Writing in BUALA, Marta Lança explores how visual artist and performer Mussunda N’zombo’s work informs Paulo Idalécio’s 2025 short film Sabes Quem Eu Sou?. The review connects his screen character to A Metamorfose, a 2018 performance, and to his use of costume, gesture and alter egos. Through a fictional man whose authority is no longer recognised in Luanda, the film extends that artistic investigation into identity and the performance of power.
BUALA·
Kamy Lara at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, 3 February 2026. Photo: Vera de Kok / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Contextual portrait, not the Luanda screening or exhibition.Vera de Kok · CC BY-SA 4.0
In an interview with Marta Lança for Buala, filmmaker Kamy Lara discusses documenting Fuckin’Globo, the artist-led exhibitions held in Luanda’s Hotel Globo from 2015. Her 2024 documentary combines interviews, archival material and footage of the event’s final edition. Lara describes artists sharing rooms, resources and ideas, and reflects on how collective working shaped the exhibitions. The conversation accompanied a 30 October screening at FIC Luanda, rather than the launch of a new film.
Maputo Fast Forward’s tenth-anniversary festival runs from 23 October to 1 November 2026 at JFS Tower in Mozambique’s capital. ART AFRICA reports that Artificial Realities: The Infinite Mirror brings exhibitions, discussions and workshops together around technology and cultural knowledge. Installations and projects by Russel Hlongwane, Dilayla Romeo, Zayaan Khan, Malik Afegbua and Adilson De Oliveira explore territory, memory and image-making.
In an ART AFRICA interview with Suzette Bell-Roberts, curator Fadzai Veronica Muchemwa discusses Second Nature | Manyonga, Zimbabwe’s presentation at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Work by Franklyn Dzingai, Gideon Gomo, Pardon Mapondera, Eva Raath and Felix Shumba connects material processes with memory and change. Muchemwa questions celebratory accounts of resilience, describing adaptation as uneven rather than automatically liberating.
Anastasia Pather and curator Chepape Makgato discuss Mother Tongue at the William Humphreys Art Gallery in an ART AFRICA interview with Suzette Bell-Roberts. Pather describes finger-painting as a way to explore memory, belonging and identity. Her first solo museum exhibition is presented alongside works by women printmakers from the gallery’s collection and remains on view in Kimberley, South Africa, until 26 November 2026.
The National Arts Festival in Makhanda is recruiting an artistic director on a renewable five-year contract, ART AFRICA reports. The festival’s official vacancy notice confirms that the role spans curatorial direction, visual arts and other disciplines, commissioning, the Fringe and artist development. Applicants will need programming and leadership experience, including budget management and African and international partnerships. ART AFRICA lists 30 October 2026 as the deadline; applications must use the festival’s official online form.
In an ART AFRICA interview published on 20 October, researcher Jane Freedman reflects on a Johannesburg exhibition in which young people used photography and podcasts to examine migration and belonging. Participants selected and arranged their own work, retaining control over how their stories were shared. The exhibition opened at Bag Factory Artists’ Studios on 13 June 2026; the new interview considers its participatory approach rather than announcing a forthcoming show.
Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam announced a survey of South African artist Moshekwa Langa spanning work made between 1995 and 2026. Curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Kabelo Malatsie, You Will Find Us in the Best Places will bring together nearly 120 works across drawing, collage, photography, video and installation. ART AFRICA describes a presentation organized around recurring memories, places and questions of belonging rather than a strict chronology.
South African artist Unathi Mkonto has won the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation Prize for his Goodman Gallery presentation at Frieze London, reports Shalom Esene in Art Report Africa. Nominated by Yinka Shonibare for the fair’s Artist-to-Artist section, Mkonto will share the £10,000 prize with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation. The award also includes a commission to be shown at the foundation in London in 2027; precise exhibition dates have not been announced.
Art Report Africa·
Filmmaker Mati Diop at Sea’nema in 2024. Diop is among the artists named in Turning Towards the Sun; the forthcoming exhibition is not pictured.4MAPS · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Cropped
Zeitz MOCAA has announced a moving-image exhibition developed with the African Film and Media Arts Collective. Curated by Khanyi Mawhayi, it brings together six artists and filmmakers, including Mati Diop and Wanuri Kahiu, to explore Pan-African connections, learning and artistic exchange.
In an ART AFRICA interview with Suzette Bell-Roberts, ICA director Nomusa Makhubu discusses taking live art beyond Cape Town’s established cultural centres. She describes partnerships with 16 on Lerotholi and Guga S’Thebe in KwaLanga, and the possibilities of free performances in public spaces. The conversation explores how participation, local histories and movement across the city shaped the festival’s approach. The 2026 festival ran from 14 to 18 October.
In BUALA, Júlia Barata discusses adapting Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais into graphic narrative. Drawing on her childhood in post-independence Maputo, she reflects on privilege, racism and the visual possibilities of watercolour. The interview connects her treatment of colonial memory with experimental comics, everyday feminism and collective learning in Buenos Aires.
Zeitz MOCAA has announced Were It Not for Shadows, bringing together six Cape Town artists who took part in its Koyo Kouoh Atelier residency programme. Curated by Phokeng Setai, the exhibition will present installations, tapestries, sculpture and photography connected to their time at the museum. Scheduled for 12 November 2026 to 29 August 2027, it considers the experimentation and studio work that precede public exhibitions, according to the museum’s announcement.
Swaline Mkhonto and Zovuyo Pendu’s Site Forming brings together printmaking, installation and figurative painting at Johannesburg’s Bag Factory Artists’ Studios. ART AFRICA describes the exhibition as the culmination of their 2025/2026 Young Womxn Studio Bursary. Mkhonto explores bodily memory and fragmented space, while Pendu examines faith and the unconscious. The presentation includes curatorial input from Penina Chalumbira and collaboration with members of the Letsema collective.
Mozambican artist Euridice Zaituna Kala’s Daylighting: aber es ist Wasser, das spricht at Kunsthalle Münster examines how colonial archives shape remembrance and erase experiences. ART AFRICA describes installations, performances, paintings, objects and books engaging with representations of Black bodies and the power to record history. Curated by Merle Radtke, the Münster presentation adds new works to an exhibition previously shown in Rennes and Brussels.
Marta Lança revisits Sara CF de Gouveia’s documentary The Sound of Masks through the performances of Mozambican Mapiko dancer Atanásio Cosme Nyusi. Her BUALA essay considers how choreography, masking and storytelling carry memories that official archives miss, while questioning how cinema represents cultural inheritance and its transmission between generations without freezing a living practice.
Elgin Rust turns photographs of architecture in Ghana, Cairo, Dubai and Cape Town into speculative floating structures in Sky Cities: Futures in Flux. At the AVA Gallery, digital manipulation meets cyanotype printing, bringing environmental uncertainty and material change into view. The exhibition pairs her visual work with an independent sound piece, Umoya.
Africans Column·
Koyo Kouoh speaking in Douala in 2010. IMPRINT is the current iteration of the museum’s Koyo Kouoh Atelier; the current residents and exhibition are not pictured.Lard Buurman . · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Cropped
Zeitz MOCAA has introduced IMPRINT, a publishing residency bringing three Cape Town collectives into its Koyo Kouoh Atelier. (B)andWi(d)th, Medupi Publishing and Creative Knowledge Resources will use the museum as a place for production and experimentation, with the programme running until April 2028.
Six Luanda galleries are presenting new exhibitions during Noite das Artes, Novo Jornal reports. The route links Mayamba, Espaço Luanda Arte, Why Not, Palomino Artes, The Art Affair and D’Maio, with free admission and transport between venues. Organisers hope the last-Friday initiative will become a regular meeting point for artists, galleries and wider audiences.
Novo Jornal·
Context: Palácio de Ferro in 2011, not the 2026 film and photographic exhibition.Zorglub · CC BY-SA 3.0
Novo Jornal reports that young Angolan filmmakers created short films for an exhibition at Luanda’s Palácio de Ferro marking fifty years of diplomatic relations with France. Produced with the French embassy, the films were presented alongside photographic archives, bringing a younger generation’s audiovisual perspectives into dialogue with the history of bilateral cooperation.
