In its 2024 announcement of The Other Side of Now, Zeitz MOCAA described Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s films and sculptures as an exploration of histories linked by colonialism and war. Stories of Moroccan soldiers and Senegalese-Vietnamese families placed African experiences at the exhibition’s centre. Curated by Beata America, the presentation used memory, imagined dialogue and objects associated with conflict to consider displacement, intergenerational connection and healing.
Voni Baloyi’s ArtThrob review of Esther Mahlangu’s Iziko retrospective considered how a major survey could honour both an individual artist and the Ndebele community sustaining her practice. The account discussed curator Nontobeko Ntombela’s thematic approach, the returned BMW Art Car and less-familiar figurative works. Baloyi argued for placing Mahlangu within broader histories of South African abstraction, Black women artists and communal cultural preservation.
Margot Dower’s ArtThrob review of Georgina Maxim’s Telling Moments at Goodman Gallery, London, focused on six works assembled from clothing and embroidery. The Zimbabwe-based artist’s use of dhunge mutunge, a temporary stitching technique, became a way to consider memory, women’s lives and the limits of repair. Dower resisted flattening the work into a general textile-art trend, stressing the specificity of its methods and context.
Zeitz MOCAA’s July 2024 announcement introduced Berni Searle as the sixth resident in its Atelier programme. Under the title On Site, the Cape Town artist combined earlier work, moving images, sketches and objects with a working studio where new ideas could develop. The museum connected the residency to Searle’s sustained engagement with the city’s histories and to opportunities for visitors to encounter artistic processes directly.
Tiyani Rikhotso reviewed Lady Skollie’s GROOT GAT at Norval Foundation for ArtThrob, following its final presentation associated with her 2022 Standard Bank Young Artist Award. The paintings drew on San and Khoisan rock art while exploring gaps left by colonial dispossession. Rikhotso described the exhibition’s reimagined cave realm and its tribute to Botswana artist Coex’ae Qgam as acts of self-authored cultural memory.
ART AFRICA published the curatorial announcement of thirty artists selected for La Panafricaine, the central group exhibition of the fourteenth Bamako photography biennial. Under the theme Kuma, or the Word, the edition proposed a dialogue between images, speech and memory. Its selection ranged across the continent and diaspora, including Héla Ammar, Nuno Silas, Zara Julius, Maheder Haileselassie Tadese and Jeannette Ehlers.
Zeitz MOCAA announced its first children’s book series, The Stories that Ran Away, in July 2024. Written by Meridian Berndt and illustrated by Jax Lamb, Berndt, Jill Joubert and Mandy Wamono, the four books grew from the museum’s earlier child-centred exhibition. The museum described the project as a way to connect African creation stories, visual art and learning, extending its educational work beyond the galleries.
Published by ArtThrob from the catalogue for Igshaan Adams’s Weerhoud exhibition at The Hepworth Wakefield, Nkgopoleng Moloi’s essay examined movement as a source for material and spiritual exploration. It connected Adams’s work with dancers to his textile practice, questions of trauma and the body’s cultural inscriptions. The account located these experiments within community collaboration and Sufi thought, extending discussion of the artist beyond decorative readings of weaving.
Maya Pontone reported for Hyperallergic on a family-held portrait newly displayed at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Attributed to James Alexander Simpson and thought to depict Mary Ann Tritt Cassell, the 1839 painting may have been commissioned by her mother, Henrietta Steptoe, who had been enslaved. The reporting traced family provenance and curatorial research while preserving uncertainty around the sitter and commission.
In May 2024, Zeitz MOCAA reported that its fellowship with the University of the Western Cape had welcomed Yasmina Ali Yahia, Angela Muritu, Edna Bettencourt, Kakule Chadrack and Abbey IT-A. The third cohort combined museum work with study toward an honours qualification. The announcement records a pan-African investment in curatorial practice, collections, education and heritage, with fellows contributing to the museum’s Atelier programme.
Nancy Dantas’s ArtThrob feature traced the Casablanca Art School’s challenge to colonial hierarchies through an exhibition in Sharjah. Historical publications, ceramics, murals and archival research connected classroom experimentation with public interventions in Morocco. Dantas emphasised how African, Amazigh, Islamic and Mediterranean inheritances informed a collective modernism, placing the school’s educational ambitions within wider African and Arab cultural networks rather than a narrowly national art history.
Reviewing the Metropolitan Museum’s Harlem Renaissance exhibition for Hyperallergic, Zoë Hopkins highlighted both its international reach and its unresolved debates about Black representation. The 160-work presentation, curated by Denise Murrell, placed well-known figures alongside artists whose contributions had received less attention. Hopkins read its juxtapositions as evidence of artistic freedom, political disagreement and transatlantic exchange, rather than one unified style or obligation.
In April 2024, Zeitz MOCAA announced a new Selections from the Collection presentation in Cape Town. Drawing on contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, the exhibition addresses migration, memory, visibility, desire and power through multiple media. Featured artists include Nandipha Mntambo, Zanele Muholi, Kudzanai Chiurai and Joël Andrianomearisoa. The museum’s announcement scheduled the display from 4 April 2024 until 4 April 2027.
ART AFRICA reported on Passengers in Transit, a Venice Biennale collateral exhibition organised by the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. April Bey, Christa David, Euridice Zaituna Kala, Joana Choumali and Thandiwe Muriu explored belonging through interdisciplinary practices and archives. The curatorial framework connected Black women’s representation with cross-cultural identity, drawing on the right to opacity rather than asking difference to become easily legible.
Writing in ArtThrob after the 2024 Lagos Biennial, Sinazo Chiya examined how its temporary installations reworked the historically charged Tafawa Balewa Square. Works by Bruce Onobrakpeya, Ibrahim Mahama, Victor Ehikhamenor and Tabita Rezaire tested refuge through material, belief and communal space. The review situated those experiments within the square’s colonial, independence and FESTAC histories, finding possibilities for communities to reshape inherited settings.
In a BUALA essay translated into Portuguese by Marta Lança, Imani Jacqueline Brown interpreted Memórias do Rio Envenenado, a multimedia exhibition by Kiluanji Kia Henda and Felix Shumba in Luanda. Across the Natural History Museum and Jahmek Contemporary Art, Brown read the works through a river’s imagined memory of colonial extraction and ecological damage. Her discussion of Restless Landscape and Nocturnal Bodies connected artistic form with interdependence, inherited violence and collective resistance.
In December 2023, Zeitz MOCAA announced Sala, a collection exhibition developed with its museum fellows and staff from across departments. Seventeen artists, including El Anatsui, Joël Andrianomearisoa, Thania Petersen and Zanele Muholi, provided different ways to consider what a museum holds and whom it serves. The announcement framed the title as an invitation to remain in conversation with the works, the institution and its audiences.
Maya Pontone’s Hyperallergic report identified Grafton Tyler Brown’s western landscapes and María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s multipart Polaroid work among more than 300 Brooklyn Museum acquisitions, alongside works by Twins Seven Seven and Whitfield Lovell. Made between December 2022 and October 2023, the additions were intended to broaden American and international representation before a gallery reinstallation. The report documented collecting as an active revision of museum narratives, with Black American and Caribbean practices entering that institutional conversation.
ART AFRICA reported on the Metropolitan Museum’s Africa & Byzantium, a nearly 200-work exhibition tracing artistic exchange across northern and eastern Africa. Nubian wall paintings, Coptic manuscripts and Ethiopian icons challenged the treatment of Africa and Byzantium as separate histories. Contemporary works by Tsedaye Makonnen and Theo Eshetu extended the inquiry into memory and historical interpretation, connecting medieval objects with present-day African artistic thinking.
ART AFRICA’s account of the completed eighth ART X Lagos highlighted a compact selection of ten exhibitors alongside projects that connected generations. Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Writing with… appeared with presentations by Access ART X Prize recipients Dafe Oboro and Belinda Kazeem-Kamiński. MOWAA’s Nigeria Imaginary Incubator and other commissioned projects widened the fair beyond sales, documenting an ecosystem of historical research, emerging practice and institution-building.