Exhibitions

The New Black Vanguard: Photography between Art and Fashion is still on view at the Aperture Foundation in New York City, NY, United States until January 18, 2020

This exhibition presents fifteen artists, whose vibrant portraits and conceptual images fuse the genres of art and fashion photography in ways that break down long-established boundaries. Their work has been widely consumed in traditional lifestyle magazines, ad campaigns, and museums, as well as on their individual social-media channels, reinfusing the contemporary visual vocabulary around beauty and the body with new vitality and substance. The images open up conversations around the roles of the black body and black lives as subject matter; collectively, they celebrate black creativity and the cross-pollination between art, fashion, and culture in constructing an image. Seeking to challenge the idea that blackness is homogenous, the works serve as a form of visual activism. It’s a perspective often seen from this loose movement of emerging talents, who are creating photography in vastly different contexts—New York and Johannesburg, Lagos and London.

Lina Iris Viktor: Dark Matter, Some are Born to Endless Night is still on view at Autograph ABP in London, United Kingdom until January 25, 2020

Lina Iris Viktor’s Dark Continent series dominates the space: its solitary female figure in a monochromatic landscape is illuminated by gilded solar and lunar symbols. The figure is the artist’s own form, her body shrouded in deep, matt black paint, her hair golden; at times contemplative and elusive, at other times provocative and alluring. These works represent an imaginary riposte to imperial narratives of empire and expansion, and the nineteenth-century myth of Africa as the ‘dark continent’. Viktor often deploys her body in her conceptual art practice, the sole performer in a meticulously crafted cosmology. Combining photography, performance, painting and sculpture with ancient gilding techniques, she creates intricate, densely layered surfaces characterized by her ritualistic use of 24-karat gold leaf. For Viktor, gold is both substance and symbol, a conduit to spiritual transcendence.

Lagos, Nigeria: Diaspora at Home – Group Show is still on view at the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Lagos, Nigeria until January 31, 2020

Diaspora at Home is a group exhibition that provides an opportunity to engage in a variety of conversations on the issue of mobility within Africa. A dearth of diasporas within Africa seems strange when one juxtaposes two persistent themes that often recur in many discussions about Africa: a long history and practice of migration within the continent; and the close attachment of people and place, in particular land. Diaspora at Home takes the KADIST collection as a resource to be articulated in shifting cultural conditions, reflecting on the role of artistic forms in the circulation of knowledge within the African continent. The exhibition and accompanying public programme takes an alternative approach to highlight political, economic and ecological issues in transnational mobility without the confrontation between Europe and Africa.

Biennials

12th Bamako Encounters Photography Biennial is still open at various locations in Bamako, Mali until January 31, 2020

Titled Streams of Consciousness after the eponymous 1977 record by Abdullah Ibrahim and Max Roach, the Biennale will employ multiple understandings of how such streams can be used as photographic tools. Tools that bridge the African continent with its various diasporas, in addition to conveying cultures and epistemologies. “Africa” has, after all, long ceased to be a concept limited to the geographical space called Africa. Africa as a planetary concept relates to people of African origin, the I & I, which are spread over the world in Asia, Oceania, Europe, the Americas and the African continent. The exhibition will apply the notion of the stream of consciousness as a metaphor for the flux of ideas, peoples, cultures that flow across and along with rivers like the Niger, Congo, Nile or Mississippi.

21st Contemporary Art Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil is still open at various locations in São Paulo, Brazil until February 2, 2020

Under the theme Imagined Communities, this edition borrows the title from Benedict Anderson’s classic study to reflect on forms of social and community organization existing beyond, on the fringes or in the breaches of nation states: religious or mystical communities, refugee groups uprooted from their original land, clandestine, fictional and utopian communities or those constituted in the underground worlds of bodily and sexual experiences. That is the horizon featured in the works by artists from indigenous groups or original peoples that deal with the issues present in the making and representation of those cultures in art and the world, in works that address the queer/LGBT universe, racial issues and border conflicts. The Biennial is divided into three platforms: exhibition, public programs and publications.