Adel Abdessemed * Algeria / France
Using diverse media, Adel Abdessemed exposes and subverts the social codes that inform identity in a trans-national, multicultural world. In particular he explores the notion of limits and boundaries - be they cultural, religious, political, geographic or psychical. His consistently challenging work ranges from installations, such as Bourak, which saw him covering the shell of a light plane with traditional Algerian pastry, to animations like God is Design which challenges religious and social hierarchies by morphing religious symbols, Islamic designs and scientific images.
A painter, printmaker and installation artist, Muhsana Ali addresses social issues in an attempt to find positive solutions. Focussing on the transatlantic slave route, her installation Doors and Passageways of Return highlights issues relating to history, alienation and dislocation. The installation was produced in collaboration with street children in Abidjan, Ivory Coast and was initially presented in the abandoned building they lived in. She has subsequently founded Doors and Passageways, a non-profit organization developing a holistic art centre in Senegal.A photographer and video-artist, Sammy Baloji investigates the undocumented histories that have been suppressed by the unstable political situation in the DRC. In a country where photography is viewed with suspicion by the authorities and it is illegal to photograph state buildings, his images of ruined urban architecture are especially provocative. In Baloji's hands, the camera becomes a transgressive tool and the act of taking pictures becomes a daring performance at the edge of danger.
Ty Bello is a member of a collective of Nigerian photographers called Depth of Field (D.O.F.) who aim to create a complex portrait of the city of Lagos and its multitude of dimensions. In particular she focuses on portrait photography, often highlighting the conflicting situations of woman in the Nigerian capital. Her work is however never simply documentary photography - rather it is informed by her passionate belief that the act of photography is itself an experience shared by both her subjects and herself.
Dineo Seshee Bopape * South Africa
She might only be 26 years old, but Dineo Bopape has already received extensive acclaim both locally and internationally for her intriguing mixed and multimedia works. She is a compulsive collector of things, both public and private - from objects containing stories to events, moments, feelings, secrets and bodily secretions. Using these objects and instances as a basis she creates mysterious paintings, installations, video, sound and performances that disrupt the everyday with an intimacy that’s both suffocating and seductive.
Willem Boshoff’s radical multimedia work explores language, communication and knowledge, in particular the ‘scientific’ practices of classification. Applying an almost obsessive attention to detail, he calls into question the supposedly rational basis of ‘knowledge’. "I am an artist who makes dictionaries" he once proclaimed. And while words and vocabularies are part of his production, his dictionaries are not conventional books. They are complex sculptural objects that indicate a search for order and clarity in a world in which words have lost their true meaning and power.
Zoulikha Bouabdellah * Algeria/ France
Drawing on her personal experience as an artist living at the geo-political crucible of North Africa and Europe, Zoulikha Bouabdellah creates subtly playful yet provocative videos and installations. These works expose cultural stereotypes and question preconceived ideas about Islamic and Arab society. Despite their transgressive subject matter, they are often filled with delight, surprise and a gentle humour that reinvigorates the serious heavy themes of gender, identity, culture, nationality and religion.
Wim Botha makes technically ingenious sculptural installations that are marked by an adventurous approach to materials. Maize meal replaces stone as a sculptural material and bibles and official documents are transformed into figurative forms. Through these works, he reflects on and subverts the symbolic imagery of power and religion. At the same time he deconstructs the boundaries between high and popular culture by incorporating everyday objects, reconstructions of artworks, artificial light and surveillance cameras into his installations.
Moving freely between diverse material, media and processes Kevin Brand produces paintings and sculptures that range from large-scale public works to miniatures. An alchemist of styles, he fuses neo-minimalist simplicity with Pop art idioms to create meticulous detailed works that display an uncanny mastery of form, material and finish. For Brand, his selection of materials serves primarily to promote his themes and content, which range from socio-political concerns in his early work, to more recent exploration of personal and everyday issues.
After sixty years of professional practice, artist and poet Peter Clarke's extensive body of work forms a lengthy poetic narrative of local realities. Working across a broad spectrum of media, he creates figurative paintings, drawings and prints that reveal the poetic dimensions underlying social realities. His Fanfare project is an ongoing exercise of exchange, reflection and creation. It comprises a series of colourful collages accompanied by sometimes playful, sometimes evocative prose and inspired by friends, as well as historical, biblical and literary figures.
Godfried Donkor is best known as a printmaker, although he also paints and works in collage and video. His work explores the history of slavery, exposing the commodification of the black body, first in the slave trade, then in the contemporary Western media. Mixing conflicting cultural imagery - from heavyweight boxing to the stock exchange - he scrutinises themes of capitalism, globalisation and liberation. At the same time he uses these incongruous elements to emphasize hybridity and creolisation as new emerging positive creative forces.
Marlene Dumas * South Africa / Netherlands
The work of veteran South African artist Marlene Dumas combines dynamic painterly qualities with acute emotional sensitivity and a profound political courage. She is best known for her monochromatic paintings on paper that contrast a soft, seductive wash technique with hard hitting subject matter, ranging from race and religion to sexuality and politics. Her indirect engagement of these taboos invokes questions of ethics and insists we recognize the subtle links between intimacy and discomfort, beauty and horror.
Meshac Gaba * Benin/ Netherlands
Meshac Gaba’s work explores economic, aesthetic and cultural situations in a post-colonial world, and in particular the tension between economic power and colonisation. His earlier explorations dealt with economic power directly by incorporating hard currency, including notes and coins into two-dimensional works. More recently his work has become increasingly inventive, interactive and installation-based. Using museum spaces or unusual locations he engages viewers in a witty multi-layered exchange of ideas that highlights economic power relations between Africa and the West.
David Goldblatt * South Africa
For over half a century David Goldblatt has been photographing South Africa, initially in black and white, and later in colour and on a larger scale. Over the years he has produced an extensive archive of twentieth century South Africa that shows the country in all its beauty, its horrors, its honest simplicity and complex cultural and political history. This dense, complex layering of images invites viewers to find their own narratives and values for a country in transition.
George Hallett first rose to prominence for his uplifting photographs of oppressed communities. Since his return from exile in 1995, he has however found new themes for his photography. His recent investigations include portraits of leading cultural and political figures, as well as life-size portraits of young dancers. Working in traditional black and white photography he has found a language that allows him to celebrate humanity's triumph over adversity, capturing the pulse of an altered cultural awareness sweeping through the youth of South Africa.
Anawana Haloba * Zambia/ Norway
Anawana Haloba makes sound, film and video installations that use overlapping layers of narrative to explore both personal and collective memories, as they relate to Africa’s fractured history. Working with introspective sources that she calls “noises of her mind” or "mind discussions", she explores how subjective experiences are translated into external realities. Her body becomes an important medium to mediate this exchange and she uses it to create a new language that becomes interactive and direct.
Susan Hefuna's work draws on her dual cultural heritage and her experience as a woman. She explores the terrain between binaries: the exotic and the mundane; interior and exterior views; the technological and the handmade. In her drawings, pinhole photographs, sculpture, video and installations she makes frequent use of the Mashrabiya (wooden latticework) that is part of Islamic architecture. She has commented that she sees similarities between the shapes of the Mashrabiya and molecular structures that “illuminate us about the bigger structure of life”.
Nicolas Hlobo's consistently provocative installations and performances reflect on his masculine, homosexual and Xhosa identity. Combing a wide range of materials, including rubber, ribbon, silicon and found objects, he questions perceptions of his sexual identity and challenges dominant notions that homosexuality is not African. At the same time he highlights the multifaceted aspects of his cultural background, using provocative titles to convey multiple meanings that open up new possibilities for the future.
William Kentridge * South Africa
William Kentridge rose to prominence in the mid 1980s with his distinctive monochromatic drawings that navigated a personal route through the fraught landscape of apartheid and colonialism. Over the past two decades he has increased the layered meanings of these drawing, incorporating them into dynamic animated works that blend sound, image and motion. Sometimes lyrical, sometimes darkly humorous, sometimes brutally frank, these works present complex characters that weave emotion, history and memory into provocative narratives of the past and present.
Born in Togo and living in the heart of Europe, artist El Loko uses a range of media to explore his daily encounter of cultural difference. His diverse work ranges from linocuts and paintings to performance works. Recently he has been creating multidimensional large-scale installations that incorporate drawing, painting, sculpture and photography, as well as found objects. Sometimes playful, often provocative these works delve into the conflicting themes of inclusion and exclusion, identity and alienation, modernity and tradition.
Mustafa Maluka often incorporates material taken from a range of cultural sources, from advertising to hip-hop culture and Pop art, translating these into visually seductive stylised portraits. These resulting images are at once provocative, raising a clenched fist at the commidification of culture and empathetic, engaging contested issues notion of race, identity and culture. Whilst drawing on historical references, including the Black Power movement, Maluka’s focus is firmly on the contemporary. In particular he uses the internet to redefine notions of place and community.
Best known as a video installation artist, Thando Mama’s work examines the role of television in society and raises questions about how popular culture impacts on our perceptions of life. Mama is inspired by the potential television and moving images have in transforming society. He uses video to investigate his black masculine identity, interrogating the mass media’s portrayal of black identity and emphasizing the role media can play in reflecting positive imagery of Africa.
Senzeni Marasela * South Africa
Senzeni Marasela combines conceptual and handicraft approaches to explore collective and personal memory and investigate the relationship between a new generation of young South Africans and their county’s apartheid past. Drawing on both apartheid’s visual archive as well as her own memory, she creates deeply personal mixed-media and video works that re-interpret history and retell forgotten stories to find new ways to move forward.
Santu Mofokeng is driven by the desire to record aspects of culture that are overlooked. Having begun as a documentary photographer, photographing apartheid’s oppressed communities, he is currently concerned with capturing some more essential aspect of his subjects. This makes his photography an exercise in “chasing shadows”. In his Chasing Shadows project he challenges the divisions between traditional healing and medical health in HIV/ Aids treatment. The shadows here are complex patterns of belief that transcend the simple divisions between spirituality versus science, magic versus medicine.
Titus Moteyane initially developed his reputation for ingenuity and resourcefulness in the mid 1980s when he began producing fairly large models of aeroplanes out of recycled metal, including a version of the ill-fated spaceship Challenger. Today, Moteyane is best known for his detailed, often large-scale, watercolour aerial landscapes of various localities, including sweeping panoramic views of cities such as Amsterdam, Pretoria, and New York, and a 47 meter panorama entitled “Transvaal: Messina to Sasolburg”.
As an artist and as an activist Zanele Muholi focuses on Gay/ Lesbian/ Bi-sexual/ Transgender/ Intersex (GLBTI) communities, highlighting hate crimes, discrimination, desires and pleasures as lived experiences of these sub groups. Infused with a simple but forthright frankness her photography offers a compelling portrait of lives that many South Africans would rather pretend do not exist. It is often confrontational, sometimes intimate, always compelling.
Patrick Mukabi is primarily a painter but he has recently been experimenting with installation, sound and the moving image. His video works pose a provocative challenge to prescribed representation of Africa. Often combining references to mass media and urban culture with more personal narratives, these works challenge our attempts at framing them with certainty, acting to destabilise static and stereotyped colonial and neo-colonial readings of art from the continent.
Sculptor Bret Murray’s art is characterised by a razor-sharp political sensibility and wit. His work has tackled everything from apartheid rule, to whiteness and globalization, frequent using sources from popular culture. While it often packs the punch of one-line jokes, even soliciting laughter, his themes lingering long after the initial impact, posing more difficult questions. Like the best satirists, Murray’s work is more serious than most.
Primarily a sculptor, Mambakwedza Mutasa also paints, photographs and creates performance art. His work explores the opposing forces that define human life: spiritual and physical, natural and supernatural. In his often monumental sculptures, the physicality of materials such as scrap metal, stone and wood enliven his spiritual themes with a rich, vibrant tactility. At the same time, his spiritual beliefs introduce a sacred dimension into the act of creation with his resourcefulness and imagination becoming instruments of his faith.
Ingrid Mwangi * Kenya / Germany
Ingrid Mwangi uses video, performance and installations to explore confrontations with difference experienced between her two homes, Kenya and Germany. Using the body as the site of her investigation, she mixes known references into controversial contexts to engage the viewer in the conflicting emotional states of desire and aversion, fear and fascination. In the work Conscious of the Wall she extends this exploration in a provocative collaboration with Kenyan multimedia artist Jimmy Ogonga.
Senam Okudzeto * US/ Ghana/ UK
Senam Okudzeto is a transnational artist. Born in Chicago, brought up in Lagos, Accra, London and New York, she draws on personal experiences to create painting, installation and video works that question the relationship between identity, nationality and globalization. Her work Capitalism and Schizophrenia, presents fragments of an abandoned archive - the books and contracts of a Swiss conman on the run, exploring the concept of money as a "phantom object" and the absence of social and moral value in conjunction with generating exchange value.
Johannes Phokela * South Africa / UK
Johannes Phokela’s legacy could be that of a jester in the court of European art. His tongue-in-cheek re-invention of the sacred icons of European art, from Hogarth to Rembrandt, wave two comic fingers at those critics who claim not to see any authenticity nor anything of value in contemporary African works. A truly postmodern painter, his art engages with simulation, identity, translation, inclusion and exclusion, while poking fun at overblown Western European notions of their own inventiveness.
Hany Rashed produces monochromatic paintings and three dimensional painted assemblages depicting scenes from everyday lives as well as fantastic scenes from an imaginary city. His postage stamp sized paintings and large installations made up of numerous tiny 3D figures spread out on floors and walls, play with notions of scale to raise questions about power in contemporary society. At the same time his work explores urbanisation, and the role that the media, specifically TV have on contemporary society.
Few young artists have had such a rapid ascent into the international arena as Robin Rhode. His art combines an unrelenting energy and quirky humour with an acute awareness of popular culture that offers fresh approaches to complicated issues. His street-savvy works incorporate diverse elements of performance, drawing/painting, street art and graffiti, as well as video and photography. At once delightfully comic and deadly serious, they undermine expectations of the ordinary, adding layers of levity and social conscience to everyday activities.
Dinkies Sithole * South Africa
Dinkie Sithole is a multitalented painter, sculptor, performance artist, percussionist and tap dancer. His performance works are inspired by his environment, often incorporating found materials as props and makeshift percussive instruments. His painting show a similar rich layering of materials, media and influences, drawing on everything from ancient Eastern mysticism to the urban environment in order to find new ways to express African identity.
The unfolding canvas of South Africa’s history has formed the backdrop to acclaimed artist Penny Siopis’ 30 year career. While she has worked in various mediums, including video and installation, painting remains the medium that she uses to explore her interest in subjectivity, shame and moral panic. Personal childhood memories, dreams and scary tales from local folklore all animate her recent paintings. In these works, "Pinky Pinky" is a returning unstable character, the subject of different kinds of projection and embodiment, especially in times of radical transition.
Working with film, video and lens-based media, Berni Searle's work opens up dialogues across cultural boundaries, acting as a catalyst for discourses around personal and collective histories and memories. While her work is always deeply personal, her more recent videos extend her earlier overt explorations into body politics to evoke more metaphorical and poetic meanings. In About to forget, Searle manipulates photographs from her own fractured past to highlight the fleeting relationship between memory and forgetting, return and loss, past history and current reality.
Nontsikelelo 'Lolo' Veleko * South Africa
Lolo Veleko’s vivid, defiant and highly individualized photography explores both personal and collective identities within a South African post-apartheid context. Referencing popular magazine and glamour photography, she investigates issues of race, beauty and belonging, often recreating herself by performing multiple identities based on others assumptions. These become playful, witty explorations into complex personal states and ideas of self-representation.
Primarily a self-taught painter and sculptor, Emile Youmbi is inspired by the relationship between Cameroonian traditions and contemporary reality. In his current work he explores past memories and future prospects within the accelerated, compressed and densely populated 21st Century urban environment. Shape, texture and colour combine in overtly abstract paintings that draw form a variety of sources, including ancient symbols and urban signs to suggest movements and shifts in the African landscape.
Billie Zangewa’s work is strongly linked to her passion for fashion. She uses embroidery and collage on fabric, usually silk, to create intimate and personal stories that are set in an urban backdrop. Her art engages with the written word as much as it does with visuals and many of her works read like journal pages reflecting urban tensions through personal relationships.
Dominque Zinkpe; * Benin / France
Dominique Zinkpe works in a variety of media including video, photography and performance, but is most famous for his sculptural installations that incorporate recycled and found objects to explore the tension between the local to the global. Political instability, forced migration, religion and HIV/AIDS are reoccurring themes in his work. In his Taxi-Zinkpe project, for example, painted taxis overloaded with luggage were used to explore transience, accumulation and proximity, while at the same time bringing art closer to the man in the street.
Ina van Zyl * South Africa / Netherlands
Ina van Zyl makes tightly cropped, provocative paintings that explore the tension between a highly mediated image and the visceral immediacy of a seductively painted surface. While her subject matter is often sexual charged and provocatively intimate, van Zyl isn’t out to surprise or shock. Rather she aims to provoke intensive, imaginative looking that contrasts our rapid consumption of visual imagery in our hyper-fast media-saturated digital world.