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.
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.
Hyperallergic reported that María Magdalena Campos-Pons and Carolyn Lazard were among four visual artists receiving 2023 MacArthur Fellowships. Campos-Pons was recognised for multidisciplinary work connecting personal ancestry and wider diasporic histories; Lazard’s practice examined accessibility and institutional ableism through installation, video and sculpture. The unrestricted awards supported future work without a prescribed project, marking significant recognition for practices that challenge dominant accounts of bodies and belonging.
Maya Pontone reported for Hyperallergic on Now and Forever, Kerry James Marshall’s first stained-glass commission, unveiled at Washington National Cathedral on 23 September 2023. The paired windows depicted Black demonstrators carrying signs about fairness and justice. Parts of the earlier glass remained above the new windows, sustaining a dialogue between past and present. The work expanded his longstanding representation of Black American life into an architectural medium.
ART AFRICA documented the second Dig Where You Stand exhibition at Palais de Lomé and satellite sites in Togo. Curated by Rosemary Esinam Damalie with advice from Azu Nwagbogu, it brought together more than 166 works addressing migration, colonial economies and restitution. Planned Ewe translations and mobile displays extended its argument beyond museum walls, making local participation part of the project rather than an afterthought.
ART AFRICA introduced Common Ground at Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute as an examination of how groups occupy social and physical space. Works by Peterson Kamwathi, Elias Mung’ora, Paul Njihia and Morris Foit depicted students, officers, protesters and families. The selection included a newly completed five-part Foit sculpture in the institute’s collection, connecting contemporary public life with the material and intergenerational histories of Kenyan art.
ART AFRICA reported on Otherscapes at Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, bringing large installations by Nicholas Hlobo, Sethembile Msezane, Siemon Allen and Wim Botha into dialogue. The works approached belonging and national identity through spatial environments visitors could move around or through. Rather than illustrating a political verdict, the exhibition asked how memory, spirituality and colonial histories complicate the distance between democratic aspiration and contemporary disappointment.
ART AFRICA reported that Amoako Boafo expanded his Gagosian debut into a presentation at dot.ateliers in Accra, adding new portraits to paintings first seen in New York. The exhibition connected international circulation with an artist-built local infrastructure: Boafo’s space, opened in December 2022, combined galleries, studios and an art library with residencies. It documented a concrete effort to retain artistic exchange and experimentation within Accra.
ART AFRICA reported on Afriart Gallery’s Shapes of Water, which assembled ten women artists from seven African countries in Kampala. Water supplied a framework for considering femininity, bodily autonomy and the pressure to conform under patriarchy. Participants included Sungi Mlengeya, Charlene Komuntale, Nelsa Guambe and Maliza Kiasuwa. The exhibition placed distinct regional practices in conversation rather than presenting a single model of womanhood.
Elaine Velie’s Hyperallergic report explored Lauren Halsey’s roof commission at the Metropolitan Museum. Egyptian architectural forms carried portraits of people close to the artist and inscriptions drawn from South Central Los Angeles. Built from hundreds of tiles, the installation connected Afrofuturist imagination with the preservation of a neighbourhood’s everyday language, asking whose culture museums make permanent while communities face the pressures of gentrification.
ART AFRICA described Syowia Kyambi’s return to a Nairobi solo presentation after seven years, at Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute. Kaspale assembled photography, video, sculpture and installations made between 2018 and 2022. The artist’s trickster character moved through colonial archives and inherited sites of power, drawing on research at Tanzania’s Amani Research Station and the MARKK Museum to examine violence, memory and the construction of identity.
ART AFRICA’s October 2022 report outlined the thirteenth Bamako Encounters, scheduled across venues including Mali’s National Museum and Bamako railway station. The photography biennial planned contributions from around 75 artists, with five thematic chapters drawing on Aimé Césaire. Artistic director Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and a collaborative curatorial team foregrounded layered identities and heritage; announced retrospectives included Samuel Fosso, Joy Gregory and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons.
Dan Hicks’s June 2022 Hyperallergic report examined Hew Locke’s Foreign Exchange, an Ikon commission for Birmingham’s Commonwealth Games festival. Locke placed the city’s Queen Victoria statue aboard a fabricated ship alongside five smaller versions of the monarch. Rather than removing the monument, the intervention used added figures, crates and military imagery to examine, in Hicks’s reading, the circulation of imperial symbols. Hicks connected the work to Locke’s childhood encounters with another Victoria statue in Guyana.
ART AFRICA reported that Zeitz MOCAA’s Indigo Waves and Other Stories would open on 30 June 2022, examining the Indian Ocean’s role in connecting African and Asian histories. Curated by Natasha Ginwala and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung with Michelangelo Corsaro, the exhibition included commissions involving Thania Petersen, Myriam Omar Awadi and Shiraz Bayjoo. Its historical focus encompassed migration, colonial trade and cultural exchange, extending accounts of diaspora beyond the Atlantic.
ART AFRICA·
Ibrahim Mahama at Art Basel, June 2025. Photo: Bea Phi, CC BY-SA 4.0. This is not a photograph of the 2022 announcement or the Ljubljana Biennale.Bea Phi · CC BY-SA 4.0
ArtReview reported in June 2022 that Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama would direct the 35th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, scheduled for 2023. The announcement connected his appointment to the histories shared by Ghana and Yugoslavia through the Non-Aligned Movement. It also highlighted his institution-building in Tamale, including Nkrumah Volini, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art and Red Clay, alongside the large installations for which he is internationally known.
Jasmine Liu reported for Hyperallergic in March 2022 that the Colby College Museum of Art had acquired Faith Ringgold’s Coming to Jones Road #4: Under A Blood Red Sky, made in 2000. Combining painted imagery and written narrative, the quilt follows people escaping enslavement through the Underground Railroad. The acquisition brought an important example of Ringgold’s storytelling practice into Colby’s collection,.
In a March 2020 ArtThrob review, Vusumzi Nkomo considered Mawande Ka Zenzile’s Udludlilali at Stevenson in Cape Town through Xhosa cosmology and its dialogue with Sisonkepapu’s poetry. Nkomo described paintings, sculpture and disruptive sound as challenges to dominant ideas of artistic knowledge, while questioning the exhibition’s reliance on English text. The review documents a critical encounter with Black spiritual and aesthetic traditions.
Anke Geldenhuys’s March 2020 ArtThrob student review considered Igshaan Adams’s I Am You at the Stellenbosch Triennale. Describing a maze of translucent fabrics, she connected the installation to the artist’s account of a dream and to Sufi ideas of spiritual unveiling. Her encounter with its layered structure became a reflection on memory and the overlapping personal, social and religious narratives through which identity takes shape.
