Vrijdag 29 November 2013

A selection of African barbershop boards from Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Cameroon and Zaïre. These non-verbal brightly coloured messages were collected over the last forty years by Esger Duintjer in Africa’s big cities, where they are hand-painted using industrial paints and lacquers on walls, hardboard, plywood, metal sheets and used canvas flour bags. Most of the craftsmen are autodidactic and anonymous although some are known by their chosen artist's name or the name of their collective workshop.

ascleiden

First major exhibition to examine the conceptually complex and visually rich relationship between African artists and the land upon which they live, walk, and frame their days. Approximately 100 artworks are on view in five thematic sections. For the first time, five artists create land-art installations in the Smithsonian gardens. Drawing upon a rich literature related to Earth shrines and religious organizations, this exhibition also contributes new and ground-breaking research on contemporary earthworks in Africa.

africa-si

Als uitgangspunt voor haar project The Afronauts, koos Cristina De Middel (1975, Spanje) een klein onderwerp uit de geschiedenis van Zambia. Een ruimtevaartprogramma gestart door een onderwijzer waardoor Zambia mee zou doen aan de internationale ruimtewedloop. Door gebrek aan financiële hulp was het initiatief echter gedoemd te mislukken. 50 jaar na dato reconstrueert De Middel dit verhaal, resulterend in de publicatie The Afronauts en de gelijknamige tentoonstelling; fantasie- en kleurrijke beelden vol humor, met prachtige zelf gecreëerde rekwisieten.

foam

Samba’s paintings reveal his perception of the social, political, economic and cultural realities of Zaïre, exposing all facets of everyday life in Kinshasa. His canvases offer a running commentary on popular customs, sexuality, AIDS and other illnesses, social inequalities, and corruption. From the late 1980s on, he himself became the main subject of his paintings. For Samba, this is not an act of narcissism; rather, like an anchor on TV news broadcasts, he places himself in his work to report on what it means to be a successful African artist on the world stage.

pascalpolar

In his own words, Tei Huagie,”… a painter, sculpture, furniture and fashion designer”. A true artist whose works - paintings, sculpture,furniture and fashion - will launch the opening of the gallery space at Nubuke Foundation.

nubukefoundation

A protean and controversial artistic personality between the 1960s and the 1990s, Kevin Atkinson embraced a multiplicity of approaches to making art and made a deep impression on generations of students at UCT. This exhibition, drawn from the Atkinson’s underground studio named ‘Plato’s Cave’, is both a posthumous tribute and an attempt to come to a greater understanding of the impressive contribution that he made to South African art, both as an artist and an educator.

iziko

Roger Ballen (b. 1950) has been shooting black-and-white film for nearly a half-century. A New York native, he has lived in South Africa for more than thirty years. Ballen's photographs of rural Afrikaners in their homes and urban-based "outsiders" in windowless rooms quickly became distinguished for their interior arrangements and the events that transpired among the people, animals, and furnishings within. Ballen's interest in line-whether of coat hangers, electric wire, or marks made on walls-has been constant.

africa-si

Drie Soedanese kunstenaars, allen afgestudeerd aan het 'College of Fine and Applied Art' in Khartoum en werkend en levend in België. Nahia Mahdi legt zich, behalve op moderne schilderkunst, ook toe op het illustreren van kinderboeken. Nasir Abbas is een moderne schilder en specialiseert zich daarnaast ook in digitale audio en video. Mohamed Shabini verwierf enige naambekendheid in Gent door zijn samenwerking met 'Ambrosia's Tafel' en het project 'Shabini's Droom'.

decentrale

Recent paintings by Ghanaian-born artist George Afedzi Hughes. Hughes's recent work uses art as a tool for cultural provocation, by challenging contemporary systems of order and engaging notions of violence, including the consequences of misused power. He utilizes creative processes that reactivate imagery through a variety of media in which elements from diverse sources such as war machinery, military uniforms with epaulettes, automobiles, colonial / historical references are charged with meaning.

skotogallery

Exploration of nostalgia in five African countries; Senegal, Nigeria, Algeria, Benin and South Africa. This exhibition tells the stories of bygone eras – positioning them firmly within present day narratives. Through architecture, construction, cartography, photography, communal archives, and historical reenactment, each artist and participant has a conversation with a past through which they did not live by juxtaposing design elements with those of today.

moadjhb headlines

Explores representations of the structures that the bare eye cannot see. Marx focuses on the structures that hold or shape the fluid aspects of existence; the ribcage that holds the soft, near shapeless interior of the body, the city structure that funnels and facilitates the flows of lives lived together. Marx literally brings the informational abstractions of aerial views, maps, and anatomical illustrations into his physical world by using plant material from his immediate environment as medium. The techniques that Marx develops to do this are at once practical, poetic and conceptual strategies.

goodman-gallery

In The Future White Women of Azania Ruga is turning his attention to an idea intimately linked to the apartheid era’s fiction of Azania – a Southern African decolonialised arcadia. But Ruga, in his imaginings of Azania, has stuck closer to the original myth, situating it in Eastern Africa as Pliny the Elder did. Here Ruga in his map The Lands of Azania (2014-2094) has created lands suggestive of sin, of decadence and current politics. Countries named Palestine, Sodom, Kuntistan, Zwartheid and Nunubia are lands that reference pre-colonial, colonial and biblical regions with all their negative and politically disquieting associations.

whatiftheworld