Abdoulaye Konaté is a Malian artist who combines hanging, assembly, dyeing and sculpture to achieve high recall and strong presence in space. With textiles, gris-gris, bullets, used clothing or sand, he comes in the theater and the world of contemporary art through the door or spiritual or political. He is reflecting a Malian, African and universal collective consciousness.

Today, his work primarily takes the form of textile-based installations which explore socio-political and environmental issues. The artist questions the way in which societies and individuals, both in Mali and beyond, have been affected by factors such as war, the struggle for power, religion, globalisation, ecological shifts and the AIDS epidemic. Employing material native to Mali, namely woven and dyed cloths which are sewn together, the artist creates large-scale compositions, abstract and figurative. Konaté refers to the West-African tradition of using textiles as a means of commemoration and communication, balancing global political and social reflections with a reference to his own local and cultural history.

Konaté’s work has been exhibited in numerous international exhibitions. Major group shows include Documenta 12, Kassel (2007), Africa Remix international tour including the Centre Pompidou, Paris and Hayward Gallery, London (2004-2007) and more recently The Divine Comedy, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory revisited by Contemporary African Artists at the Frankfurt Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014). In 2008, Konaté was nominated for the Artes Mundi prize, Cardiff. He has received several awards, including the prestigious Leopold Senghor Prize at the Dak’Art Biennale in Dakar (1996), the Officier de l’Ordre National du Mali (2009) as well as the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de France (2002). He is currently General Director of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia Balla Basseké Kouyaté in Bamako. Konaté lives and works in Bamako, Mali.

Her work stems from her personal and family history and reflects on current issues of exile, migration and refugee-statues. Process and materiality is key to her practice. Employing used engine oil and salt as a medium for painting, she engages in ecological discussion, the threatening instability and subtle collapse; and the unethical seizing of rapidly dwindling natural resources, particularly on the resource-rich African continent. Furthermore she investigates notions of mourning – both of an individual and collective nature – and the lamentation of the loss of land and of those who have been ‘unhomed’.

Her work is part of private and public collections including the Iziko South African National Gallery in South Africa, the Spier Collection in South Africa, the Darvesh Collection in the UAE, The Royal Portfolio Collection, in South Africa, and the Luciano Benetton Collection in Italy.

Antonio is inspired by traditional art as a stimulus to develop a contemporary discourse appropriate to his time and circumstances. The elements the artist uses in his works evoke the colonial period, the slavery, the war, the destruction, the human nature, the ability to resist and to survive.

As an artist, António Ole stood out for his sculptures inspired by the murals of the Tchokwe, east of the country, and for the contemporary painting that incorporates many traditional elements, which make him one of the strongest international promoters of Angolan culture.

António Ole has held exhibitions on a regular basis since 1994.

His solo exhibitions include “António Ole: marcas de um percurso (1970-2004)", Culturgest, Lisbon, 2004; in 2009, "Hidden Pages”, Iwalewa-Haus, Bayreuth, Germany; and “Angola, Figures de Pouvoir”, at the Musée Dapper, Paris, from 2010 to 2011.

In addition to several solo exhibitions, the works of António Ole were part of several other collective exhibitions, among which: “The Short Century”, at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; “Body of Evidence”, at the National Museum of African Art – Smithsonian, Washington, in 2007; “Africa Remix”, on display from 2004 to 2007, at the Kunstpalast Museum, Düsseldorf, the Hayward Gallery, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Johannesburg Art Gallery.

Siwani completed her BAFA (hons) at the Wits School of Arts in Johannesburg (2011) and her MFA at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts (2015), where she graduated ‘’cum laude’’.

The artist works predominantly with performance and installations. She also uses videos and photos to represent her body physically absent from space. Her work has been described as "revealing" and "political", covering themes of black femininity and spirituality.

Siwani's work interrogates the patriarchal framing of the black female body and the black female experience in the South African context. As an initiate Sangoma, a spiritual healer who works in the space of death and the living, Siwani focused her artistic practice on rituality and the relationship between Christianity and African spirituality. At the center of her work is her own body, which operates in multiple registers as subject, object, form, medium, material, language and place. Her work can be described, although not literally, as the documentation of a diverse set of performances, which take place through video, photography, sculpture, installation and works on canvas and paper. Each of her projects deals with the relationship between ancestral rituals and modern life, addressing social and political themes such as the female body, black communities, colonization stories and the paradoxes of our contemporary society, all seen through the artist's own filter.

Buhlebezwe Siwani was the winner of the 2021 Standard Bank Young Artists Award in the Visual Arts category.

She lives and works between Amsterdam and Cape Town.

In 1938 he moved to Paris to be able to study and, as he later wrote in a text for the Danish artist Ejler Bille's 90th birthday, to work, and especially think, freely as an artist. In Paris, Mancoba met with the Danish artists' colony and soon joined the CoBrA circle. In 1942, he married the Danish artist, Sonja Ferlov Mancoba. They both showed at Høstudstillingen in Copenhagen in 1948 and 1949.

Ernest Mancoba's work represents a unique synthesis of modern European art and African spirit. His goal was to bring to European art his deep understanding of African culture, represented by the frequently appearing totems in his drawings and paintings that reflect the umuntu philosophy he so often referred to: A human is a human by and for other people. After the end of apartheid, Mancoba was honoured with large retrospectives at the National Gallery in Cape Town and the Museum of Modern Art in Johannesburg.

Her work addresses the issues of gender and race, and the notions of trauma and memory, either in the context of the current debates on colonialism and post-colonialism in the early 21st century, or as a research into the ambiguous relation between memory and forgetting, and the collective memory and identity of Africans and of their diasporas. Evoking African oral traditions and their power to carry on the spoken word, the artist’s work gives voice to silenced narratives with the aim of rewriting and retelling a history that has been suppressed or disregarded.

Using and combining different mediums, Kilomba has been exploring unconventional, experimental and interdisciplinary artistic practices; her performances, video installations, readings and lectures create an interface between text and image, between artistic and academic language. Showing her work for the first time in Portugal, the artist presents Secrets to Tell at the MAAT — Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology. The first exhibition in our new Project Room, this show starts from the video installation The Desire Project, a piece specially conceived for the 32nd São Paulo Biennial (2016), which is also one of the most recent acquisitions of the EDP Foundation Art Collection. Adapted to the MAAT, the new installation of this piece is accompanied by a video version of a staged reading of Kilomba’s book Plantation Memories, published in 2008, and by Kosmos2, Labor #10: Video Installation, one of a series of debates the artist has been hosting at the Maxim Gorki Theatre, in Berlin, featuring “refugee” artists who explore original and subversive ways of producing new work.

He earned a BFA in photography and Africana studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts (1998) and a MFA in photography, along with an MA in visual criticism, from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco (2004).

Thomas’s body of work constructs dialogues around the stereotypical images of African Americans that media outlets seek to exploit and profit from in film and television as well as advertisements for alcohol, apparel, food, hair-care products, and cigarettes, among other items. Thomas situates the photographs within their historical context and addresses how these stereotypes have been pervasive in American culture since the antebellum period. Particularly interested in the literal and figural objectification of the African American male body, Thomas’s B®anded series (2006) appropriates advertising copy and superimposes a Nike swoosh logo onto the bodies of black men, recalling the branding of slaves by their owners. The series Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America (2005–08) was a direct response to the B®anded project. Taking mostly magazine ads of African Americans starting in 1968 during the civil rights movement to contemporary times, Thomas digitally stripped the images of all logos and text. In doing so, he allowed for commentary on how the advertising industry commodifies African American identity with even the simplest imagery. Thomas’s photographs draw parallels between the past and present and remind viewers of how dominant cultural tropes continue to shape notions of race and race relations.

In 2012 Thomas became Institute Fellow at Columbia College, Chicago, as part of his concurrent video installation project, Question Bridge: Black Males (2012), a collaboration with artists Chris Johnson, Bayeté Ross Smith, and Kamal Sinclair. The work is an accumulation of interviews with hundreds of African American men throughout the United States documenting their views on a range of subjects such as family, love, education, and community during the Barack Obama administration. Thomas has had solo exhibitions at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2009); Baltimore Museum of Art (2009); Goodman Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (2010); and Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2011). His work has appeared in group exhibitions, including those at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut (2007); Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2008); Museum of Art and Design, New York (2010); and the Istanbul Biennial (2011). His first monograph, Pitch Blackness (2008), garnered him the first annual Aperture West Book Prize. Thomas lives and works in New York.

Benohoud began his artistic journey with self-portrait photography, a medium he continues to practice, expanding his current process to incorporate mixed and new media. Humour, surrealism, performativity and self-deprecation staged in unexpected modes, are recurring elements in his work.

His works are featured in the permanent collections of institutions such as the Tate Modern, London and Centre Pompidou, Paris. Benohoud’s recent exhibitions include The Time is Out of Joint, Gwangju Biennale (2016); Come Closer, MACT/ CACT, Ticino (2016) and Performing for the Camera, Tate Modern, London (2016).

He is a multidisciplinary artist, who has completed his undergraduate degree at the London Metropolitan University in 2005 and he is attending a MFA in Fine Arts at the Goldsmith University, in London.

His multidisciplinary research comprises painting, textile, performance, sound installation, video and photography, allowing him to develop relevant bodies of works and work rituals Januario Jano explores the opposing notions of modern pop culture and traditional practices through different media. The chosen media are part of a more articulate vocabulary used by the artist to create his grammar: material defines since the beginning the outcome of the work either on an aesthetical point either on the narrative. The body plays a pivotal role as the main motif and leads the way to link between the present and past to build up the historical narrative.

He was included in Atlantica: Contemporary Art from Angola and its Diaspora) produced by Hangar Books. In 2018 he was selected for the Cape Town Art Fair curatorial section “Tomorrow/Today” where he presented a solo project together with a performance. For the Dakar Biennale 2018, prominent curator Simon Njami included his most recent work Ilundu (1/24), part of his ongoing project In 2016 Januario was awarded with the Art Laguna Prize on selected category “Business for Art”, one of most prestigious art award in Venice, Italy. He participated to the group exhibition “UNORTHODOX” curated by Jens Hoffman & Kelly Taxter at The Jewish Museum, New York, USA. Januario Jano is founder member of the Cultural Collective Pés Descalços and mentor and organizer of the TEDxLuanda since 2012 to present.

Andrianomearisoa has participated in a number of group shows, including Africa Remix, Rencontres Africaine de la Photographie in Bamako (2009); the Havana Biennale (2006); The progress of love, Menil Collection, Houston (2012); and Divine Comedy (2014) among others.

His solo shows include Bir Gece, a one-night performance and installation in Istanbul (2004) ; Habillé – Deshabillé, a performance/video piece in Stockholm Moderna Museet and Saint-Brieuc (2009); Sentimental at la Maison Revue Noire Paris (2013).

In 2019 he represents Madagascar to the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.

The art of Keyezua addresses individual stories, expressed in films, paintings, poems and sculptures. She believes that an African artist can only break the epidemic stigmatized and prejudiced image on Africa through the media, breaking the silence and traditionalist stereotypes.

Keyezua’s work has already been included in exhibitions and events such as Afro Vibes Festival Exhibition (Holland), Lagos Photo Festival (Nigeria), Addis Photo Festival (Ethiopia), Something About Bodies (England), among others.

Practicing in the fields of photography, video, and performance, Kia Henda has tied his multidisciplinary approach to a sharp sense of criticality. A profound springboard into this realm comes from growing up in a household of photography enthusiasts.

Furthermore, his conceptual edge has been sharpened by immersing himself in music, avantgarde theatre, and collaborating with a collective of emerging artists in Luanda’s art scene. In complicity with historical legacy, Kia Henda realises the process of appropriation and manipulation of public spaces and structures, and the different representations that form part of collective memory, as a relevant complexion of his aesthetical construction.

His solo exhibitions have been held in galleries and institutions around the world. His work has featured on biennales in Venice, Dakar and São Paulo as well as major travelling exhibitions such as Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design and The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Hell, Purgatory revisited by Contemporary African Artists.

Evincing a strong poetic and aesthetic sensibility, his work blurs the boundaries between the formalities of painting and photography. Katembo’s mirroring technique, best visualised in his photographic series Un regard (2008-2009), captures vignettes of Kinshasa’s streets in the reflections of puddles. His photographs and short films address the economic and political realities of the capital, yet produce moments of intense serenity.

Katembo’s work was featured in Beauté Congo – 1926-2015 – Congo Kitoko, Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris (2015), Kiripi Katembo Siku: Mutation, Galleri Flach, Stockolm (2014) and the 4th International Festival of Photography, BOZAR, Brussels (2012).

Mónica has a visual art degree from Camberwell College of arts (London, 1998); a Master’s degree in art and education at the Institute of Education (London, 2000) and a PhD in visual art from the University of Middlesex (London, 2014). She has received the support from the Foundation for Science and Technology. She is currently developing her research project: Post- archive at CEC (Centre of Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon).

She was nominated for Novo banco Photo prize and exhibited at Museu Berardo ( Lisbon, 2016). Mónica was also nominated for Prix Piclet Photo Award (2016).

Stemming from an itinerant life in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris; and his contrasting experiences of growing up in South Africa, the artist interrogates his own position by embracing almost every artistic medium. Through painting, video, drawing, installation, sculpture and photography, he creates an ongoing index of items and observations.

Solo exhibitions include: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, NL (1998), Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, CH (1999); Renaissance Society, Chicago, US (1999); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, US (2003); Kunstverein Dusseldorf, DE (2004); National Museum of the 21st Century Arts (MAXXI), Rome, IT (2005); Modern Art Oxford, UK (2007), Kunsthalle Bern, CH (2011); Krannert Art Museum in Champaign, Illinois, US (2013); ifa Galleries, Stuttgart and Berlin, DE (2014). Langa has most recently exhibited in group shows: Le nouvel atelier, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, FR (2017); Afriques Capitales, Gare Saint Sauveur, Lille, FR (2017). He also participated in many biennials: Johannesburg (1997), Istanbul (1997), Havana (1997), São Paulo (1998 and 2010), Gwangju (2000), Venice (2003 and 2009), Lyon (2011).

He was selected by Simon Njami to participate in the 2018 edition of the Dakar Biennale, and by Gabi Ngcobo to take part in the 10th Berlin Biennale. Public collections include Johannesburg Transitional Metropolitan Council, Sandton Municipal Art Gallery, Johannesburg; The South African National Gallery in Cape Town, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, and Maxxi Museum, Rome.

His videos, installations, drawings, paintings and sculptures bring to light our doubts, fears and desires.
By using materials such as antenna cable, typewriters and VHS tapes, Mounir Fatmi elaborates an experimental archeology that questions the world and the role of the artist in a society in crisis. He twists its codes and precepts through the prism of a trinity comprising Language, Architecture and Machine. Thus, he questions the limits of language and communication while reflecting upon these obsolescent materials and their uncertain future.

His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, at the Picasso Museum, War and Peace, Vallauris, at the Contemporary Art Center Le Parvis. He participated in several group shows at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, The Brooklyn Museum, New York. His installations have been selected in biennials such as the 52nd and 54th Venice Biennial, the 8th biennial of Sharjah. Mounir Fatmi was awarded by several prize such as the Cairo Biennial Prize in 2010, the Grand Prize Leopold Sedar Senghor of the 7th Dakar Biennial in 2006.

Ever since the beginning of the 1990’s and his participation in Documenta 11 (2002) in Kassel and at the Venice Biennale (2005 and 2009) Pascale Marthine Tayou has been known to a broad international public.

His work is characterized by its variability, since he confines himself in his artistic work neither to one medium nor to a particular set of issues. While his themes may be various, they all use the artist himself as a person as their point of departure. Already at the very outset of his career, Pascale Marthine Tayou added an “e” to his first and middle name to give them a feminine ending, thus distancing himself ironically from the importance of artistic authorship and male/female ascriptions. This holds for any reduction to a specific geographical or cultural origin as well. His works not only mediate in this sense between cultures, or set man and nature in ambivalent relations to each other, but are produced in the knowledge that they are social, cultural, or political constructions. His work is deliberately mobile, elusive of pre-established schema, heterogeneous. It is always closely linked to the idea of travel and of coming into contact with what is other to self, and is so spontaneous that it almost seems casual. The objects, sculptures, installations, drawings and videos produced by Tayou have a recurrent feature in common: they dwell upon an individual moving through the world and exploring the issue of the global village. And it is in this context that Tayou negotiates his African origins and related expectations.

Her father later joined the South African Defense force which resulted in Firmino spending her school years in Zeerust and Johannesburg.

She went to the University of Witwatersrand where she obtained a Masters Degree in Fine Arts in 2018.

Firmino’s present narrative is contained in a broader theme that enquires into history. “History as presented is often biased and one-sided, so to get a better understanding I reimagine my past in this so-called truth.” Personal memories and historical events are combined and presented in interior scenes that present themselves as both possibilities and invitations to reimagine history.

While his practice, expressionist in nature, is entirely underpinned by drawing, constructed by filming a drawing, making erasures and alterations, and filming it again, his method combines studio-based and collaborative practices to create artworks that draw on politics, science, literature and history, and maintain a space for contradiction and uncertainty.

His work can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Western Australia (Perth), Art Institute of Chicago, Carnegie Museum of Art (New York), San Diego Museum of Art, Fondation Cartier (Paris), Zeitz MoCAA (Cape Town), Norval Foundation (Cape Town), LACMA (Los Angeles), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Sharjah Art Foundation, Mudam (Luxembourg), Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montreal, MoMA (New York), SF MoMA (San Francisco), Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, MoCA (Los Angeles), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Johannesburg Art Gallery, MAXXI (Rome), Louisiana Museum (Humlebaek,Denmark), National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), National Museum of Modern Art (Kyoto), Israel Museum (Jerusalem), Inhotim Museum (Brumadinho, Brazil), Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Louis Vuitton (Paris), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), Tate Modern (London), Sifang Art Museum (Nanjing), Kunsthalle Mannheim, Vehbi Koç Foundation (Istanbul), Luma Foundation (Arles), Museum of Fine Arts (Budapest), Fundaçion Sorigue (Lerida, Spain), Guggenheim (Abu Dhabi), Kunsthalle Praha (Prague) and Amorepacific Museum of Art (Seoul); as well as private collections around the world.

Kentridge is the recipient of honorary doctorates from several universities, including Yale and the University of London. In 2012 he presented the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. In 2013 he was Humanitas Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art at Oxford University, and Distinguished Visiting Humanist at the University of Rochester, New York, and in 2015 he was appointed Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy in London. In 2017 he received the Princess of Asturias Prize for the Arts, Spain, and in 2018, the Antonio Feltrinelli International Prize, Italy. Previous awards include the Kyoto Prize, Japan (2010), the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna (2008), the Kaiserring Prize (2003), and the Sharjah Biennial 6 Prize (2003), among others.

Over the past decade, he has become well known for his exploration of colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalization. Working in painting, sculpture, photography, film and installation, Shonibare’s work examines race, class and the construction of cultural identity through incisive political commentary on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their respective economic and political histories. Shonibare uses wry citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities.

In 2002, he was commissioned by Okwui Enwezor to create one of his most recognised installations, Gallantry and Criminal Conversation for Documenta XI. In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2008, his mid-career survey commenced at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney touring to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. In 2010, his first public art commission, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. In 2013 Shonibare was elected a Royal Academician. Works recently shown at the RA have included the RA Family Album, which was used to wrap Burlington Gardens during the refurbishment of the RA, and the room he curated as part of the 2017 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. His sculpture Wind Sculpture VI was also displayed in the RA courtyard during that exhibition.

Shonibare’s forthcoming new commission with the Public Art Fund, Wind Sculpture (SG) I, is currently on display at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza, Central Park (until 14 October 2018).

His work is included in notable museum collections including Tate, London; the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago among others.

Yonamine’s prolific and diverse artistic practice includes painting, drawing, graffiti, photography, video, and other media, such as tattooing and body art. His multimedia installations are both personal diaries and explorations of African history and politics.

Currently his work is articulated by complex installations, large murals, photographs and videos. In these works, the artist uses an immense range of objects and materials, such as newspapers, serigraphs, drawings, collages and traces where images from popular culture, American films, personalities that populate the masses and political figures of the African continent and the world overlap. In this great mixture, the artist builds a peculiar vocabulary on these references and his own positions.

Muholi was selected for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2015. Received the Infinito Prize from the International Center of Photography in 2016, the Chevalier degree from the Order of Arts and Letters and an honorary scholarship from the Royal Photographic Society in 2018.

Muholi participated in and completed, in 2003, the course in advanced photography offered by the “Market Photo Workshop School of Photography”in Newtown, Johannesburg.

In 2004, she held her first solo exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. In 2009, she received her Master's degree from Ryerson University in Toronto. Her dissertation mapped the visual history of black lesbian identity and politics in post-Apartheid South Africa.

Muholi researches and documents stories of hate crimes against the LGBTQIAP community in order to bring to light the practices of “corrective rape”, assault and HIV/AIDS.
On October 28, 2013, Muholi became an honorary professor of video and photography at the University of the Arts Bremen, Germany.
In 2014, she attended the Indaba Design Conference in Cape Town. In 2017, she was one of the speakers at WorldPride.

Muholi's photography has been compared to W.E.B. Du Bois - as a way of subverting stereotyped representations of African Americans. Both create an image archive, where they work to dismantle pre-existing and dominant perceptions of the subjects they choose to portray in their photographs.

She grew up in Algiers and moved to France in 1993. She is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Arts de Cergy-Pontoise in 2002.

Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s works -through installation, drawing, video and photography- deal with the effects of globalization and question their depictions with humour and subversion. In 2003, she directed the video Let's Dance (Dansons) in which she confuses the archetypes of French and Algerian cultures by performing a belly dance to the tune of the Marseillaise. The same year, her work featured in Experiments in the Arab Avant-garde at the French Cinémathèque (Paris). In 2005, Zoulikha Bouabdellah participated in the seminal exhibition Africa Remix at Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), and in 2008 in the festival Paradise Now! Essential Avant-Garde French Cinema 1890-2008 at the Tate Modern (London).

Since 2007, Bouabdellah’s works focus on letters and words of love, and particularly on the status of women. Made with different materials -paper, acrylic, aluminum, neon, wood- her works act as slogans and forge links between North and South, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, the visible and the untold.