In April 2018, the National Gallery of Jamaica announced the return of John Dunkley: Neither Day nor Night after its presentation at Pérez Art Museum Miami. Scheduled for April 29 through July 29, the Kingston exhibition brought together 34 paintings and nine sculptures by the self-taught Jamaican artist. Nicole Smythe-Johnson was to oversee the local installation with the gallery’s curatorial team, alongside an accompanying monograph.
In a 2017 C& interview with Awuor Onyango, curator Jimmy Ogonga explained his approach to Kenya’s Venice Biennale pavilion, Another Country. Drawing on James Baldwin’s novel, he considered how an international exhibition could connect Kenyan artists with wider audiences and generate discussion at home. The Biennale archive confirms the pavilion’s five participating practices, including Arlene Wandera, Mwangi Hutter and Peterson Kamwathi.
Diana Sette reviews The Ecstasy of St. Kara, an exhibition of Kara Walker’s drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Developed after a period working in Rome, the works bring religious imagery into contact with histories of enslavement, racial violence and Black self-determination in the United States. Sette reads their recurring figures and scenes as an examination of martyrdom, oppressive narratives and the possibility of resisting inherited violence.
Gontse Mathabathe reviews the tenth-anniversary presentation of Zanele Muholi’s Faces and Phases at Stevenson in Johannesburg. The exhibition placed earlier portraits beside newer photographs of the same participants, making change over time central to its living archive of Black queer lives. Mathabathe emphasizes the project’s political and personal force while noting that participants’ written testimonies, which often accompany the portraits, were absent from this installation.
London’s October Gallery presented new work by El Anatsui from 4 February to 2 April 2016, following his Venice Biennale lifetime-achievement award the previous year. The exhibition continued his exploration of large sculptures assembled from discarded aluminium bottle tops. C&’s advance listing and the gallery’s archive place the show within a practice shaped by decades of sculpture and teaching in Nigeria.
Adrian Piper received the best-artist Golden Lion at the 2015 Venice Biennale for The Probable Trust Registry: The Rules of the Game #1–3. C& reported the award during Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition All the World’s Futures. The Biennale’s official record confirms the winning work and identifies the ceremony as 9 May 2015; the project placed questions of trust and personal responsibility within a participatory conceptual artwork.
ArtReview’s Siona Wilson considers Afterword, Kara Walker’s return to the imagery and reception of her 2014 sugar installation A Subtlety. Preparatory drawings, sculptural remnants and films extend the project’s questions about looking. Wilson focuses on An Audience, assembled from footage of visitors during the installation’s final hour, and the contrast between emotional encounters with the work and the habitual production of photographs and selfies.
Serge Alain Nitegeka’s 2014 exhibition at Stevenson Johannesburg brought geometric paintings, silhouetted figures and charcoal portraits into a sustained exploration of blackness. ArtThrob’s review connected the Burundian artist’s formal language with migration, absence and ancestral memory. Portraits of his grandmothers, presented alongside his own likeness as self-portraits, complicated the relationship between individual identity and family history.
Ian Grose’s 2014 exhibition Some Assumptions at Stevenson Cape Town brought together patterned cloth, reworked religious imagery and repeated views of a studio window. ArtThrob’s reviewer praised his control of paint while describing an elusive, self-questioning practice. References to Renaissance altarpieces, Monet and abstraction became ways of asking how painters translate observation and inherited conventions into images.
Chad Rossouw’s 2014 exhibition The Planet’s Wake at Brundyn+ in Cape Town combined fabricated artefacts, altered historical imagery and science-fiction references. ArtThrob’s review considered how these objects unsettled distinctions between evidence and invention, drawing attention to photography, materials and the authority of historical records. Accompanying fiction by Matthew Blackman offered another route through the exhibition without supplying a single definitive narrative.
A 2014 exhibition at the University of Cape Town presented portraits made by Singarum Moodley at Kitty’s Studio in Pietermaritzburg between 1972 and 1984. Curator Steven Dubin selected 80 photographs from an archive of discarded negatives. ArtThrob’s review explored how clothing, poses and personal accessories offered insight into self-presentation and everyday social life during apartheid.
Kiluanji Kia Henda’s 2014 exhibition at Brundyn+ in Cape Town used photography and video to unsettle familiar narratives of Africa. A fictional African aid organisation reversed the usual geography of humanitarian assistance, while images of monuments and military remnants examined Angola’s changing identities. ArtThrob’s reviewer singled out Concrete Affection – Zopo Lady for connecting urban space, memory and belonging in Luanda.
Trevor Coleman’s 2014 survey at SMAC Gallery in Stellenbosch revisited paintings made between 1960 and 1977. Lloyd Pollak’s ArtThrob review emphasised their shifting colour relationships, geometric structures and optical effects, describing connections between hard-edge abstraction, Op Art and African decorative forms. Alongside its praise, the review noted that ageing and damage had affected some painted surfaces.
Portia Zvavahera’s 2014 exhibition Wayfinding at Stevenson Johannesburg presented paintings of women, prayer and shared emotional experience. Percy Mabandu’s ArtThrob review considered how oil-based printing ink, layered marks and patterned cloth shaped the works’ atmosphere. It read religious references and grouped figures through questions of gender, authority and catharsis, while highlighting the expressive force of the artist’s surfaces.
Reporting from Dak’Art in 2014, Basia Lewandowska Cummings followed the OFF programme through hospitals, restaurants, studios and other spaces beyond conventional galleries. Her C& review describes encounters with Issa Samb’s studio and digital-art activity at Kër Thiossane. It presents the sprawling fringe as a way of connecting artistic work with Dakar’s everyday life, while questioning who gains visibility through the biennial system.
Hrag Vartanian examines Kara Walker’s A Subtlety before its public opening at Brooklyn’s former Domino Sugar Factory. A monumental white sphinx and smaller sugar figures connect the installation to the industry’s reliance on enslaved labor. His review also considers the tensions surrounding the site’s planned redevelopment, asking how a tribute to exploited workers sits within the changing economics and cultural memory of Williamsburg.
Reviewing Gravity and Grace at the Brooklyn Museum, Maeve Gately examines El Anatsui’s large metal hangings and their capacity to change with each installation. The exhibition combined twelve monumental works with pieces in other materials. Her account connects the Ghanaian artist’s use of Nigerian liquor-bottle caps to West African histories of trade and consumption, while emphasizing the sculptures’ shifting surfaces and spatial presence.
A 2013 C& feature by Jonathan Fine examined Nigerian exhibition pamphlets held by London’s Stuart Hall Library. Its bibliography brings together records from the late 1980s and early 1990s, including publications featuring El Anatsui, Ndidi Dike and Obiora Udechukwu. Fine argues that these easily overlooked documents preserve information about artistic networks and working conditions that more prominent publications can miss.