Category: Africa
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Kinshasa: a ‘site of dreams’ for contemporary visual artists
“It is a site of dreams, where dreams encounter each other and become a single body. However, on the level of our own experience of that urban environment, once one plunges into the life of the city and participates in it, it inevitably diversifies and becomes multiple.” – Extract from an interview with Vincent Lombume Kalimasi…
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Exploring ‘othering’ through the work of Congolese pop artist Chéri Samba
The triptych, Quel Avenir Pour Notre Art? [What Future for Our Art?] (1997) by Congolese pop artist Chéri Samba (b. 1956) presents visual and textual representations of three significant stages in the artist’s life and career. Painted in acrylics in Samba’s characteristic comic strip style he combines self-portraiture, symbolic imagery and textual narratives to pose…
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Senghor’s Contribution to the Making of Dakar as an Art World City
The establishment of Dakar as a global centre for modern and contemporary arts on the African continent can be traced back to Senegal’s independence in 1960 and the particular interventions of Senegal’s first president Léopold Sédar Senghor. By setting up a number of major national art institutions, and hosting large-scale international arts events in the capital city…
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From Mancoba and Sekoto to Mslaba and Sibande: Johannesburg’s Post-Apartheid Emergence as an Art World City
“The embarrassment that my presence caused – to the point of making me, in their eyes, some sort of ‘Invisible Man’ or merely the consort of a European woman artist – was understandable, as before me, there had never been, to my knowledge, any black man taking part in the visual arts ‘avant-garde’ of the…
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