The last couple of years have had a disorienting effect on artists, curators and cultural producers alike. That being said, a sense of groundlessness and disorientation can in fact breed fertile ground for daring ideas to flourish. I learnt recently of a key piece of advice Ai Weiwei gives to the young generation of artists…
I feel like for a long time as Africans we’ve been under the rug with the influence that we’ve given the world. Now is a time when we’re saying, ‘No, we want to be seen. We want to be heard. And we want the world to know that we’ve connected everybody and everything did come…
There’s a beautiful thought experiment that writer and theorist Kodwo Eshun suggests we should undertake: “Imagine a team of African archeologists from the future—some silicon, some carbon, some wet, some dry—excavating a site, a museum from their past: a museum whose ruined documents and leaking discs are identifiable as belonging to our present, the early…
Whenever confused along the journey of life — lost in an abyss of darkness struggling to navigate towards the light — a healing, and sometimes necessary act, is that of retracing your steps back home. This pilgrimage of homecoming forms the conceptual bedrock of Dominican visual artist and director Amanda Valle’s exploration in her latest…
“I want to challenge this idea of the archive as something that exists in a distant past, rather, understanding it as something that can be living, porous and flexible. Thinking of the archive like this can be a kind of memory practice against the ‘ritual of forgetting.” Achille Mbembe, 2002. History was like an old…
CODA is a short documentary following urban youth cruising through Johannesburg in December. Directed by Hallie Haller — whose creative output also finds home in forms of writing — and shot at the edge of a new year, the short film asks us to consider the passing of time and what it means to us….
I work with collages involving mainly the iconoclastic process of uprooting images from mass produced print media and proposing alternative realities through reconstruction of hallucinated images. My work is made with the intention to generate propaganda as a means to reject the certainty of the normal/ the reasonable often presented by hegemonic representations of ‘reliable…
A couple of years ago, I wandered through the quite obviously constructed industrial showroom of a high-end homeware store in Kramerville — an expansive space often sparsely filled with ludicrously expensive imported furniture pieces. The grey walls littered with drab black and white wildlife photography and commercially clinical Keith Haring and Picasso prints. Meandering up…
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…
Probably since the beginning of civilisation and definitely as early as I can remember, the question of who or what God is, where to seek God, and if there is even a God, has plagued my perilous human existence. The question of who, what, where and if, has been so impossible to definitively answer and…
I have spent the past year complaining about the figure. Okay, perhaps complaining is not the right word — being critical about the figure. Thinking about figures of life, figures that bewitch and figures that enrage. I approach the figure with suspicion — questioning why it is that so many faces of so many Black…
We’re made to believe that suffering is just a natural part of being who we are, and is a natural by-product of being a Black person – Timi Sotire For his directorial debut, in collaboration with A Joyful Project, Tobi Onabolu reads us a love letter to the inner child in every black person,…
