Over the past 8 years, Fak’ugesi has directed efforts to not only celebrate creatives using technology but to also create laboratories and programs that are meant to provide mentorship, advance skills and create global networks for African digital art and creatives.
With the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival at the forefront of the continent’s African digital arts, culture and technology scene, November 25 2021 sees Fak’ugesi launch a new initiative in the form of a virtual 3D gallery space aimed at discovering and purchasing contemporary artworks of both continental and diasporic African artists — working to create global networks and economic ecologies rooted in the dissemination of continental and diasporic African art.
The 3D gallery space will run between 25 November 2021 to 4 January 2022, profiling work from forty digital artists, with eight works to be featured at the physical gallery at Tshimologong. Over the years, Fak’ugesi Festival has displayed innovative work with over four hundred artists from various digital creative sectors and countries across the continent.
The exhibition pays tribute to some of the most indispensable work digital artists across Africa have made by documenting innovations and culture on the continent. Outcomes of the Fak’ugesi Labs are also exhibited at the gallery, including an interactive animation created by a group of Johannesburg based creatives led by Fak’ugesi, Arts Research Africa and City of Bogota’s artist in residence — Crila Regina from Colombia, Bogota.
To celebrate seven years of the Fak’ugesi Digital Innovation Festival, an alumni catalogue will be launched in tandem with the exhibition. The catalogue is a celebration of the immense and diverse talents of the artists who make up the festival’s alumni and who have made significant contributions to its growth and scope over the years.
The gallery space is a virtual hall of 3D graphic glass-front shipping containers, each home to a curated exhibition packed with explosive, contemplative and experimental work — across gaming, digital art, animation and more. Everyone has put in a lot of work to ensure that the exhibition and the alumni catalogue provide a broad and beautiful view of the digital creative industries in Africa today, and one that we are proud to have helped build.” Shares Fak’ugesi Festival Curator, dillion s. phiri.
The public will get a chance to explore contemporary digital photography through the work and creative sensibilities of artists Puleng Mongale and Sanele in an exhibition titled No Boundaries. Along with the captivating work of animators digging into Africa’s folklore canon, with projects like Deidre Janties’ Stories In Die Wind and Formation Animation’s Azania Rises, both part of the Fak’ugesi stories exhibition. Augmented reality artists Xabiso Vili and Sonwabo Valishaya bring a thought provoking exhibition to the physical space, Re/Member your Descendants — which asks the question, “if you were an ancestor, what would your descendants call upon you for?”.
Commenting on the virtual 3D gallery space, BetterShared, Founder and CEO Swakara Atwell-Bennet expresses, “It’s been a great opportunity to work on [the] Fak’ugesi Festival. It’s been our largest gallery build and we’ve also been able to really push the concept and create something quite different from what’s already out there in terms of virtual galleries.”
To find out more about Fak’ugesi’s virtual 3D gallery space click here!
