PAN!C is a platform for inter-changeable new ideas, connections, collaboration and information across the African continent. This website is a listing of independent contemporary art spaces throughout Africa, but is also a repository of content and ideas relevant to independent contemporary art practice on the continent.
PAN!C is an experimental platform that seeks to stimulate novel and low/no cost modes for networking, project development and presentation of work among contemporary art practitioners. This is a pivotal venture, functioning in a context that is largely inimical to the movement of ideas, people and work within the continent.
PAN!C served as a platform to interact and explore more intimately how to facilitate exchange, dialogue, collaboration and the development of projects between organisations, curators and artists working in different parts of African continent.
The PAN!C website serves, first and foremost, as a directory of independent art spaces throughout the African Continent. To enable broader knowledge, networks and connections, this online platform serves to provide access and will be updated on an ongoing basis.
As a platform PAN!C intends to participate in the discourse on library building on the continent. The library stems from the difficulty of sharing content across the continent, as well as still persisting perspectives that the continent is not producing its own knowledge largely due to this issue. The library features material and references from the continent that exist physically or electronically which may be relevant in furthering knowledge production from within the continent.
This part of the website features projects throughout the continent (and in some cases about the continent) that have come to shape and influence contemporary art practice today. It is an archive that, again, seeks to address the difficulty of communication and wider information on knowledge production on the continent. It functions as an archive space for such projects but also a platform for reflection and building upon what and how contemporary art manifests itself on the continent and beyond.
Research maps have been developed to spatialise links and shared ideas, to rethink geographies of African Contemporary art beyond the initially enforced borders. The data is coproduced and researched through communication across the network.
PAN!C is an amorphous and transient platform that belongs to no one entity. For more information on PAN!C, contact any of the listed spaces here.
