Abstract This article examines Where Lies My Carpet Is Thy Home, Christopher Joshua Benton's monumental astroturf installation created for Public Matter, the inaugural Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial (2024–25). Sited in the historic Carpet Souq of Mina Zayed—a marketplace sustained by the long-standing work, craftsmanship, and transnational histories of Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, and Iranian merchants—the installation transforms an everyday commercial corridor into a site of collective storytelling. Developed through an embedded, relational process, the work draws on merchants’ memories of home, present realities, and future aspirations, weaving them into a vivid, collaboratively authored textile. Benton's approach extends his ongoing engagement with power, race, and labor into a methodology aligned with Gayatri Spivak's notion of “critical intimacy,” foregrounding listening, shared authorship, and ethical proximity. The article situates the work within Abu Dhabi's sociohistorical context and the biennial's redefinition of public art as civic and dialogic. It traces Benton's collaborative process—majlis sessions, multilingual exchanges, and iterative drawing—and analyzes how these practices resist extractive modes of representation. Through merchants’ narratives, the carpet becomes a living archive of the souq and a counterpoint to what Achille Mbembe identifies as “necropolitical” structures of visibility. The installation ultimately proposes a model of public art grounded in care, reciprocity, and community stewardship.
Abstract This article examines Ousmane Sembène's cinema, tracing the evolution of its thematic interweaving of animism, objectification, and commodity fetishism through the colonial and postcolonial ontologies of Senegal. It argues that his films construct a distinctive metaphysics in which bodies and objects continually exchange vitality. Drawing on Wolof folk traditions of totems and ancestral spirits, the article first situates animism as a relational ethic: an ontological “vibrating” with the natural world, as articulated by thinkers such as Gogo Khanyakude and Édouard Glissant. Sembène's films, however, depict a modern distortion of this ethic; under the pressures of neocolonial capitalism, objects such as wagons, medallions, money orders, and masks become newly ensouled, not through the reciprocal spiritual kinship of “anima,” such as spirits and living souls, but through the extraction and displacement of human vitality into something inanimate. Through close readings of Borom Sarret, Mandabi, Xala, and La Noire de . . . , the article traces how Sembène materializes Marx's theories of commodification and alienation while advancing an epistemologically African critique of the spiritual corruption of capital. In these narratives, laboring subjects lose not only agency but metaphysical coherence—morphing from bodies into objects—while commodities accumulate quasispiritual power and corporeality. This dialectic reaches its most potent expression in the chiasmic exchange between Diouana and the mask in La Noire de . . . , in which the protagonist's dehumanization culminates in the mask's uncanny animation. Situated alongside Fanon's phenomenology of objecthood and Glissant's poetics of relational trembling, the article argues that Sembène articulates a postcolonial aesthetics of soul displacement: a cinematic philosophy where modernity reconfigures the sacred, capital becomes totem, and humanity's ancestral relation to the world is violently rerouted through the machinery of neocolonial power.
Abstract The Senegalese poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor and the Martinican psychiatrist-philosopher Frantz Fanon both had a keen interest in North Africa and competing visions of the relationship between “Arab and Negro.” Morocco would play a significant part in their intellectual formation and political trajectories. Starting in the mid-1970s, Senghor would play a growing role in Moroccan political culture, advancing a discourse on the symbiosis of Arabité, Berberité, and Négritude. When historians of Berber/Amazigh culture discuss Senghor's impact on Morocco, the focus tends to be on Senghor's friendship with Berber politicians and, more broadly, on Négritude's influence on the Amazigh cultural movement. For two decades, however, the Senegalese poet-president presided over the annual Afro-Arab Forum in the coastal town of Asilah. In Asilah, a different understanding of Arab Négritude would take shape, with the Moroccan-Senegalese alliance conceived as the foundation of a broader Afro-Arab relationship. The late Moroccan diplomat Mohammed Benaissa, who launched the Afro-Arab Forum in 1980, would envision Asilah—“this little Afro-Arab town,” this “fragment of the Third World”— as a place to cultivate the kind of cultural cross-breeding that Senghor had long called for: le co-naitre—co-birth. This article argues that the prevailing discourse of Afro-convivencia, which locates Morocco as rooted in the Sahel but extending to Iberia, portraying the kingdom as a mirror and extension of both Spain and Senegal, found its modern expression in Asilah as a result of dialogue between Arabophone, Hispanophone, and African intellectuals.
Abstract This article examines how contemporary curatorial practices reimagine Nigerian modernism and postcolonial nationalism through the worldmaking/building that is enabled through exhibitions. Taking Tate Modern's 2025 show Nigerian Modernism: Art and Independence as a point of departure, the article explores what it means to be presented with Nigerian modernism sixty-five years since the country's independence from Great Britain in a Western exhibitionary context, and then also, almost simultaneously, at home, in Nigeria. Drawing on philosophical and theoretical frameworks articulated by Hal Froster, Olu Oguibe, and Uche Okeke, with the benefit of Chika Okeke-Agulu's foundational work on Nigerian postcolonial modernism, the article highlights exhibitions as sites for reunification and witness bearing. Ultimately, the article argues that recent curatorial projects engaging with Nigerian modernism, whether belated or not, do more than restore the country's inaugural artistic movements into a global narrative of modernism and art history; the existence of these exhibitions, their responses, and surrounding organization affirms the sustained relevance of Nigerian modernism and the structures it produced as a consistent point of reference for artistic legitimation. Even more, these exhibitions approach the archive as a site of infinite renewal. In the end, engaging with Nigerian modernism is about grappling with the disjuncture between the present and the past; it is about trying to reconcile with fracture and with tragedy, with the fact that the utopia promised at the point of independence is yet to come to fruition.
Abstract This article explores how Ivorian artist Ouattara Watts (b. 1957) employs African cosmology and philosophy to develop a universal visual language. It traces his artistic evolution from formal training in Paris through his move to New York, beginning with early figurative works inspired by Dogon and Mande traditions. The study centers on his significant shift to symbolic abstraction in the 1990s, when he started transforming the picture plane into a sculptural surface by adding found objects, soil, and textile fragments as symbolic elements. Through close formal analysis and attention to the artist's explanations of his methodology, I argue that Watts's work presents a radical reimagining of abstraction as a syncretic practice capable of holding multiple epistemologies in productive tension. It proposes that rigorous analysis and mystical speculation are not opposing modes but complementary languages for expressing shared truths about our place in the universe. Additionally, the article reveals how Watts uses complex systems of code and metaphor—a deliberate veiling strategy—to embed political allegories within cosmic themes. Ultimately, it suggests that Watts's commitment to African epistemology generates a global dialogue that transcends geographical boundaries and connects to the “deep time” of human existence, demonstrating how deeply local knowledge can serve as the basis for a universal vision.
Abstract More Than Meets the Eye, an exhibition of contemporary African art at Geneva's Musée Rath, exemplifies the paradoxes inherent in decolonial exhibition making within Western institutions. This article examines how the exhibition negotiates the tension between aesthetic refinement, institutional authority, and historical accountability. Through its scenography, including softly lit alcoves, bespoke display panels, and carefully controlled sight lines, the show constructs an atmosphere of reverence and beauty, translating political and historical charge into visual harmony. Artists assert presence and agency within this carefully orchestrated environment. Yet, despite the power of these works, the exhibition simultaneously enacts containment, mediating visibility through corporate sponsorship and the aesthetics of neutrality. The curatorial framework highlights universal themes: spirituality, intimacy, everyday life, rendering African modernities legible to Western audiences but risking the depoliticization of trauma. By foregrounding the interplay between artistic autonomy, corporate mediation, and institutional display, the article interrogates the limits of decolonial practice in the museum context. It argues that the exhibition illuminates rather than resolves the contradictions of contemporary representation: liberation exists alongside structural complicity, visibility is inseparable from containment, and the glow of aesthetic care can both reveal and obscure historical realities.
Abstract Through an affectionate examination of pigment and clay, an evocative layering of colorful realms on paper, and the threading and disentangling of nature's fibers, Otobong Nkanga has constituted a multivalent artistic practice that interrogates human complicity with the Earth and its impact on scarcity of its resources. In this survey article, the author navigates the contours of the Nigerian-born, Antwerp-based artist's thirty-year career, arguing that her aesthetic politics is rooted in an interest in and exploration of languages. In this fantastical realm, the act of voicing routes the reader through a narrative where postcoloniality's scar tissue is revisioned as a form of female worlding. Informal tongues, dialects, and speech acts materialize through Nkanga's performances, her authored clay poems, and the all-encompassing installations, fashioning new portals for the diasporic imagination. Collectively, hers is an art that proffers an ontological view for nature's interstitial life forms. Here, stratification is explored as a point of interrogation. Wayward creatures are afforded a stage, if not to breathe among humans, then at least to reveal themselves for a mere moment.
Chemu Ng’ok is a Kenyan painter based in Nairobi who investigates personal, psychological, political, and spiritual relationships through her art. Ng’ok’s work navigates the tensions and shifts in belief systems of East African societies, weaving reality and imagination to create intricate multilayered narratives. These include the act of negotiating power for the self within the institution, bearing witness to ceremonies, the search for justice, and navigating loss through the body within the recurring motif of transition. Her works are in constant flux, as their meaning changes over time and the ambiguity of the work allows for different interpretations. This article takes its title from the artist’s latest solo exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich, Switzerland. The exhibition that forms the core of this article presents a series of drawings and paintings executed in Kenya between Nairobi and Lamu. The critique delves into the artistic approach, influences, and intricate themes explored by the artist.
Ozioma Onuzulike's Who Knows Tomorrow is the artist's second solo presentation the United States. As a professor of ceramics and African art history and director of the Institute of African Studies at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Onuzulike's practice is intimately linked with Nigerian art histories and ongoing pedagogies of craft production, interpretation, and social use. The exhibition features eleven clay, palm kernel, and copper tapestries that merge ceramics, beadwork, and textiles, presenting multivalent modes of craft. The collection attests to a profound evolution from Onuzulike's practice of thrown and hand-built vessels to this current reflection on textilelike forms. Though modest in size, the gallery exhibition is impressive in the material and conceptual dimension of each work. Onuzulike's choice to take on the symbolism of traditional West African textiles associated with colonial exploitation situates these recent works with a practice that is as concerned with craft production as it is with politics.
This article explores how contemporary Ethiopian artists use visual storytelling to challenge dominant political narratives, reclaim historical memory, and foster critical dialogue. Through in-depth interviews with three leading artists—Dawit Abebe, Ashenafe Mestika, and Wendimagegn Belete—the piece examines how their work reflects Ethiopia's complex sociopolitical landscape, shaped by ethnic tensions, colonial legacies, and the aftermath of civil war. Belete's Code Switch layers archival colonial maps with images of Indigenous scarification, creating a visual tension between imposed histories and personal identity. Abebe's Jerba series presents anonymous, hunched figures alongside historical documents, inviting reflection on ethnic identity and the erasure of personal histories. Meanwhile, Mestika's Togetherness? depicts entangled human forms, questioning whether Ethiopia's diverse communities can truly coexist. Despite their differing approaches, all three artists use the human body as a central motif, emphasizing that political struggles are always experienced on a deeply personal level. As Ethiopia grapples with internal divisions and global misrepresentations, these artists provide an alternative to both state-controlled narratives and reductive Western media portrayals. Their work challenges viewers to reconsider Ethiopia beyond simplistic frameworks by, instead, highlighting the country's rich, multilayered histories. Using aesthetics as a form of resistance and storytelling, these artists push the boundaries of how history, memory, and identity are understood and represented. Their work not only documents Ethiopia's present but also invites audiences—both local and global—to engage in a more nuanced, participatory conversation about the nation's future.
Fidelity to everyday, interior African life is a hallmark feature of Abderrahmane Sissako's celebrated body of work. His films put in relief quotidian African experiences adjacent to the continent's political reality, seamlessly interweaving the vagaries of everyday life with consequential political matters. What amplifies the sense of interior life in Sissako's portrait of the continent and its people is the space he gives to quiet and its radical expressiveness. The essay begins with a brief discussion of Sissako's first film Le Jeu (1988); then, drawing on Kevin Quashie's theory of quiet, it offers a substantive analysis of Bamako (2006), reading Sissako's most explicit political film against the grain. Bamako takes place largely in the courtyard of a house in Mali's capital city, indeed the very house in which Sissako grew up. The film portrays, on the one hand, a couple's fraught relationship and, on the other, the public legal proceeding of a case in which the plaintiff is African Society and the defendant the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. With an aesthetic of quiet, Sissako breaks down the division between interior and exterior, private yard and public court, real and fiction. In Bamako, ultimately, Sissako uses the inner world of his childhood home to plumb an African interiority expansive and expressive enough to represent individual, familial, communal, national, and continental African life—not by erecting a hierarchy among these subject positions or eschewing their contradictions or flattening out their differences, but instead, by inventing a poetic tableau that reveals, and quietly revels in, their overlapping textures and individual seams.
This article describes, analyses, and responds to the work of Mohamed A. Yakub, a photographer for more than forty years. Drawn to the camera's magical ability to, in his words, “capture light,” Yakub created a series of works that either capture the fleeting passage of light over time in long exposures with the camera in motion or transform architectural spaces into imaginative, otherworldly places, composing, mirroring and multiplying them vertically or horizontally. The artist's imagery often suggests or evokes Afrofuturistic places and spaces to be seen, imagined, and felt.
Within wider debates surrounding the restitution of African objects, Achille Mbembe's thought has not yet received full exploration. Compared to major contributions by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, Mbembe's work on the matter remains relatively marginal. This article argues that Mbembe's writings on restitution merit greater visibility and centrality. It demonstrates how his views on restitution are distinguished by their unusually broad philosophical and historical framing. Exploring Mbembe's critique of existing positions within the debate on restitution, it analyzes his account of African objects’ epistemological significance and their function in precolonial African cultures. Indeed, Mbembe connects these objects with foundational questions about human/material relations as well as with the structure of Western forms of philosophical knowledge. True restitution, for Mbembe, rather than lesser acts of recuperation, requires a reckoning with these broader issues, including, ultimately, the treatment of Africa within European philosophy. This wider framing of restitution both enlarges our understanding of the parameters of the debate on the return of African objects and enlarges our perception of these objects’ global philosophical significance.
This review of the Sharjah Biennial 16 focuses on the works of African diaspora artists within the exhibition. The biennial theme “to carry” explores themes of survival, cultural continuity, and global politics. African artists and several of their commissioned works are highlighted. Ndidi Dike's installations use photography and objects to examine trade, slavery, and resource extraction. Julianknxx's film blends poetry, performance, and film to explore diasporic narratives and oral traditions. Kaloki Nyamai's large-scale paintings incorporate newspapers and documents, reflecting on Kenyan culture and history. Rita Mawuena Benissan's mixed-media installation uncovers Ghanaian history and traditions through photographs, textiles, and film. Despite a limited presence, the African diaspora artists at the biennial presented compelling and agency-driven works that challenge Western perspectives and offer rich, layered experiences.
This review of Christina Kimeze's debut institutional solo exhibition Between Wood and Wheel at South London Gallery reflects on the artist's exploration of memory, feeling, and liminal spaces. Set against the backdrop of emerging AI image generation, which challenges notions of authorship and artistic subjectivity, Kimeze's work serves as an antidote to technological replication, emphasizing the intangible qualities of human emotion. Inspired by Black roller-skating culture and the poem “Night at the Roller Palace” by January Gill O'Neil, Kimeze's paintings evoke a sense of blurred motion, geometry, and color, existing between figuration and abstraction. Recurring motifs, such as banana leaves, root the work in personal and cultural references, particularly the artist's Ugandan heritage. The exhibition explores the tension between individual and collective experience, reflecting on the impact of diaspora and the role of memory in shaping identity. Ultimately, Between Wood and Wheel is a testament to the power of painting, showcasing Kimeze's distinct style and her ability to translate emotions into vibrant, layered compositions. The exhibition posits painting as a uniquely human endeavor, a challenge to artificial intelligence, and a celebration of subjectivity in an increasingly homogenized world.
Born in England in 1996 of a Vincentian mother and Ghanaian father, Emma Prempeh's emerging practice as a painter is at once breathtaking, refreshing, and brimming with captivating confidence. Committed as she may be to the Black figure and to the compelling lives, stories, and memories it signifies and illustrates, what sets Prempeh apart is the idiosyncratic rigor of her pictorial tactics. Mostly given to a low-key, earthy, and dark viridian palette, her figures are often set in dim interiors, sometimes with a window or door opening to the outdoors. When she takes on the verdant scenery of the island of St. Vincent, a pall of twilight dusk washes over lovingly detailed, familiar island scenes ruptured unexpectedly by high-key patches of yellow. A characteristic feature in her work is her use of Schlag metal, a brass alloy similar to gold leaf, as a painting surface, creating randomly placed shafts of light slicing through dark interiors, sunlight rupturing rain-heavy clouds, bright gleams on dark and brown skin, or floating, formless decorative motifs within otherwise naturalistic compositions. Through her exploration of the physiochemical characteristics and affective qualities of specific material substance, Prempeh has found new means of extending painting beyond pigment with intriguing results.
This article explores two major recent exhibitions in the United States—The Time Is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica at the Art Institute of Chicago—to examine how contemporary curatorial practices reimagine Black identity, solidarity, and history through the concept of worldmaking. Drawing from philosophical and theoretical frameworks articulated by Nelson Goodman, Fred Moten, and Adom Getachew, the article analyzes how each exhibition uniquely challenges traditional historical narratives, colonial temporalities, and spatial boundaries. By examining Black figuration, Pan-Africanism, and artistic interventions, the article highlights how Black artists actively construct alternative worlds through creative, political, and speculative practices. Ultimately, it argues that these exhibitions move beyond mere representation or visibility toward dismantling and reimagining the very structures of colonial representation, offering dynamic visions of Black life as continuously unfolding possibilities.
