Tate Modern

The problem with doing an exhibition about art in the age of photography is that all art for over 150 years has been made in the age of photography. You could literally whack in anything made in the twentieth century and say ‘see? This was made while cameras were a thing’.  Which is what the Tate’s done. Sure, they could have just concentrated on painters whose work has a tight, necessary relationship with photography. But they haven’t. This big exhibition starts with Francis Bacon, who painted from photographs, hung next to Lucian Freud, who didn’t. There’s Dorothea Lange’s iconic ‘Migrant Mother’, which is a photo, opposite Alice Neel’s lovely portrait of two little Puerto Rican kids, which isn’t.  It gives you an immediate headache. They’ve set up the premise so that anything fits it, and ‘photography has changed how we see the world, so all paintings are influenced by photography’ is a batshit approach to curation. What has George Condo’s frantic, neurotic Pop abstraction or Georg Baselitz’s upside-down portraiture got to do with photography? Nothing, but here they are anyway.  There are huge photographs by modern giants of the medium like Thomas Struth, Candida Höfer and Andreas Gursky. They capture vast housing estates, ornate libraries, hushed cathedrals. They are jaw-dropping, detailed, beautiful things. But if you’re including them because it’s photography made in the age of painting then holy moly, this show just got even messier. It gives you an immediate headache

You should be deeply suspicious of anyone who thinks they can neatly sum up a whole continent’s artistic output. Because even if you focus on just one artform – like photography, in the case of the Tate’s latest exhibition – you’ve given yourself a pretty impossible task. But ‘A World in Common’ gives it a valiant, vibrant go anyway. It starts with George Osodi’s gorgeous, lavish portraits of Nigerian kings and queens; regal figures who survived as cultural custodians despite Britain tearing their lands apart, sat on ornate thrones in luxurious robes. It sets the tone for the show, because at its best this exhibition acts as a portrait of a continent bearing the indelible scars of colonial wounds. Colonialism and its impact is ever-present in the works on display. In shadowy, silently violent photographs, Em’kal Eyongakpa documents his journey through sacred lands that were once a place of anti-colonial Cameroonian resistance; Sammy Baloji juxtaposes colonial-era portraits with images of modern mines to show that exploitation of Africa's land and people never really stopped. Ndidi Dike’s installation of hundreds of binders filled with reams of information shows how data was used to manipulate power. There are so many scars here.  The future might be bright, and it might be gloomy, it’s all still being written But it would be wrong to assume that all African photography is a confrontation with colonialism; it does a disservice to the countless artists from the continent who h