A continent. A diaspora.
A conversation.
OPENING THE JOURNAL
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Zeitz MOCAA announced a monumental textile commission by Malian artist Abdoulaye Konaté for its atrium. Composed of coloured fabric strips and conceived for the museum’s architecture, the work honours Youssouf Tata Cissé and Germaine Dieterlen while drawing on histories of knowledge, writing and symbolism.
ArtThrob’s January 2020 review examined Ruby Swinney’s Hold Still at WHATIFTHEWORLD in Cape Town. The critic read the artist’s monochromatic oil paintings on silk as unsettling encounters between human leisure and environmental damage. Conservatories, pools and faceless figures become settings for questions about consumption, spectatorship and alienation from nature. The review argued that the apparent serenity of the works gives way to discomfort about their depicted world.
ArtThrob’s January 2020 review of Moshekwa Langa’s Tropic of Capricorn at Stevenson in Cape Town considered works built from unstable forms, layered surfaces and unconventional materials. The critic interpreted their fragmentation as a resistance to settled meaning, relating Langa’s practice to experiences of displacement and uncertainty. Rather than treating the exhibition as a single narrative, the review followed its shifting relationships between matter, memory and perception.
Chad Rossouw’s January 2020 review of Soft Architectures at Goodman Gallery Cape Town examined how built forms organize behaviour and preserve unequal histories. Discussing works by Kapwani Kiwanga, Jeremy Wafer, Naama Tsabar and Mateo López, he explored the relationship between materials and the stories viewers bring to them. His assessment praised the exhibition’s coherence, particularly the dialogue between archival references and sculptures that initially appeared abstract or ordinary.
ArtThrob’s review of Cathy Abraham’s A Deeper Kind of Nothing describes how fragile materials became a means of mourning and collective reflection at Glen Carlou Gallery in Klapmuts. A central installation used thousands of painted eggshells, while another incorporated balloons holding the artist’s breath. The critic considers the shared painting sessions as spaces for remembering lives affected by gender-based violence and for confronting the difficulty of recovery.
In January 2020, ArtReview reported Yinka Shonibare’s plans for the Guest Artists Space Foundation, with residency sites in Lagos and Ijebu, Ogun State. Building on his London-based Guest Projects initiative, the proposal aimed to foster exchange between artists in Nigeria and international participants. Plans included studios, accommodation and a gallery in Lagos, alongside a rural site on a farm. The article described an intended programme, rather than confirming that either residency had opened.
Martin Herbert’s January 2020 ArtReview preview included substantial discussion of Kehinde Wiley’s engagement with European portrait traditions and Black representation. It also noted Ellen Gallagher’s Afrofuturist paintings within the announced Dhaka Art Summit programme. Read as an archival preview rather than current recommendations, the article records how these practices appeared within an international exhibition calendar at the beginning of 2020.
Tajudeen Sowole previews Segun Aiyesan’s Dymentiona at Thought Pyramid Art Centre in Lagos, a 2019 exhibition bringing together 35 paintings, sculptures and hybrid works. The Port Harcourt-based artist uses textured surfaces and figurative and abstract compositions to explore human relationships with nature, inner life and survival. The report situates these works within his continuing experiments with canvas and records the exhibition’s scheduled closing date of 8 December 2019.
Laura Raicovich reflects on The NewOnes, will free Us, Wangechi Mutu’s four bronze figures installed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s façade. She reads their seated poses, coiled garments and reflective surfaces as a challenge to the building’s monumental authority and inherited European conventions. The essay connects the sculptures with questions of colonial history, Black presence and forms of beauty that dominant cultural narratives have excluded.
Jasmine Weber’s review of the 2019 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York follows connections between studio portraiture and newer photographic experiments. Works by Seydou Keïta, Malick Sidibé and J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere appear alongside artists including Hassan Hajjaj and Lebohang Kganye. Weber traces recurring concerns with beauty, family, identity and representation across African and diaspora practices, while highlighting photography’s exchanges with textiles, sculpture and collage.
In April 2019, ART AFRICA previewed Ghana Freedom, the country’s first national pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Curated by Nana Oforiatta Ayim within a space designed by David Adjaye, the announced exhibition would bring together El Anatsui, Ibrahim Mahama, Felicia Abban, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, John Akomfrah and Selasi Awusi Sosu. Its planned installations, portraits and moving-image works addressed Ghanaian independence and its legacies across generations and diasporic experiences.
After seeing William Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance at the Milwaukee Art Museum, Debra Brehmer reflects on the procession of figures moving across its eight screens. Her essay relates the South African artist’s images of burdens and confinement to a nearby protest against US immigration policies. The connection is the critic’s interpretation, extending into a self-examination of privilege, segregation and the limits of solidarity.
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.