2015-11-23

dynamicafrica:

A hand-picked listing of African and Afro-Diasporan art events happening around the world, updated weekly.

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“Through the Lens: Visions of African American Experience, 1950-1970″ at

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

This exhibition features over sixty works by seven photographers active during the civil rights era (1950-1970). Organized to underscore different artistic intentions and photographic approaches, Through the Lens highlights various aspects of African American experience during this time of tremendous social and political change.

Photographers Danny Lyon, Bruce Davidson, and Charles Moore bore witness to the activities and struggles of the civil rights movements as a means to effect social change. W. Eugene Smith, Gordon Parks and James Karales produced extended photo-essays that brought stories about the lives of ordinary African Americans to the national public. Drawing inspiration from music and literature, Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks made original, creative photographs as purely artistic expressions.

When: 18 November - 03 April 2016

Where: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

“Rising Up: Hale Woodruff’s Murals at Talladega College“ at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, USA.

In 1938 Talladega College in Atlanta commissioned acclaimed artist Hale Woodruff to paint six monumental murals. Installed in the institution’s newly constructed Savery Library, Woodruff’s vibrant murals educated and inspired students through depictions of both heroic efforts to resist slavery (The Mutiny on the Amistad cycle) and noteworthy events in the institution’s history (The Founding of Talladega cycle).

Although he painted the murals for a local audience of students and faculty, Woodruff also intended for their impact to reach beyond Talladega’s campus. The murals swiftly attracted national attention, becoming adopted as a statement of racial pride and recognized as a significant artistic achievement. Today the murals remain symbols of the centuries-long struggle for civil rights.

When: 25 September - 10 January 2016
Where: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

“AfroFuturism – African Science Fiction Shorts” at the

Hackesche Höfe Kino, Berlin, Germany.

Watch the following African science-fiction films: Jonah (Zanzibar), Pumzi (Kenya), Afronauts

(Ghana)

and Al Djazira – The Island (Algeria), followed by a discussion with Peggy Piesche and Jean-Pierre Bekolo. This will be followed by the screening of the Afrofuturistic classic Les Saignantes - The Bloodettes.

(“L'île - Al Djazira”)

For more film screenings visit the AfricaVenir site.

When:

16 December, 20:00 – 22:15

Where: Hackesche Höfe Kino

“Youssef Nabil: I Saved My Belly Dancer” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia,

Cloître Saint-Merri, Paris, France.

I saved My Belly Dancer is a poetic depiction of Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil’s study of belly dancers, and his anxiety over the disappearance of the art form that is unique to the Middle East. The 12-minute video is visually inspired by the 50s golden age cinema of Egypt and touches upon Youssef’s fraught relationship with his home country – both elements that inform a large aspect of his practice.

Memory, exile and rebirth continue to be a recurring theme in Youssef’s work. The video is a self-portrait of his history and relationship with Egypt – and his separation from it – as well as what is left of the past within memory; even if it is no longer a part of our reality. The video also explores shifting perceptions of the position of women in the region, with the amplified sexualisation of their bodies a growing problem in the new social constructs. It is this, and the fear of losing an indigenous art form to time and changing ideologies, that inspired Youssef to work on I Saved My Belly Dancer, the second video in his career.

The photographic work produced from this video is done in Youssef’s characteristic technique of hand colouring black and white photographs – one that finds inspiration in the movie posters and billboards of the Egyptian cinema of the mid twentieth century.

When: 6 November - 6 January 2016
Where: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris

“I am your sister, tête-à-tête“ at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels, Belgium.

A group exhibition of works by Lorna Simpson, Derrick Adams, Latoya Ruby Frazier, Deana Lawson, Carrie Mae Weems, Zanele Muholi, Malick Sidibé and Xaviera Simmons.

(Image: Malick Sidibé)

When: 19 November - 26 December 2015
Where: Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels

“Mickalene Thomas: I am your sister” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels, Belgium.

The first solo exhibition by the American artist Mickalene Thomas in Belgium.  For this show, Mickalene Thomas offers a «double» exhibition at the gallery that explore one of her favourite themes: femininity, in particular that of black women. Alongside a selection of her most recent paintings, photographs, and collages, Thomas has chosen to showcase works by a number of international artists linked together by elective affinities. This «tête-à-tête», in her words, is the new opus in a series begun in 2012.

When: 19 November - 26 December 2015
Where: Galerie Nathalie Obadia

“Nari Ward: Sun Splashed” at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, USA.

Pérez Art Museum Miami will present a mid-career retrospective of Jamaican-born artist Nari Ward, Sun Splashed, which will be the largest survey of the artist’s work to date, offering a close consideration of his diverse production. Sun Splashed will examine Ward’s career through interrelated frameworks that reveal the ongoing investigations, both material and intellectual, that have guided his practice across more than 20 years.

Rather than chronologically, this exhibition will be organized around vital points of reference for the artist, including urban space, performance and the body, the dynamics of power and politics, ideas of migration and movement, vernacular traditions, and Jamaica.

(Image: Miami New Times)

When: 19 November - 21 February 2016
Where: Pérez Art Museum Miami

Addis Video Art Festival, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Addis Video Art Festival intends to provide a platform for innovative video art in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The festival will screen throughout the city in a variety of locations including street corners, rooftops, public centers and art centers.

Addis Ababa is currently in the midst of massive transformation. It is expanding drastically, over a quarter of its current residents relocating to new neighborhoods. Old communities are disappearing and new ones are forming. Paralleling the current state of the city, Addis Video Art Festival presents works that explore and interpret the complex idea of “new home” whether it be an external literal physical home, an internal psychological home or a cyber-home.

By sharing video art in both conventional and non-conventional settings, the festival will reach both the artist community and the everyday passerby. The festival aims to create a dialogue between local, and international artists by encouraging digital media culture.

When: 23 December - 03 Jauary 2016
Where: Addis Ababa

Lindeka Qampi and Zanele Muholi at the MAN Museum, Nuoro, Italy.

The two South African artists will host a photography workshop at the museum. Qampi and Muholi are both known for using their work to create social awareness, using this form of visual activism as an experimental platform for self-representation and self-determination within their communities.

During the workshop various topics will be addressed: from activism as a form of visual archiving a community, to the era of the digital selfie (self-identification). It will also include discussions of activism, community participation, action, social responsibility.

When: 5-7 December 2015
Where: MAN Museum

“Shooting Stars“ at  Erdmann Contemporary,  Cape Town, South Africa.

This group exhibition, consisting of work from photographers Pierre Rommelaere, Vetman van der Naam, Hylton Boucher, Pierre Crocquet, Tim Hopwood and Roger Ballen, explores the inter-relationship between music and photography.

When: 28 November - 30 January 2016
Where: Erdmann Contemporary

“J.D. Okhai Ojeikere: Hairstyles and Headdresses” at the London Print Studio, London, England.

London Print Studio presents a collection of the late Nigerian photographer J.D Okhai Ojeikere’s iconic images of ornate hairstyles and headdresses.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest 20th century African photographers, Ojeikere earned international acclaim through his Hairstyle series; a personal project begun in 1968, which grew to encompass 1,000 photographs spanning 40 years until his death in 2014.

When: 27 November – 9 January 2016
Where: London Print Studio

“David Goldblatt: The Pursuit Of Values” at the Standard Bank Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.

In this retrospective exhibition, The Pursuit of Values includes photographs from prolific South African photographer David Goldblatt’s twin projects, South Africa - The Structure of Things Then and Structures of Dominion and Democracy, as well as a number of images that have not previously been exhibited or published.

(David Goldblatt: A farmer’s son with his nursemaid, Heimweeberg, Nietverdland, 1964.)

When:

21 October - 09 December 2015

Where: Standard Bank Gallery

“African Modernism: Architecture of Independence” at the

Goethe-Institut, Johannesburg, South Africa.

When most countries in Central and Sub-Saharan Africa gained their independence in the late 1950s and 1960s, experimental and futuristic architecture became a principal means by which the young nations expressed their national identities.

At the same time, this architecture also shows the difficulties, contradictions and dilemmas that the countries experienced in their independence process: in most cases, the architects were not local, but came from countries such as Poland, Yugoslavia, the Scandinavian nations, Israel, or even from the former colonial powers.

The exhibition, researched and curated by architect and author Manuel Herz, looks at these questions as it documents more than 80 buildings in Ghana, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and Zambia. It is accompanied by the 700-page publication African Modernism - Architecture of Independence.

(FIDAK - Foire Internationale de Dakar, Dakar (Senegal), by Jean Francois Lamoureux & Jean-Louis Marin, 1974 © Iwan Baan)

When: 24 November - 29 January 2016

Where: Goethe-Institut

The 7th Cairo Video Festival at Medrar, Cairo, Egypt.

The Cairo Video Festival is a platform aimed at fostering a dialog between video-artists, curators and the public, creating a space for artists to showcase their innovative, low-budget video art productions that are selected according to quality, authenticity and conviction in investigation of subject matter.

Over a ten day period of screenings, artists talks, and discussions the Cairo Video Festival caters to the growing public interest in new media production and experimentation further exposing audiences to artists and concepts from around the world.

When: 10 December - 25 December 2015
Where: Medrar

“A LABOUR OF LOVE” at the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt a.M., Germany.

8 years after the first exhibition of this collection was held in Frankfurt,

A LABOUR OF LOVE

re-examines a selection of these works inspired by very different readings of the idea of love – from interpersonal relations to the passion and commitment which influenced both the creation of the works and the history of the collection’s acquisition.

The exhibition focuses on a key part of the Weltkulturen Museum’s contemporary art collection: 600 works from South Africa which the museum acquired in 1986. These works were all produced by black artists, including internationally renowned figures such as Peter Clarke, Lionel Davis, David Koloane and Sam Nhlengethwa.

(’Miners Showering’, Sam Nhlengethwa)

When: 03 Dec 2015 - 24 Jul 2016
Where: Weltkulturen Museum

“Njideka Akunyili Crosby” at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA.

In her Los Angeles debut, Nigerian-American artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby brings her large scale works on paper, which combine collage, drawing, painting, and printmaking, fusing African and American influences and creative traditions, to the California gallery.

Reflecting on contemporary, postcolonial African cosmopolitanism and her experiences as an expatriate living in America, her intimate paintings provide an important counter-narrative to the often troubled representation of Africa’s complex political and social conditions.

(Njideka Akunyili Crosby: “Nwantinti”)

When:  03 October - 10 January 2016
Where: Hammer Museum

“ruby onyinyechi amanze / Salt Water” at the  Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa.

For this exhibition, amanze’s large-scale drawings foreground her concern with metamorphosis and imagination as a lense through which multiple and often, disparate layers of meaning, histories, and forms can be simultaneously read.

According to amanze, her work is “as much about beauty and make-believe, as it is a commentary on cultural hybridity” and it “isn’t social science, it’s magic-realism and the power of drawing to invent worlds for ourselves.” SALT WATER offers a metaphor through which to understand the oddity, absurdity, subtlety and power of elements that naturally co-exist in the world.

When: 19 November – 19 December 2015
Where: Goodman Gallery Johannesburg

”Serge Attukwei Clottey: The Displaced” at the Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, USA.

Ghanaian multi-disciplinary artist Serge Attukwei Clottey, who has, over several years, worked across a variety of mediums including painting, photography, performance, sculpture and installation, roots his art both in matters of deep self-reflection, as it relates to his experiences and immediate environment, as well as in the freedom of expression that experimentation brings.

Centered on the seemingly mundane yet complex relationship that exists between plastic gallons often sighted in his hometown of Labadi, Accra, for his project The Displaced Clottey recycles and recontextualizes the use of these waste hazards into a larger cultural narrative that are symbolic of trade and transportation along the Atlantic Coast.

When: 24 October - 22 November 2015
Where: Zach Feuer Gallery

“Alex Majoli & Paolo Pellegrin: Another Congo” at Art21, Lagos, Nigeria.

Magnum photographers Alex Majoli and Paolo Pellegrin, both Italian, exhibit their photojournalist works taken throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo.

When: 31 October - 30 November 2015
Where: Art21

“Dis place” at  MoCADA, New York, USA.

Dis place, a play on the word ‘Displace’, maps the somatic, psychological and infrastructural violences that have become markers of displacement within the contemporary African Diaspora, from the perspectives of those living in its throes. Displacement, or a state of being rooted in uprooted-ness, is a consequence of colonial conquest in Africa and the Americas that has come to frame dominant perceptions of diasporic identity and nationhood.

The exhibition features a collection of multimedia works by artists Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Kudzanai Chiurai, Mohau Modisakeng, Valerie Piraino, Sable Elyse Smith and Ralph Ziman, who render visible the power relations produced by and through displacement.

(Mohau Modisakeng)

When: 17 October, 2015 - 17 January, 2016
Where: MoCADA

“John Akomfrah” at the Lisson Gallery, London, England.

Presenting work that covers multidisciplinary artist expressions, Ghanaian artist Jogn Akomfrah collages archival film footage, still photography and newsreel with new material, as he investigates personal and collective memories, post-colonialism, temporality and aesthetics in works that frequently explore the experience of the African diaspora in Europe and the US.

For his debut at Lisson, Akomfrah is making two new diptych video installations, shot in Greece and Barbados respectively. These will be shown together with other new and recent works including Tropikos (2016 - see excerpt below), a film that transforms the landscape of the Tamar Valley into a sixteenth-century English port of exploration on the African continent in order to reveal the deep-rooted and darker history of the river.

When: 22 January – 5 March 2016
Where: Lisson Gallery

“John Akomfrah: Vertigo Sea” at  Bildmuseet , Umeå, Sweden.

Vertigo Sea, which had its premiere at the 2015 Venice Biennale, the 56th International Art Exhibition All the World’s Futures, is a three-screen film installation that forms a meditation on man’s relationship with the sea: on the role of the sea for migration, in war and conflict, for the history of slavery and colonization. Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick and Heathcote Williams’ Whale Nation are two literary points of reference.

(image: Flashartonline)

The presentation at Bildmuseet marks the first time Ghanaian visual artist John Akomfrah’s work will be shown in Sweden, before touring other future venues.

Watch an excerpt from the film.

When: 25 October - 17 January, 2015
Where: Bildmuseet

“Awol Erizku: New Flower | Images of the Reclining Venus” at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA.

Hosted at the 10th floor gallery at New York’s FLAG Art Foundation, New Flower | Images of the Reclining Venus is the first presentation of Ethiopian artist Awol Erizku’s series of portraits taken in Addis Ababa in 2013.

The photographs, depicting women who work as sex workers in the Ethiopian capital, were conceptualized by Erizku’s attempt at challenging the mythologized art historical role of the Venus and the odalisque in Western painting, setting these tropes against the reality of one of the largest concentrations of sex workers in Africa.

When: 17 September – 12 December, 2015
Where: The FLAG Art Foundation

“A Constellation” at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA.

A Constellation traces connections among twenty-six artists across various generations, all of African descent: eight who emerged in the mid- to late twentieth century, and eighteen younger artists whose works are being shown at the Studio Museum for the first time. The artists in the exhibition embrace a broad range of conceptual approaches. The works in the Museum’s collection serve as material and conceptual anchors exploring themes of the figure, formal abstraction, economy, African diasporic history and materiality. Newer works expand on these themes and prompt an intergenerational dialogue in visual space.

(Ayan V. Jackson, image via Chika Oduah)

Artists in A Constellation: ruby onyinyechi amanze, Elizabeth Catlett, Torkwase Dyson, Melvin Edwards, Nona Faustine, Aaron Fowler, David Hammons, Ayana V. Jackson, Tony Lewis, Al Loving, Hugo McCloud, Troy Michie, Sondra Perry, Julia Phillips, Adrian Piper, Faith Ringgold, Andy Robert, Andrew Ross, Cameron Rowland, Betye Saar, Tschabalala Self, Talwst, Torey Thornton and Jack Whitten.

When: 12 November 2015 - 06 March 2016
Where: Studio Museum in Harlem

“Selections from Revelations” by Kudzanai Chiurai at  MoCADA, New York, USA.

In Selections from Revelations, Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai chronicles the rise of a fictitious African leader through a satirical lens, and constructs environments that feed the Western imagination about the state of the contemporary African continental politics.

When: 17 October 2015 - 17 January 2016
Where: MoCADA

“Kongo: Power and Majesty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.

Aimed at radically redefining our understanding of Africa’s relationship with the West, Kongo: Power and Majesty is a presentation of that will features 146 works drawn from more than 50 institutional and private collections across Europe and the United States, “reflecting five hundred years of encounters and shifting relations between European and Kongo leaders.”

The exhibition claims to “focus on one of the continent’s most influential artistic traditions, from the earliest moment of direct engagement between African and European leaders at the end of the 15th century through the early 20th century.”

When: 18 September 2015 – 03 January 2016
Where: Metropolitan Museum of Art

“Moffat Takadiwa: Foreign Objects” at the Tyburn Gallery,  London, UK.

The first solo exhibition by the Zimbabwean artist in the UK, Foreign Objects includes a range of installations made of discarded and recycled goods, and that  engages with issues of material culture, identity and spirituality as well as social practice and the environment.

The wall-hung sculptures in the exhibition are symbols of the cultural dominance exercised by the consumption of foreign products in Zimbabwe and across the African continent. Due to the country’s ongoing economic stability, from the change in currency to the obsoletion of much of the local economy, imported goods have become symbolic of the shifting power struggles within Zimbabwe, resulting in the uneven distribution of economic and cultural power across the country.

Greatly influenced by the Argentine semiotician Dr. Walter Mignolo’s scholarship on ‘coloniality’ and modernity, Takadiwa’s work is an explicit challenge to contemporary governments whose pledges on indigenous empowerment are failing to come to fruition.

When: 5 November 2015 – 9 January 2016
Where: Tyburn Gallery

“In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa” at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, New York, USA.

Spanning 100 years of portrait photography in West Africa through nearly 80 photographs taken between the 1870s and the 1970s, In and Out of the Studio: Photographic Portraits from West Africa, the exhibition seeks to expand our understanding of West African portrait photographs, by rendering the broad variety of these practices and aesthetics. It juxtaposes photographs, postcards, real photo postcards, and original negatives taken both inside and outside the studio by amateur and professional photographers active from Senegal to Cameroon, and from Mali to Gabon.

These works, many of which are being shown for the first time, are drawn from the Metropolitan Museum’s Visual Resource Archives in the Department of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, with additions from the Department of Photographs. Among them are renowned artists, such as Seydou Keïta, J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere, and Samuel Fosso, and lesser-known practitioners who worked at the beginning of the century, including George A. G. Lutterodt, the Lisk-Carew Brothers, and Alex A. Acolatse.

(image: Alex A. Acolatse)

These photographers explored the possibilities of their medium, developing a rich aesthetic vocabulary through revealing self-portraits, staged images against painted backdrops or open landscapes, and casual snapshots of leisurely times. Regardless of their unique place in the history of photography in West Africa—from the formality of the earlier studio poses to the theatricality of Fosso’s fantasies—the sitter’s self-assured and unabashed presence fully engages the viewer.

When: 31 August - 03 January 2016
Where: Metropolitan Museum Of Art

“Zanele Muholi: Somnyama Ngonyama” at the Stevenson, Johannesburg, South Africa.

In contrast to her previous bodies of work that featured portraits of LGBTQI South Africans, for which she has become well known for, Zanele Muholi’s new exhibition of photographs sees the artist turning the camera on herself.

Taken in different locations whilst travelling in South Africa, America and Europe, Muholi describes this process as one of self-discovery. Through this series, we see and experience the many ways she imagines herself, experimenting with different characters. Muholi portrays herself in a highly stylised and performative language that references the history of black and white fashion photography.

When: 19 November - 19 December 2015, 4 January - 29 January 2016
Where: Stevenson Johannesburg

“Zanele Muholi: Vukani/Rise” at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, England.

Four of Muholi’s projects will be presented across Open Eye Gallery’s three exhibition spaces, accompanied by audio/video interviews and statements from those featured in Muholi’s work.The exhibition is the first major presentation of Muhli’s work in the UK.

Faces and Phases (2006–15) is an ongoing series of work, a collection of powerful portraits that not only highlight the importance of representation and stories of LGBTQI individuals in South Africa, but that Muholi embarks on a journey of “visual activism” to ensure black queer and transgender visibility.

(Photo: © Anders Sune Berg)

ZaVa (2013) focuses on Muholi’s relationship with her white partner, and brings the notion of making the private public to the fore.

Brave Beauties (2013-2014) is a series of 12 black and white photographs celebrating looking at the body – and the experience of being seen.  Stylish, coy, subtle and proud, the gay and transgender men present a personal vision of themselves to the compassionate lens of Zanele’s camera.

(Eva, Somizy and Kat. photo shoot took place in Parktown, Johannesuburg on the 12th April 2014. Photo: Zanele Muholi)

Mo(u)rning (2014) evokes death but also suggests the cycle of life as morning follows night. Life and death, love and hate are themes that run throughout her work. Tragic loss is addressed in this series, the persecution of a community and the coming together to remember those who have passed.

When: 18 September - 29 November 2015
Where: Open Eye Gallery

“Kara Walker: Norma” at the Victoria Miro Mayfair,  London, England.

For her exhibition at Victoria Miro Mayfair, Walker is showing a selection of preparatory drawings, sketches and models related to the production of Vincenzo Bellini’s two-act operaNorma she directed and art directed for Teatro La Fenice.

Her production moved the action from Roman Gaul to an unnamed west or central African colony under European subjugation in the late 19th century. The drawings and other studies show the artist’s detailed working process. The selection includes a number of works in pastel and watercolour, and demonstrates Walker’s facility with colour and line.

When: 13 November 2015 - 16 January 2016
Where: Victoria Miro Mayfair

”Samuel Nja Kwa: Route du Jazz” at the Onomo Hotel in Bamako, Mali, and the Durban Art Gallery, South Africa.

In celebration of his book of the same name, Paris-born Cameroonian photographer’s ‘Route du Jazz’ exhibition is currently on show at the Onomo Hotel in Bamako, Mali, and will be exhibited at the Durban Art Gallery in Durban, South Africa.

Featuring images, interviews and historical pieces, Kwa traces the history of jazz music to its African roots to its spread and evolution throughout the African diaspora.

Dates: 21 May 2015 - 06 January 2016
Where: Onomo Hotel

“50/50” at The New Church Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa.

50/50 is a collation and juxtaposition of historical and contemporary works, all viewed through a responsive, documentary lens. As these repetitions and recognitions accumulate over time they come to bear on signifiers such as monuments, monumentality and iconoclasm, secrets and lies, the rise and fall of ideas, culture, cultivation, movement and mobility.

(Kemang Wa Lehulere)

Artists on show: Avant Car Guard, Willem Boshoff, Kudzanai Chiurai, David Goldblatt, Dumile Feni, Randolph Hartzenberg, Samson Kambalu, Kemang Wa Lehulere, David Mogano, Robin Rhode, Cecil Skotnes, Sue Williamson

When: 5 November 2015 – 23 April 2016
Where: The New Church Museum

“Margaret Bowland: Power” at the Drisoll Babcock Galleries, New York, USA.

The exhibition features 8 new paintings, which marry canonical imagery with contemporary references to blur fact and fiction, challenge cultural hierarchies, and offer alternate narratives. It also includes Bowland’s first major installation: a transformational bramble of US dollar bills folded into origami roses that twist throughout the gallery on barbed-wire stems, underscoring the dangerous allure of wealth and power.

Bowland’s paintings construct an anachronistic world dense with symbolic imagery. She employs a variety of sources, from the artistic production of the early modern Deccan plateau of India, to post-Renaissance European paintings, to today’s fashion magazine spreads. In this maelstrom of references, Bowland’s subjects bear the weight of complex power struggles, reckoning with enduring issues of race, gender and agency.

When: 29 October – 12 December 2015
Where: Driscoll Babcock Galleries

“Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination” at the  Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, USA.

Composed of artifacts from the Schomburg collections that are connected to Afrofuturism, black speculative imagination and Diasporan cultural production, Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination is a sci-fi and fantasy lover’s dream that aims to offer a fresh perspective on the power of speculative imagination and the struggle for various freedoms of expression in popular culture.

The exhibition showcases a range of multimedia, from illustrations, film posters, fiction, comics, literature, memorabilia and other graphics that highlight those popularly found in science fiction, magical realism and fantasy.

(Vigilism X Ikire Jones)

When: 1 October - 31 December 2015
Where: Schomburg Center

“Esther Mahlangu 80” at the Irma Stern Museum, Cape Town, South Africa.

In celebration of internationally renowned Ndebele artist Esther Mahlangu’s 80th birthday on 11 November 2015, the artist will lauch a solo exhibition, Esther Mahlangu 80, at the UCT Irma Stern Museum in Cape Town, South Africa. The exhibition will comprise of recent paintings and three-dimensional works.

When:  11 November – 2 December 2015
Where: Irma Stern Museum

”David Adjaye Selects” at Cooper Hewitt, New York, USA.

Ghanaian architect David Adjaye presents a series of curated textiles from West and Central Africa, all textiles from the museum’s permanent collection, in the latest installment of the Selects series.

The exhibition is the 12th in the ongoing series, in which prominent designers, artists and architects are invited to mine and interpret the museum’s collection.

Dates: 19 June – 14 February 2016
Where: Cooper Hewitt

“Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?” at Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston, Texas, USA.

Centered on the relationship between the people of the Niger-Delta and their surrounding environment, largely tarnished by neglect from the Nigerian government and pollution from oil companies, Nigerian-British filmmaker and artist Zina Saro-Wiwa’s first solo exhibition at the Blaffer Art Musuem includes a series of video installations, photographs, and a sound installation produced in the Niger Delta region of southeastern Nigeria from 2013 to 2015.

The series cultivates strategies of psychic survival and performance, underscoring the complex and expressive ways in which people live in an area historically fraught with the politics of energy, labor and land. The exhibition uses folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food and Nigerian popular aesthetics to test art’s capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism.

Dates: 26 September – 19 December 2015
Where: Blaffer Art Museum.

“Syd Shelton: Rock Against Racism” at Rivington Place, London, England.

Between 1976 and 1981, the movement Rock Against Racism (RAR) confronted the growing racist ideologies in streets, parks and town halls all over Britain.

(image: Syd Shelton)

Formed by a collective of concerned and affected musicians and political activists to fight fascism and racism through music, we revisit this pivotal time and radical period in post war British history and 20th century race relations through the first major exhibition of Syd Shelton’s photographs.

Dates: 2 October – 5 December 2015
Where: Rivington Place.

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