The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists

The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists is a tour de force on the part of curator Simon Njami. Above all, Njami was able to gather fifty artists with recent works that effectively filter Dante's poem for the twenty-first century. He was also able to persuade each venue mounting the exhibition so far (Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art) to devote for the first time its entire gallery space to a single exhibition, so that the Divine Comedy's tripartite afterlife imaginary would be suitably housed. Furthermore, Njami commissioned nearly half of the exhibiting artists to create new works that directly engage Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso, while the makers of the noncommissioned works had to be persuaded to allow his curatorial acumen to match them to one of the Dantean realms. For all this, Njami is an impresario of Diaghilevian proportions. He has often alluded to such a wide-ranging role when describing the feats of an independent curator as comparable to those of a symphony conductor or opera director.