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As the history of art in the twentieth century unfolded, with the world-making intersection of the ethnographic and modernity, the representational strategies of colonial identities were bound up in extreme depictions of racial exoticism. The emergence of modernist primitivism, which radically transformed the trajectory of modernity through its treatment of foreign objects, complicated a dialectical relationship between notions of the “primitive” and the “civilised,” and by extension, between fear and desire. The progression of modernity that saw the subsequent embrace of the “other” in European art, from social Realism through to Abstract Expressionism, runs in parallel with the gradual breakdown of certain colonial and imperial forces, making accessible the cultures that could only previously have existed in the European imagination. By this time, of course, the transatlantic trade had already urged the transmission of black cultures around the western world, creating the instances of what would later be called “cultural hybridity,” occurring as a direct result of slavery and its legacies.
Sammy Baloji’s investigation into the paradigmatic rupture of colonialism and the image began in the South-Eastern Katanga. After graduating with a Humanities degree from the University of Lubumbashi, the artist began specializing in photography. Having recognized the lack of ...
While Inji Efflatoun’s life was marked by phases of colour and agony, her paintings vibrate with the spirit of revolution. In 1964, the French artist Jean Lucrat summed up Efflatoun’s impetus as follows: “She does not listen except to the Egyptian voice which is her profound heritage...
Over the past decade, Lavar Monroe has cultivated a unique visual language born of a collision between reality and fiction. The interdisciplinary artist has explored the spaces between the sculptural field and theatrical installation, opening up a world in which monsters, creatures and ...
Joachim Schönfeldt’s practice has been long concerned with the relationship between objects and oral discourse. After graduating from the University of Witwaterand, Schönfeldt began his artistic career as a curator and researcher of historical African art before becoming a full-time ...
In Dawit Abebe’s observations of human kind, strange figures turn away from the world. As silent witnesses, their often-gaunt affliction and melancholic surroundings suggest they are bodies in exile, or the subjects of an unknown trauma. Together, they command the foreground ...
Eduardo Berliner had originally resisted using oil on canvas because of its weighted tradition, loaded with social, political and cultural associations. Eventually he came to recognise that the medium’s resilience lay in a unique temporality, unlike the uninterrupted flow of photographic...
Jean-François Boclé’s metaphorical installations propose a wasteland in which the ruins of civilisation are shored against its discontents. The artist’s alchemical process involves bringing everyday objects into a network of relations, highlighting dialectics such as capitalism and ...
Armand Boua deals with the human condition, as a response to the inhumanity he sees in the world around him. His recent works, depicting the formless figures of forgotten children, testify to the violence that continues to characterise the political struggles of West Africa...
Pia Camil’s objects are never quite what they seem, meaning that they are almost always misunderstood. The artist draws from the symbolic universe of contemporary consumerism, incorporating the signs, objects and things that form part of everyday life. Compelled by the ...
Alida Cervantes’ paintings reimagine the perceived boundaries upon which social, economic, and political conditions remain contingent. Born in the border city of Tijuana, the artist’s home environment meant that she had domestic servants for the best part of her life, instilling an ...
Alexandre da Cunha is not the typical maker, despite the fact he operates within a sculptural field of overtly modernist tendencies. The artist intervenes into the everyday, displacing specific objects and entering them into an exhibitory realm, reorienting them as artworks...
Federico Herrero’s tropically coloured geometric compositions have been painted on floors, walls, parking garages and even buses around the world. Such is the widespread application that encountering these compositions as singular objects can lead one to forget how they ...
For Diego Mendoza Imbachi the process of gardening is intrinsically linked to art making, a platform for his ongoing exploration into the natural landscape and topographies of rural Colombia. Growing up in the department of Cauca in the village of venta Cajibio, an active ...
Born in Africa’s third largest urban area, Eddy Ilunga Kamuanga draws influence from the cultural hybridity and structural complexity of Kinshasa. In spite of the limiting conditions imposed by the Democratic Republic of Congo’s volatile conditions, the artist’s paintings ...
As a Cuban exile living in Mallorca, Jorge Mayet’s photographic memory has allowed him to conceive startlingly realistic landscapes and natural forms based on visions of his distant home country. Lifelike trees stand in for the artist’s feelings of nostalgia and yearning for his ...
Boris Nzebo’s visual language began as no more than an urban vernacular drawn from Douala’s bustling streets and commercial market places. upon receiving an offer from his brothers to design signs for their barbershop, the artist began producing graphic illustrations to entice ...
Visual languages explode into view in the paintings of Alejandro Ospina, who manipulates the two-dimensionality of painting to reveal its proximity to the digital world. The artist’s investigation into cyberspace began with a series of portraits depicting social media users...
Ephrem Solomon portrays the distance between the governing and the governed, fleshing out tender subjects whose lives are marked by a lack of political agency and meaning. Solomon’s mixed media layering of human experience in his native Ethiopia are descriptive images of ...
In Mikhael Subotzky’s photographs, a representation of South Africa’s socio- political landscape is filtered through the optic nerve of a self-reflexive lens. Adopting documentary techniques, Subotzky’s candid insights are in fact constructed, often made up of individual ...
The strategic alignment of Africa and Latin America based as a supercontinent that existed about 250 million years ago is as ideologically utopian as it is historically challenged. Today the hemispheric centre that once was is merely the origin of a concept, a state of events that ...
Ibrahim Mahama is an artist for whom the collectivist potentialities of art production, recall the progressivism of political action. Mahama’s practice acts within the historical intersection of society and its commodities, placing an emphasis on processes in which art becomes the ...
Incited by the tempestuous political histories that engender the repressive conditions of the country’s social reality, South African artists often conspire toward activism. For Cameron Platter, who lives in the urbanized province of KwaZulu-Natal near the former battlefield of ...
It is safe to say that the geographies of the artworld are expanding, as are the various activities and movements of its multiple constituencies. At once distanced from the traditional centres of monolithic power, the penetration of the Internet accompanied by the proliferation ...
The Congolese entrepreneur began his collection of art in Luanda, Angola in 2004, with the aim of unveiling contemporary art to an African audience. In its inaugural decade, the collector’s personal project has entered the public domain, and can now be thought of as a ...
Aboudia’s unhinged imagination gives way to a world in which images, signs, and gestures are coded into ambiguity. His deceptively crude paintings are in fact typologies of an African identity. They emerge out of the fractional divisions of ethnic, tribal and religious tensions that ...