works of these early explorers shine out. Akinola Lasekan's paintings of ancient battles and modern-day acrobats may be patently illustrative, but their presence is an honest reflection of what was happening on the ground before the arrival of modernism proper.