Shannon approached art as a social form, an oppositional gesture, and a means of staying with what slips through. Their careful observations were absorbed into objects that were not simply readymades, but contorted and fixed into new realities, where they no longer possessed the ease of their original purpose. The domestic interior emerged as a layered object rather than a passive backdrop, its surfaces, thresholds, and furnishings holding traces of the social and emotional labour performed within them.

At Liste, Shannon explored endings not as conclusions but as continual reconfigurations. In their solo presentation end-o, endings operated more like “ands”: sculptural works brought together exhausted infrastructures ( the london brick turned briefcases), fractured narratives, and traces of labour, showing how things can remain active even when they appear worn out or passed tense . I came way curious about what other objects they could brilliantly contort?

In Bedding, Shannon brings this logic into the domestic sphere through garments, furnishings, and architectural interventions.

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The Office

The exhibition reminded me how historically recent our relationship to work really is. Shannon’s objects expose a condition that now feels almost natural: the assumption that everyone should constantly produce, optimise, and remain employable. This expectation feels inevitable only because corporate culture and capitalism have normalised it. Work no longer claims only our labour; it increasingly occupies our leisure, our attention, and even our aspirations. The boundaries between professional and personal life continue to erode. Work follows us home. Play becomes networking. Even the club becomes another space of performance. Rest becomes recovery for more work.

Having first encountered Shannon’s work during Basel week, it was difficult not to notice how insistently questions of work and professional identity resurfaced elsewhere across the city. At Basel Social Club in particular, the workplace was reimagined as a space for critical reflection, with artists questioning how labour now structures identity, time, and everyday life. One work that particularly stayed with me was Alicia Framis’ The Walking Ceiling, in which a group of professional women carried a 2 × 3 metre glass plate—a literal “glass ceiling”—through the office space.

Shannon’s work echoes many of these concerns, particularly how the demands of work are experienced through the body and the lens of gender. Here, power is performed through clothing, the “right” work bag, and the careful cultivation of a clean, professional beauty. The office look is not simply a matter of dress but a way of inhabiting corporate culture, requiring the continual performance of competence, composure, and ambition.

The Uniform

The office look is not simply a matter of dress but a way of being, one that requires the daily negotiation of professionalism, beauty standards, emotional composure, and even hormonal cycles. Like the women balancing Framis’ fragile sheet of glass through the city, Shannon’s htid night trench and Raglan Street Suit, 2026 perform competence through the uniform, while their carefully composed exteriors hint at the invisible weight of the compressive expectations they carry.

The reversible garments become particularly compelling as objects through which to observe a state of compression. Rather than symbolising freedom or adaptability, they expose the demand placed on contemporary workers to inhabit multiple identities without pause. Across the garments, corporate language is literally imprinted into the cloth: “Citibank,” “Citicorp.” Workwear has become evening wear; night, another extension of productivity. The outfit never gets to rest because neither does the wearer.

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London became a fitting backdrop. As a global financial capital and a city synonymous with music, nightlife, and cultural production, it is shaped by competing rhythms of work and leisure. Yet one increasingly dictates the speed and access of the other. The city itself reveals the same pressures Shannon materialises.

Their screen-printed works extend this logic through the graphic and taste signifiers of music histories. Drawing from the visual language of subcultures, they recall spaces that offered alternative rhythms of time, freedom, and self-expression. Their aesthetic holds onto imagination of autonomy and obsolescence of earlier forms while remaining entangled in contemporary circuits of production.

The Domestic Interior

In Bedding, Shannon asks when optimisation tips into collapse, as compressed objects, interiors, and bodies begin to lose the very functions they were designed to improve. Shannon’s material language speaks to feeling. The glazed windows place the interior in a perpetual state of becoming, as though it is always under construction. It is the interior that is being sold, yet we too are implicated as products, expected to undergo endless tweaking and self-improvement. To keep up with these demands, one must continue to work in order to afford them.

In TLC23FTHOdouble glazing (2026), large windows are covered with baking paper and Vaseline, giving the space the appearance of an ongoing renovation. The materials mimic double glazing while exposing its fragility. What resembles a protective architectural solution is, in fact, a temporary membrane that never fully conceals its own impermanence. Under capitalism, nothing feels fixed. Everything appears held together through improvisation, where maintenance replaces permanence and constant upkeep becomes a condition of everyday life.

Some things around negotiating desire in polyimpotentsqueezetime.. daylight rest..glass house.. Elio Petri playing in the corner - KATIE SHANNON

Compression of Intimacy

The exhibition quietly dismantles the fantasy of balance. No matter how intense the state of world affairs becomes, we continue as though it is business as usual. Work-life balance often amounts to little more than surviving until the next holiday, living for the weekend while chasing forms of self-improvement that rarely offer real rest, but rather more activity. Dating exists alongside productivity culture; even intimacy becomes another task to optimise. The compressed bed is Shannon’s metaphoric object, suggesting not only the compression of rest but of intimacy itself. Time is compressed, love is scheduled, and private life becomes another site of economic pressure.

In 1980, Marina Abramović and Ulay’s Rest Energy tested the limits of trust as they balanced a drawn bow and arrow between their bodies, suspended in a state of mutual dependence and imminent collapse. Shannon’s work evokes a similar tension: a fragile equilibrium sustained through constant effort. Rest becomes less a space of recovery than a precarious state, continually threatened by the pressures of work, self-optimisation, and the expectation to remain productive.

The preserved rose, demidepeche,2026 offers the exhibition's quietest image of violence. I keep saying, “The kids are not alright,” and Shannon’s work echoes the quiet unease of Black Mirror, but without its technological spectacle. The horror is resolutely ordinary and domestic. Nothing catastrophic happens. Everyone simply continues to clock in.

The only image of natural beauty in the space is that of a preserved rose, an attempt to conserve beauty that ultimately damages it. The flower is punctured to remain intact. Preservation itself produces irreversible change. Like workers under constant pressure to endure, the effort to preserve freedom for the future becomes another form of deterioration.

Rather than functioning as metaphors, Shannon’s sculptures allow ordinary objects to carry the weight of the labour already embedded within them. Their interventions hold these objects in states of tension, where usefulness, care, and exhaustion remain visibly intact. In Bedding, compression becomes less a sculptural strategy than a condition we have learned to inhabit.

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This exhibition has now closed, but you can continue to explore more of Katie Shannon’s work online. Tina Gallery is currently closed for summer. The next exhibition, Philip Ewe’s To Be, or Not to Be, opens on 6 October.

It was thrilling to see an exhibition so carefully researched. I had seen posters and wondered, is it really that deep? and turns out it is. The depth comes in part from guest curator for film, Claire Marie Healy, whose studies on girlhood add nuance and insight, alongside the meticulous work of curator Elisa De Wyngaert

Binaries of dressing the girl

As a figure in art, the girl is often portrayed as the eternal muse, yet art has too often centered her in ways that dismiss girlhood as sentimental or lacking intellectual rigour.

In first section titled dressing the girl I learn that we see early traces of this in how we dress the girl .Gendered dressing is a 21 centrury invention ..MoMu’s GIRLS exhibition treats binary dressing not merely as historical fact but as a contested and negotiable space of identity. It demonstrates that clothing can both enforce societal expectations and provide tools for subversion, making the exhibition a platform for reflection on how fashion, gender, and adolescent agency intersect.

And Now…

It’s knock-off time. It’s the city, four girls cosplaying as women in wool coats, with the same clothes, leather totes inhand, all coveted and acquired. Binary dressing has become uniform dressing. Dressing the girl has become dressing the woman. We’re bombarded with “dress the part” rules, current trends passed down from teen magazines to bloggers and now influencers. Seeking inspiration from your favourite tastemakers is one thing, but capitalism has seeped into dressing the woman. Half of the “ten-frugal” or no-spend hauls lead you straight to ads, wanting you to buy the most minimal 400-euro, 100% wool babaa sweater. The full woman now owns multiple “must-haves.”

No hate to minimal chic but there a sense of uniformity I find unsettling also sheepish. Do we all just have good taste in cashmere?Where is the energy of coming of age? Have we silenced how much we wanted to be in it, amid it all? Did we settle it all for “playing house”?

Perhaps, as Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble, this is the performativity of gender in action: the repetition of norms that makes us appear “grown-up” while masking the creative, experimental impulses of girlhood. The exhibitions approach situates binary dressing within a broader inquiry into gender norms, societal expectations, and adolescent selfhood, reflecting MoMu’s interdisciplinary exploration of girlhood in fashion, art, and film.

Agency and compliancy

Culture has always been a means to explore self-expression. These elements shape our becoming and, in many cases, are projected outwardly in the way teens dress or in the idol posters that clutter their bedrooms. Upon stumbling onto a few mock-ups of a “girls’” bedroom, it felt like a fantasy to have had so much freedom of expression as a young person, to exercise choice so early on as something inherent. I was unfortunately not given this kind of leeway growing up, due to a mix of budget priorities and perhaps pedagogical philosophy (my room also doubled as a guest room when needed; it’s hard to imagine an adult wanting to sleep in a fully pink, or any kind of teen paradise).

When I was 16, we settled on a teal colour. It came out darker than I wanted, but by then I felt I had already stretched the leash; admitting my choices might be wrong would have given the adult more ammunition to withhold further choice. I remember girls with more freedom being called spoiled or unruly by adults. It was never clear why; those girls simply seemed to be having a lot of fun. It was as if becoming a girl who cared deeply about her own occupation of space was seen as undesirable.

Perhaps this is how the Olsen twins arrived at The Row, their aesthetic sensibility presumably shaped by the permission to refine their expression from an early age.

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Similar to my own experience, the bedroom installation by Jenny Fax is different from the others. Her childhood bedroom is poster free , void of clutter and designed in a european style with a large Rococo painting. This was a room shaped more by her mother’s dreams than her own, and the installation carries that imprint. Designer Jen-Fang Shueh looks back on her childhood memories, tracing how personal space can become an extension of parental desire as much as a site of self-expression. With the installation she rather thinks about her secret

Who is afraid of GIRLSHOOD?

I devouvered the exhibitions film section ,works like Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999), Marie Antoinette (2006), and Bonjour Tristesse (1958) appear through costumes, stills, and installation rooms, highlighting the intimate worlds of teenage girls.the cinematic works explore the complexities of girlhood, by illustrating the tension between societal expectations, personal identity, and fashion as a form of rebellion.

Girlhood is a period of longing to rebel or escape altogether, raging against the pressure of conformity versus being swallowed and governed by it. Counter to the growing up we are all encouraged to do, meaning taking up financial and independent responsibility, I feel girlhood is a feeling that remains with us. It carries a sense of creativity and freedom that I believe we must hold on to.

We call it manifesting now, but there is a great thread of naivety that dreaming and building the lives we want requires. It is interesting to see this energy being made fun of or purely categorized as infantile to downplay it. From horoscope readers being called too “woo-woo” (you’re not that kind of person, are you?), to girl dinner not being a serious thing, and “I’m just a girl” being seen as ditzy, to Pilates not being seen as a real sport until a man takes his first humbling class. But who better embodies the unruly woman than the witchy, woo-woo, fairy, herbalist , the one with her female-empowered potions, claiming agency and creativity on her own terms? Fumiko Imano’s Imaginary Twin photographs offer a perfect example. She always longed for a sister, a partner in crime. Multiplying herself in this series she explore identity, desire, and fantasy in ways that defy conventional expectations.

The girlies of this era may not be as punk-rock rebellious, but they are perhaps embarking on a form of self-emancipation, absorbed in self-actualization and independence—rootedness in knowledge, ambition, and yes, becoming disgustingly educated and hot. The girlies are channeling creative energy into building brands and turning unruly dreams into reality.

I believe ,Girlhood unsettles because it resists neat containment. It is emotional, excessive, aesthetic, and often unserious on the surface, yet it holds its own codes of intelligence and refusal. To be “just a girl” is still too easily equated with frivolity, as if lightness cannot also be a form of knowledge.What is feared, perhaps, is not immaturity but autonomy. Girlhood allows for imagining otherwise, for rehearsing futures through taste, fantasy, and small declarations of preference.Girlhood is an era of early experiments in authorship.

I love that the exhibition helps me to see that girlhood persists in coded ways,It reappears wherever women claim joy- soft life ,intuition, and self-fashioning without apology. Perhaps the question is less who is afraid of girlhood, and more what structures depend on it being taken lightly.

The Big P vs Ungovernable Women

I believe it serves both patriarchy and capitalism to trivialize girlhood and womanhood. Patriarchy distracts, framing desire and ambition as frivolous, while capitalism seeks to prevent ungovernable women, women whose labour, creativity, and self-determination cannot be fully contained or commodified.

Yes, your boyfriend might be embarrassing if your whole world revolves around him, especially if the structures you are placed in do not actually cater to your desires or fulfillment as a partner. But the point is: we don’t care. This is a translation into the reality that women are increasingly emancipated, no longer bound to be bored by the constant pursuit of men. Instead, we are pursuing ourselves.

Our becoming has evolved into something far more interesting. It is expansive, experimental, and sometimes unruly. It refuses the neat scripts laid out for us, im greatly inspired by the women starting theres lives over at 30 or merely embracing continuos evolution and adventure. Seeing womenhood not as a place of stale arival. To be ungovernable is not chaos. It is agency, creativity, and the refusal to allow one’s life to be dictated solely by external expectations or profit-driven logics.

Neverending

For me, a late bloomer to rebellion, my teens were not particularly rebelious. It has been in my late twenties and thirties that I’ve truly embraced the energy of girlhood. With the safeguards of a fully developed frontal lobe, I live in a constant state of becoming, encouraging silliness in how I dress and gallivanting constantly. I relish this yearning for inner knowing, the desire to constantly reorganize the brain and the world around me, independent of what we must do or what our bodies are expected to do.

I keep asking: What do I long to be?

Whats on

GIRLS. On Boredom, Rebellion and Being In-Between, MoMu Antwerp, 27.09.2025 — 01.02.2026
Embroidering Palestine, MoMu Antwerp, 13.12.2025 — 07.06.2026
De Associaties van Pauline Curnier Jardin, MUKHA, 10.10.2025 — 08.02.2026
Seven Paintings (Emma Verhulst), Pizza Gallery Antwerp, 15.02.2025 — 07.03.2025

I started watching films that contradict how Africa has been seen, heard, narrated, and contested on mainstream screens. If you Google “Black film,” Hollywood-starring movies dominate the results, reinforcing a second-hand perception that is often presumed to represent Africa. This is not meant to offend African American actors who play these roles; rather, it points to how, in an already scarce and under-represented industry, Black actors are repeatedly asked to perform a narrow range of characters—resulting in a constrained vision of Blackness.

The films I added to my list are part of a continuous renaissance shaped by Black African directors. As cinema travelled and access remained limited, filmmakers such as Mahamat-Saleh Haroun and Ousmane Sembène carved out space for themselves through the medium. Their works sit at the intersection of cinema, aesthetics, politics, memory, and refusal.

1. In Bye Bye Africa (1999), directed by Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, the main character, a filmmaker returning home to Chad, encounters the reality of a dying film industry. What begins as a reflection on African cinema becomes a reckoning with its fragility. He sees the urgent need for films to reflect Africans and realises that his work must remain rooted in his home.

Negritude

In this process, I have come to adopt a sense of Negritude in the way I consume and engage with the foundations of Black artistry. These films did not simply inform me; they expanded me. They left me more curious, more in awe, and more attentive to the beauty of African storytelling—its architectures, its native dynamics, and the intimacies of family structures and everyday interactions that feel humorous and unmistakably like home.

The term, originating in the 1930s among Francophone African intellectuals and writers, Negritude (from the French nègre plus -itude, meaning “Blackness”) was both a framework of literary theory and political critique. It aimed to cultivate Black consciousness, resist colonialism and Eurocentrism, and affirm African culture and identity. Drawing on surrealist literary styles and Black radical thought, Negritude explored diasporic experience, belonging, and the assertion of self.

2. Mandabi (1968), directed by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène, follows Ibrahima Dieng, an unemployed man in Dakar, Senegal, who receives a money order from his nephew in Paris. Lacking proper ID and being illiterate, he struggles to cash it, facing a maze of bureaucracy and growing pressure from those around him. The film is humorous but sharp in its critique of post-colonial society and lingering colonial systems. Shot in the Wolof language of Senegal, it prioritised cultural authenticity and local accessibility. Its themes of power, identity, and systemic injustice remain strikingly relevant today.

Film strategies

The directors of the films I watched also embody this attitude. In Sembène, it appears as a social and political critique centred on African perspectives; in Cissé, through the embrace of African cosmology, myth, and oral tradition; and in experimental works like Maldoror-inspired films, through formal innovation that challenges European cinematic norms. Across styles and contexts, they affirm African voices, histories, and aesthetic sovereignty, making each viewing not only a story but an act of cultural affirmation. What is remarkable is how deeply personal these narratives are. Sembène often appears in his own films—at times inhabiting multiple characters—collapsing the distance between author, subject, and witness (Xala, 1975). His cinema insists on presence, on speaking from within.

The black female Subject

3. Sarah Maldoror’s work, particularly Sambizanga (1972), renders political struggle through tenderness and collective endurance, allowing beauty and resistance to coexist without dilution. Sambizanga is widely considered the first feature-length fiction film directed by a woman in Africa. Set in Angola under Portuguese rule, the film explores the lived realities of women during the revolution, moving from the intimate, romantic life of a couple living in a government housing complex to the brutal conditions of revolutionary struggle. Years later, Maldoror is finally receiving her flowers, with her work being honoured in a major retrospective as part of Paris Noir at the Centre Pompidou.

4. La Noire de… (Black Girl, 1966) – Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène never lets go of the mask—it lingers as a thread throughout this powerful film and remains haunting until the very end. The story follows Diouana, a young Senegalese woman who leaves Dakar to work as a maid for a French couple in France. What begins as a hopeful journey quickly becomes one of alienation and exploitation, as Diouana is isolated, undervalued, and stripped of her identity. Like the mask, she is removed and bamboozled, veiled under the guise of “becoming” in Europe, highlighting the enduring legacies of colonialism and the personal costs of migration and servitude.

A continued renaissance

5. Dahomey (2024) by Mati Diop feels like an extended generational conversation that draws a clear parallel with You Hide Me (1970) and picks up where the contemporary debate on restitution has arrived. In this 2024 documentary, Diop gives voice to the artefacts themselves, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that mirrors their journey and displacement.

At its core, the film explores restitution while reflecting on what it means for an artefact to have lost its place not only physically but also ritually and spiritually. These spaces have been replaced by colonial voids. Homecoming and freedom are not presented as givens. Reception is institutionally complex, particularly as the Wunderkammer logic that European museums take pride in is slowly stripped away. Dahomey adds a vital new layer to this ongoing conversation. What do they return to if not another glass hull?

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5. L’avance(2024), in this short, @djibykb brilliantly unpacks the painful dynamics of the art world: Why do collectors gravitate towards trauma-informed art? While I understand why artists create intimate works, the classist and racialised institutional framework of the art world often turns these narratives into a “get out” negotiation, as depicted in the short.

6. My Father’s Shadow (2025) – I’ve already managed to tick the first movie off my list for this year, a highly anticipated film I had been eager to see. In Akinola Divis’ first feature, set in Nigeria, young brothers Remi and Aki accompany their father, Folarin, on a day trip to Lagos. Along the way, they learn more about each other while also witnessing the political crisis gripping the nation after the 1993 Nigerian presidential election.

The film is a deeply personal story about history and grief, said to be autobiographical for the young director in his first feature film. Its moving narrative delicately explores the workings of grief, serving as a time capsule through the eyes of young boys and transporting a ghostly presence between past and present. In its slow unfolding, the morning is tender, bitter, and ominous, guiding the audience toward realisation. The experience is as confusing and dissociative as a forgotten or obscured past. Set in a vivid world where political fervour has gripped Nigeria, the film illuminates the tension, uncertainty, and hope of a nation in flux, capturing what could have been for a country set on a different course at that moment.

My engagement with African cinema last year was guided by a fascination with historical representation as a tool for imagination, political resistance, and the ways beauty resonates within film. Filmmakers like Ousmane Sembène, Sarah Maldoror, and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun embed resistance in the everyday, in gesture, intimacy, and form, often rejecting linear storytelling in favor of rupture, rhythm, and provocation. Their work challenged who controls the image, who speaks for whom, and what it means to film history while living its consequences. Cinema remains a medium in ongoing dialogue, and in the new year my viewing list is deepened, geographically broader, and shaped by scholarship, like Amy Sall’s and John Akomfrah’s, to connect networks of thought, aesthetics, and histories across African visual culture.

In this practice, Negritude continues: curiosity becomes a form of Blackness and world-building, keeping the pillars and foundations of knowledge alive while allowing them to evolve.

Other Films watched in 2025 and Film Watch list 2026

WHATS ON

• Christophe Sawadogo, Picmol, Brussels (BE), 22 – 24 January, 17:00 – 20:00

• Bozar screening, All We Imagine as Light - Payal Kapadia

• Argos, Becoming Ancestors Brussel (BE) s 07.02.26—28.06.26 — 11:00—18:00

• Cinematek screening, Restored Shorts,24 jan ,Brussel (BE)

• Gallery 41, Ousmane Ba, Gallery 41, Brussels (BE)

• Whispers Down the Alley, Stevenson, Amsterdam (NL)

• Everlyn Nicodemus at Wiels, Brussels (BE), 24 October 2025 – 1 February 2026 (WIELS)

• Nairy Baghramian – ‘Nameless’ at Wiels, Brussels (BE), 25 October 2025 – 1 March 2026 (WIELS)

• John Baldessari: Parables, Fables, and Other Tall Tales, at BOZAR, Brussels (BE), – 1 February 2026 (bozar.be)

Already, the vision set the tone for what this exhibition represents: a rare moment of artistic self-definition, unfolding in a city whose relationship to Congo is layered, fraught, and still too often mediated through colonial memory rather than contemporary Congolese creativity. While institutions such as the AfricaMuseum or BOZAR regularly organise exhibitions around Congolese art, there is something particularly powerful about encountering these works beyond the institutional frame, one that so often overburdens context and strains nuance.

Here, the gallery does not over-explain the greatness of each artist. Instead, these giants take up space on their own terms, heavy with story, vibrancy, and the force of forged creativity and innovation. Meaning emerges not through didactic framing but through presence, allowing the works to speak with clarity, confidence, and complexity.

GALLERY41 is a contemporary art gallery founded by Ohana Nkulufa, whose experience across leading art institutions has shaped a distinct vision. Rooted in passion, for art, for encounters, and for amplifying voices that define our time, the gallery is a living space for sensitivity, curiosity, and emergence. It centers women and artists of the African continent and diaspora, cultivating nuance and depth. A space where artists and audiences meet, and new conversations begin. This intention runs through the exhibition experience, and it leaves a soft spot for what is absent or yet to be explored, highlighting the ongoing dialogue between presence and absence in contemporary Congolese art.

A Generational Conversation That Challenges the Curatorial Frame

What Congo Contemporary, curated by Julie Theys, achieves and why it struck me so sharply is its refusal to fold into the easy, condensed curatorial frameworks that often shape the reception of African art. Instead, it asserts diverse generational voices and an autonomous account of Congolese aesthetics by centring narratives, visual languages, and worldviews emerging directly from the DRC’s lived realities. Every work is imbued with Congo, from its vibrant colours and urban inspiration to mystical elements and the sapeurs, all coming alive in reference. This made for an exhilarating show to tour, as guests could see the works in different lights with the added context. This isn’t an exhibition trying to “explain” Congo to Europe or flatter the Western gaze. Even with unlabeled walls common in the gallery, the visual experience still felt validating, especially for continental work often oversimplified for unfamiliar viewers.

It is a generational conversation: Early modern masters like Bela Sara (1920 – 1968) and Mwenze Kibwanga(1925–1999) and contemporary voices like Precy Numbi (b. 1992) and Dolet Malalu (b. 1980) shared space without hierarchy, revealing lineages of thought, identity, technique, and political imagination. That cross-generational dialogue feels rare and almost radical — in a landscape where continental talent is often flattened or framed through reductive tropes.

What emerges is a vibrant, self-possessed artistic landscape that refuses compression, refuses simplification, and refuses to play the role of “Africa” for an external audience. And this not not something new, the historical mapping shows how artist Bela Sara and Mwenze Kibwanga, a key modernist figure from the Hangar school, Kibwanga developed “sculptural painting” using dense hatching inspired by weaving traditions. His scenes of village life and ritual reject Western depth for rhythmic surfaces and pattern-reflecting his father’s background as a weaver, and a painterly approach he described as “sculptural painting.”Unlike many of his contemporaries, Kibwanga focused on the human figure in settings of hunting, village life, animals and rituals; his technique abandons Western depth and perspective in favour of rhythmic surface patterns.

The exhibition is bold and inward-looking to practices that engage in memory keeping and power. And such postcolonial histories and spiritual vitality serve a great contrast to what Congo is widely known for, even traces of chaotic urbanity serve as inspiration for artistic innovation in works like Houston Maludi (b. 1978, Kinshasa), a painter known for “Monochromatic Symbiotic Quantum Cubism,” a unique approach to form and line. His compositions use a limited colour palette to evoke Kinshasa’s urban density, blending architectural elements, figures, and roads. Across generations, what we get to marvel at is a tale of embodied resilience of bodies and territories.

MATONGE-IXELLES. LA PORTE DE NAMUR ! LA PORTE DE L’AMOUR ?

Chéri Samba’s presence in Congo Contemporary feels vital, almost grounding, as he occupies a unique bridge between Congo and Belgium, particularly through his long-standing connection to Matonge. His mural Porte l’Amour, a landmark of the neighbourhood, is more than an artwork; it stands as a public declaration of Congolese visibility in a city still wrestling with its colonial memory. Although the mural is currently being refurbished, learning that Samba was the artist only deepened my engagement with the exhibition, making the conversation resonate even more strongly.

His work consistently reflects on identity, ethnic mixing, and the Congolese imagination, offering a contemplation of what it truly means, and looks like, to live within a multicultural society. This background as a muralist comes through powerfully here and across his practice. Many of his works are self-portraits, with faces often bearing his own likeness, and his commentary gives the paintings their weight. As he once stated in an interview, “people must learn something from painters,” a position that makes clear he does not shy away from meaning making.

Samba has always understood art as a social instrument rather than a decorative practice. His paintings speak directly, often literally, offering commentary on politics, identity, and the contradictions of modern life. In the Belgian context, this becomes even more significant. He addresses what it means to live in a multicultural society where African presence is hyper-visible culturally but under-recognised politically. Samba’s work exposes the tensions and negotiations of diasporic life, but he also insists on joy, humour, and critique as forms of intellectual freedom. Including him in this exhibition reminds the viewer that artistic language is inseparable from civic discourse. Samba does not simply paint society; he speaks back to it, revealing the very space that art occupies in shaping how communities see themselves and how they are seen.

Mami Wata

It also brought me back to a thought I had about the travelling exhibition When We See Us, which recently made its stop at BOZAR. Framed as a sweeping survey of a century of figurative painting by artists of African descent, the exhibition carried the weight of summarisation. Never have I seen an exhibition that attempts to summarise the entirety of European art, even when movements are shown as moments rather than exhaustive accounts. That realisation made me uneasy when such a gesture was proposed for Africa and, in many ways, celebrated as a triumph. The discomfort is tied to the accompanied question, “Have you seen that African art show?” a line of inquiry that sparks an almost irrational anger in me, a refusal to answer, or to be further affiliated with the line of this questioning.

In that sense, Congo Contemporary challenges the very curatorial impulse that once left me uneasy at When We See Us: the impulse to condense, summarise, or represent. Instead, it multiplies, it complicates, and it insists on its own internal coherence rather than seeking validation from a Western frame. That clarity and confidence finally felt like the depth I had been longing for.

An example of this complication is found in Kura Shomali’s Mami Wata. I was stunned when the gallery assistant unfolded its cosmological resonance, revealing a dimension of contextuality I had not fully anticipated.

Widely known, Mami Wata, is a powerful figure in West and Central African cosmology, a water spirit who embodies beauty, danger, seduction, protection, and spiritual sovereignty. She moves between worlds: the earthly and the aquatic, the visible and the invisible, the modern and the ancestral. For many communities, she is a guardian of thresholds, a negotiator of fate, a spirit who demands both reverence and caution.

In Shomali’s hands, she is not reduced to myth or folklore. She becomes a contemporary Venus, fragmented, stylised, and impossibly alive, reflecting the complexities of Congolese identities shaped by history, rupture, and renaissance. She carries her own agency wrapped in flowers, refusing to be rendered as an African motif. Instead, she appears as a subject with depth, a force with her own interiority.

Hearing the gallery assistant articulate this, not as an explanation for a Western viewer but as a gesture of grounding, captured exactly what Congo Contemporary makes possible: the reclaiming of symbolic language that has long been flattened or misread. The work is not there to illustrate Congolese cosmology; it is cosmology speaking to itself.

Ange Swana

Among the dynamic artists included in the exhibition is Ange Swana. Her practice, shaped by a life across Rwanda and eastern Congo, regions marked by decades of conflict and resource exploitation, blends personal memory with wider geopolitical tensions. Hers is a contemporary voice, moving from emotion to body, as her paintings explore resilience, identity, and the emotional landscapes of post-conflict life. Swana’s work offers a vivid example of the generational and transnational dialogues at the heart of the show.

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And then theres the encounters with Bers Grandsinge, an artist whose practice develops a language between two worlds, marks an astonishing crossover between avant-garde art in the North and South. In 1985, during an exhibition, he met Jean-Michel Basquiat, who gave him the nickname “Grand Singe” (“Great Ape”) and recognized in him a messenger heralding the future flourishing of African art on the international stage. Following Basquiat’s advice, Bers settled in Brussels and became the first Congolese artist to establish himself in Belgium. Discovered by Galerie Hutse, he exhibited there until the death of its director, Louis Hutse.

His work carries a dialogue across continents, blending memory, identity, and experimentation. Rather than following linear narratives, Bers creates a space where artistic traditions meet and merge, offering a contemporary voice that resonates with the vibrancy and complexity at the heart of Congo Contemporary.

The exhibition, Congo Contemporary, gathers artists, histories, lineages, worldviews, and an intergenerational conversation, allowing them to speak in depth about innovation and expression on their own terms. In a city still grappling with its relationship to Congo, this show is a triumph and a rare gesture of artistic self-definition. I am still shocked that this is the first, but it is a vital and exhilarating moment for the contemporary representation of continental art. I am already very excited about the next show, where artist Ousmane Bâ’s exploration of movement and corporal gestures has resulted in a body of work that is as powerful as it is meditative. Through the act of collage, Ousmane brings life to a different kind of imagery, drawing us into a universe filled with serenity, peace, and harmony.

The Exhibition is on view until the 2oth december at Gallery 41,Rue Ernest Allard 41, 1000 Brussels

Others shows

Saathi Yates,london : Cato ink

A foundation,Brussels : What’s the word Johannesburg, group exhibition

Xavier Huskins, Brussels : Magdalene Odundo

His poetry is haunted by the entanglement of history and the present, the personal and the collective. The presentation examines the emotions left out by linguistic limits and determinations. Across the 12-part poem, he responds to his mother’s ageing and his memories of her, reflecting on the intimacy of home while being away. He considers the incompleteness of language—its failures to bridge distance and its predetermined constraints. “Even before I knew and read textual history,” he writes, “I already had an intimate relationship with it, its omissions felt through my body and its senses.” Throughout, he confronts the unease of the performed neutrality of former empires.

The artist borrows from ;

Don Mee Choi :my tongue was already a ‘site of power takeover’.

His return to language and its relationship to the representational world is grounded in going to the beginning, because language is where worlds are made. The show confronts the impossibility of separating the personal from the act of past-making. This creation places the selfhood at a crosspoint, determinately entangled by togetherness rooted in a history of forced relations, a history that still shapes how we speak, love, and are moved today. This entanglement stretches from the personal, the historical and finds us in the future tense.

I was caught off guard by my own stamina to stay with the linguistic exploration. The rhythm of reading made me feel as though I had come full circle; perhaps the author did too. From parts one to twelve, the work demands focus, yet I devoured every word. I went with a poet friend, dearest Anna, and with the gallery to ourselves, we went over the poems again and again, seeing anew, feeling restless and perplexed.

Do you think he means what he means? I became aware of the time that language, that poetry, imposes on you to absorb a message: you hesitate, you question, you investigate what you read. The words are not always what they seem. I wondered if it was this suspicious quality of language itself that drew the artist in, this tension between trust and doubt that unfolds through his work.

Poetry is often seen as fluffy or pretentious, yet the sober setting here captures the essence of power and its takeover. What first appears as simple language reveals poetic threads that clarify the opacity of reality. His strength lies in showing how language shapes complexity through a form that is itself complex, never neutral, and open to bending by both speaker and listener. What impresses me most is his ability to voice, or rather to word, what his realisation of colonial linguistic takeover does: to continue expressing oneself in a colonial language, and the limits this places on knowledge and on understanding one’s own roots.

These parameters echo the language we use to give depth to difficult emotions. Language is inherited; it changes, carries history, and is shaped by which tongues were imposed and which survived. It’s here that I must address what these histories are for the artist.

Holland is GHETTO

“I am away, this city with its neon lights protest.”

TUMELO MTIMKHULU is a South African visual artist born in Germiston, Johannesburg. Drawing from his South African roots, he engages with the root source of apartheid. And while apartheid is gone, his poetry brings into words the unspoken hostility that only a foreigner knows too in an otherwise marketed, welcoming country. I wondered if the artist’s residency in the Netherlands felt like coming to the root source of the empire. In his work, there are hints of reckoning with transgression.

Fun fact: I grew up in the Netherlands > This “fun fact” is followed up by, “the country has good marketing,”. Less visible from tourist welcoming Amsterdam is the “VOC mentality” that still binds people of colour, to Lutheran humility that detects otherness like colonial antennas. In his work, I saw traces of the reflection that comes from being way from home. Longing for the memory of home.

I am away the ability to eavedrop is lost to me

You envy their stokvels ,their seriousness, their lack of play ..

Form, Function, and Performative Name-Dropping

The exhibition made me reflect on linguistic power takeover, but also on experimentation within and beyond the bounds of the canvas as a form. Cause why not publish? Well, to start, TUMELO MTIMKHULU is a writer and poet as well as a visual artist. And I feel his experimentation is telling of the current shift in the artwork. a fatigue of canvas, perhaps

The shift away from painting suggests a growing appetite to go beyond the medium’s referentiality. Frieze’s newly published list, The 25 Best Works of the 21st Century, reflects this, featuring major objects and performance works rather than traditional paintings. At #9, Francis Alÿs’s When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), a performance done in Lima, Peru, involved 500 volunteers shifting a 500-meter-wide dune by just 10 centimetres, creating a work whose physicality and communal effort convey a social statement that painting alone rarely achieves.

There now seems to be more resonance in performance and large-scale conceptual or sculptural work—gestures that speak to a need for contextual, contemporary meaning-making. It’s as if the cultural moment demands present-day referents. I’m thinking of artists like Anna Uddenberg, whose work would leave a Victorian child completely bewildered.

This turn in format reflects a broader attempt to move away from the referential canon that painting often confines itself to, or from the limitations of its messaging and packaging.

A recent interview between Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director at the Serpentine, and artist Peter Doig on his new exhibition illustrates this tension. Doig cited canonical figures such as Picasso as inspiration, yet the result felt unconvincing. The references to me carry little meaning to the objects that make this show so vibrant and culturally contextual

For someone uninterested in name-dropping and the old white male pantheon, that reverence feels hollow. Skill alone, expressed through reference, is not enough for me. I respond more to storytelling, to work that gestures toward worlds rather than lineages. That said, I must acknowledge my admiration for Louise Delange’s experimental canvases; tragically, she has recently passed

Taking the idea of a canvas, Tumelo does something else entirely within and beyond its bounds. Throughout the exhibition, his use of poetry abandons both the book and the traditional frame, appearing instead as temporal inscriptions, chalkboard-like, carved with poetic sayings. Perhaps he’s reminding us that words carry meaning and permanence, even when written in something as impermanent as chalk. On occasion, the poem continues with singular words marked in dust, an afterthought.

In Khafulela, he explores labour and the imported ideas of respectability and moral rectitude. The work consists of four irons on which he etched a poem, and behind them hangs a mirror that reflects and echoes the objects. Aperture (a poem in twelve parts) is an etching printed on plaster, meant to convey the weight and materiality of the intangible quality of language.

With Khafulela, in the domestic setting, he recounts his memories of his mother. The resonance is intimate. The iron also makes me recall the respectability of an ironed shirt and clean clothes. Most Southern African children grew up wearing uniforms to school, where the head girl or head boy would inspect their clothing daily. Looking smart to be taken seriously was the domestic lesson, but the iron also started colonial respectability politics, the kind the Black Panthers rejected. I recalled when I saw the iron that these “manners” may also be a colonial hangover. Sunday best was a kind of brainwashing; somehow, looking neat would disarm the Black figure.

When I posted photos of these irons, someone commented, “I need this tattooed on my body.” And it’s this kind of impulsive non-referential response that I think art should evoke, something so true it feels worthy of markings. I’m also a sucker for the ready-mades, for the way they are grounded in an idea that resonates through recognition of the item itself, what it stands for, and what it stands in the way of.

Pursuing a New Canon

It made me think about our own referential canon: who is valued and remembered. The classical canon is still dominated by white European men like Picasso, Rembrandt, and Michelangelo. The canon isn’t neutral; it reflects historical, social, and political power.

I’m grateful that the artist leaves traces of his own referential canon. In the gallery, I find a stack of books and reference materials with meticulously taken notes, moments of insight captured in writing. One note reads BARS, a response to words so true that no other conclusion seems possible. Among them is Don Mee Choi’s new pamphlet from Ugly Duckling Presse, Translation is a Mode = Translation is an Anti-neocolonial Mode, exploring translation as a radical practice through poetry, cinema, and American colonialism.

I’m in the process of establishing my own canon, one that, like Mtimkhulu’s, challenges the power structures of the old canon. It seeks what feels truer, before translation and empire, pursuing a domestic inquiry even if entangled with history. This canon leaves behind classical painting while acknowledging influences like Picasso, who plagiarised and worked within the limits of his understanding of “primitive art.”

Rooted in artists working within their own entanglements, Mtimkhulu’s canon affirms universality, making me feel seen, heard, and given language for feelings and memories I didn’t know I had. Translation can create a limiting referential canon, while diasporic artists expand my artistic reality, reflecting emotions and experiences I recognise in myself.

This exhibition has now ended. You can follow the artist for his latest work.

What’s On’

In Situ #2 Farida Sedoc – Social Capital Exhibition — until Jul 2, 2026, Sedelijk, Amsterdam

Toxic Lands, Living Narratives, curated by Sammy Baloji, Imane Fares Gallery, Paris

Peter Doig: House of Music, Serpentine , London

All That Remains كَيْ لا نَنْسَى (Kay la nansa) by Inas Halabi, La loge, Brussels

Everlyn Nicodemus, Black Bird. Wiels, Brussels

Ter nagedachtenis aan Louise Delanghe

Mickalene Thomas: je t’adore deux, Natalie Obadia Gallery , Paris

Augusta Curiel Yere Mi Sten, Foam, Amsterdam

As I tried to focus on my holiday ahead, my emotional resonance matched the world, moving between confused, angry, and grateful, though denial had been the strongest peacemaker. I was left torn between constantly demanding space for myself and seeking closeness to make sense of my emotions, through art and in the world. Leaving one place in search of “paradise” revealed itself as an uneasy adjustment, a new home for my emotions.

Suppose home was me, as the Space 52 exhibition I saw at Art Athina suggested, well, this one is fragile, and when transported, tested. Even as my thoughts on the Berlin Biennale began to settle, my questions remained, so I consumed more art that echoed them.

At Art Athina (18-22 Sep 2025), the works highlighted the instability of home and the ways belonging is constantly negotiated. Like Baloji and Rakowitz, the exhibitions traced histories of displacement, coloniality(Reads “paradise quest”), and memory, exploring personal and collective space, and the traces of cultural identity that persist even under flux. Home here felt both intimate and public, fragile yet performative, a place where access, welcome, and continuity intersect. The exhibition I went to while away offered some solace and a space to contemplate the visible threads connecting past and present, self and society.

Sammy Baloji: othering, morality and mankind.

Othering seems to be the identifier of our time; most political and non-political identities are built on negative identity, identifying oneself against the other. Being opposed is identity instead of grounding moral systems or ideology.

In Echoes of History, Shadow of Progress at EMST, Athens, the first solo exhibition in Greece by internationally acclaimed artist Sammy Baloji, the historic othering and violence wrought by coloniality are laid bare, along with their instruments, socialised justifications, and forms of exploitation. For more than two decades, Baloji has explored the complex interplay of cultural identity, colonial history, and industrial exploitation within his homeland, the Democratic Republic of Congo. His work is an ongoing investigation of the cultural, architectural, and industrial heritage of the contested, resource-rich region of Katanga in the country’s southeast, while critically examining the enduring impact of Belgian colonisation.

In a work that catches my eye, Baloji restores the devalued alongside the valued by hand-hammering copper plates and engraving them with scarification patterns. Copper, a key resource in the region, carries rich patterns once used by tribes to signify social identity—scarification was gradually erased under colonial rule and the spread of Christianity. While the copper was valued and extracted by all means, there was a disregard for the enduring social and geopolitical impact of colonial-era mining and extraction. Here, instead, there is a celebration of identity, and healing is vital for those who have forgotten these traces that were erased.

I am stricken by the violence in this memory, how it changes the meaning of beauty and turns it into a bestiality of sorts. These markings today in this work are proposed back into life, onto a recognisable material of value, and they are the first thing you see upon entering the exhibition space. This work is an initial remark on how historic amnesia and the erasure of meaning can be the product of othering. By negative identity, we know what “European” is, but the native is stripped of meaning. I am thinking about what that does to our understanding of cultural and social value, how detaching from each other’s value strips us of the opportunity to find one another in the beauty that is shared, the collective.

Throughout the exhibition, the economic and political exploitation of the resource-rich region of Katanga by the West is highlighted, particularly the role copper mining played in shaping the Democratic Republic of Congo’s economy and the conflicts that ensued throughout the 20th century.

In 40 Mortal Shells, Interior Plants, the installation Untitled (2018) explores the historical and political significance of copper mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). During both World Wars, copper mining in Katanga surged to meet the demand for shell production. The materiality of daily life in the region is deeply shaped by the extraction of minerals: the colonial greed that once drove the search for paradise also fueled the accumulation of wealth and weapons. These shells, transformed into flowerpots, bring this full circle—copper, exported for industrial use, continues to fuel conflict while structuring local economies. What remains are the remnants of violent extraction.

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Morality Questions

His other work also sits within another exhibition at EMST, Why Look at Animals: A Case for the Rights of Non-Humans. This invites the viewer to consider the non-human animal not as “Other” but as a being with a voice and intrinsic value of its own. Baloji exhibits the extraction of meaning from people, resources, and even non-human entities. We are left with the remnants of anthropological fascination, the mass killing and taxidermy by Carl Akeley (1864–1926) on his expeditions to the Congo. By hunting and collecting, an attempt is made to still time, illustrating the persistent exploitation of the region.

This twisted relationship between “developing” and extracting is laid bare in photographs documenting the devastating changes to the region, from tribal anthropological portraits to the rise of militias and the arming of young children in Kivu. A shocking, tall mural lists the number of NGOs active in Kivu since 1926, confronting us with the real impact of so-called “development” and revealing how the extraction of resources has often been accompanied by ineffective interventions. It made me reflect on the irony embedded in development work and the tension between common-sense awareness of the need to address root causes and the reality of partial, superficial solutions.

Michael Rakowitz: Ancient Cultures and the war on civility.

From Baloji’s Essay on Urban Planning, I went then to the exhibition Allspice by Michael Rakowitz & Ancient Cultures at the Acropolis Museum. As I find myself wondering about belonging beyond the context of othering. I fear there is a lack of concentrated belonging, or even an understanding of what it really means.

Recently, I heard someone say, “You don’t belong, you’re just either on or offline,” and I thought, what in the cyborg is up? Have we really flattened things that much? Tropes have done it, sure — it girl this, performative that. So I go to an exhibition that reminds me why we are here, or at least how we can connect. I understand that we have all been moved by modernity one way or another, through stints in cosmopolitan cities and the privilege of EU movement. But what remains universal might be the search for home or belonging?

In Allspice, I sensed this connection in ritual—in the making of mangoes preserved in jars, holding all the flavours that evoke childhood love, or in eating dates drawn from ancestral soil, which might feel like a warm, welcoming ritual, or even a prayer of belonging to a common divinity. And what remains when this is gone? It has uprooted us all, leaving some to cling only to a bitter or negative identity, a traceable void in belonging.

The exhibition presents the work of internationally acclaimed artist Michael Rakowitz in dialogue with ancient artefacts from the Middle East and the southeastern Mediterranean. Through intensely political works, it highlights the importance of cultural heritage and explores themes of loss, restoration, and restitution of antiquities, survival, and the forging of new cultural identities. Allspice is a timely reminder of the fate of displaced people and cultural artefacts in the midst of war.

Allspice is a monumental haunting of what has been erased, but also of what will never be. In Rakowitz’s practice, ancient Hellenic cultures meet Iraqi, challenging the world’s idea of “civilisation” and its hierarchies of premodern and contemporary war traditions. He makes the war on “civility” visible while leaving space for ghosts of what could have been to exist, meeting us in liminal spaces.

I take away from this show that it is less about repatriating the lost than about taking up spaces where we make sense of the world and construct ourselves in the reality of past and present. Rebuilding home becomes a reconstruction of belonging against erasure; perhaps this is the “other” we are fighting, the war on terror as a reflection of the fear of being erased by familiar colonial methods.

Rakowitz haunts the West’s war against “the uncivilised,” revealing how prehistoric and monumental these civilisations were, forging connections between erased histories and the present. What was once visited as “ancient Greece” is now filled with extracted relics; museums have become, as he puts it, “palaces of primacy.” The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, his ongoing project since the Iraq War, reanimates looted artefacts as ghosts, exposing the entanglement of conflict and art. Like Baloji, Rakowitz seeks to reset this asymmetric relationship, revealing the devaluation of people behind prized objects, the reliefs showing what is missing beside what was, tracing the cracks.

Home is You: Art Athina

At ArtAthina, several works deepened my reflection on home. Space 52, a special project at the fair with Home Is Me, explored fragility and self-construction—showing that when borders and belonging are tumultuous, home within you becomes a flexible thing. Although this feels very 21st century, the mono block stool at Breeder Gallery highlighted how cheap home can be and how it is rooted in community: “have a seat.” I come from a culture where a simple wooden or plastic stool offers access and welcomes any visitor.

This is where life is

Jovan Matić’s Signal Burnout, represented by Novembar Gallery, hinted at revolution as a televised spectacle—a “we’re cooked” moment that was a deafening statement, yet strikingly true, especially within a space otherwise glitzy on a warm Hellenic night. Tamara Kametani’s All Utopias Fail at MISC Gallery reflected the limits of idealism or flight to “paradise”, her stacked mugs delivering a message (All Utopia’s Must Fall) impossible to ignore as one passed the otherwise empty-looking booth.it also felt like a clue. Citron Galleries, meanwhile, presented a dialogue between old and new masters, highlighting both continuity and disruption in culture.

Even when we were stuck, something was always shifting..a radical paradigm shift is also possible, to borrow from Mia David, director and curator of Novembar Gallery. And I agree, these exhibitions point to an imaginative collective sustained by everyday forms of connected survival, where quiet political potential resides. Even as spatial politics tighten their grip on movement, on value, on who gets to belong. The human urge to survive, whole and within the collective, endures. It was wonderful to find a source through which to make sense of the world while on holiday, to take in the wealth of the Hellenic art scene.

Whats on

• Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (Documentary)

• Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramoviç

  by Marina Abramoviç

• Curating Zasha Colah Curatorial Talk

• Autograph, London I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies 10 Oct 2025 – 21 Mar 2026

• Analix Forever Gallery, Geneva: Serwan Baran’s "Trip to the unknown"

• Gowen Gallery, Geneva: WITH MY BODY | GROUP SHOW

• Joanna Mirabel, Natalie Obadia Gallery, Brussels

The 13th Berlin Biennale, curated by Zasha Colah with Assistant Curator Valentina Viviani, orbits around fugitivity: the capacity of art to set its own laws in the face of lawful violence. Yet this staging is anything but neutral. The Biennale is organised and publicly funded by a government actively financing a genocide abroad while policing its own people at home for protesting against it. To enter its halls is to feel this contradiction.

And yet, what emerges inside does not disguise the struggle. Instead, the Biennale draws on struggles far beyond Germany to voice a similar disdain for fascism and authoritarianism. Throughout its programming with local groups, mediation is not performative but instead focuses on transmission, on passing the role of the fugitive on to the public. Each encounter allows for contributory forms of meaning, creating exchanges that leave space for initiatory movement. Like a fox slipping between spaces, mediation smuggles in and out glimpses of freedom, turning the practice into a form of political education.

The Biennale becomes a space where histories of displacement and resistance are gathered together, not to offer spectacle, but to map the continuities of violence and the forms of fugitivity, humour, and cunning that survive in its wake.

Wild Acts of Imagination

At the Biennale, we see artists taking on the role of jesters: figures who speak truth, provoke, and unsettle hierarchies of power. Yet this role exists within a fraught landscape. Solidarity scandals reveal how institutions sometimes instrumentalise struggling minority artists, used to camouflage violence. A hierarchy of solidarity is produced, where visibility and recognition are not neutral but stratified. Operating in this commodified art world, the Biennale unfolds in indoor spaces run by public institutions, shaped by the very states implicated in the histories of war and displacement on display.

Yet its triumph lies in what is presented: a long-standing history of conflict, turning the artist into a foxing fugitive, crusading through trauma and war stories for funding. To the naysayers who demand more, did they expect the victim to perform their current suffering? It is impossible and absurd. And to what end? This revolution is televised and live; the pressure to aestheticise ongoing pain risks erasing the reality of those still in peril.

Instead, the Biennale leaves us with layered tellings of the realities of warmongering states and acts of resistance. Levying the artist as truth-sayer and myth-maker of historical survival, now confronted with the ongoing creation of fugitives. Knowing too well this feeling, they are already exiles, navigating a world that watches, judges, and commodifies their displacement. At the Biennale, we encounter a collection of these fugitives: the artist as clever fox, surviving in jester-like fashion, navigating institutions, performing the right note in the hierarchies of solidarity, attempting to make themselves heard, recognised, and remembered, yet always aware of the precarious balance between speaking truth and being instrumentalised.

Witches as Resonance: Anawana Haloba, Isaac Kalambata & Bwanga Kapumpa

If the witch and the healer channel ancestral knowledge, and the comic and the joker expose uncomfortable truths through laughter and play, then Anawana Haloba and Bwanga Kapumpa carry these archetypes into the terrain of history, memory, and civic education. Haloba’s Looking for Mukamusaba, An Experimental Opera, creates sculptural forms that function as reverberation chambers, giving sound and space to her experimental opera. Drawing from Southern African oral traditions, she conjures legendary and historical figures such as Mu-kamusaba, whose name in siLozi means "You shall fear her or them," Len-shina, a self-appointed prophetess who founded the Lumpa Church in Zambia in opposition to colonial injustice, and Sichone, a Zambian civil rights activist and educator.

Through these characters, Haloba traces tragedies from crisis and war regions across Africa, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, imagining the characters as manifestations of the subconscious struggle of a resolute mind in mourning. Their repeated question of whether they are being heard reflects on the extent to which voices from crisis areas are listened to or silenced. These women, defiant in their time, would have been branded as witches. And who is a witch, after all, if not a deviant turning toward natural remedies, resisting commodification, and embracing otherness as a form of power.

Isaac Kalambata’s work extends this inquiry into the colonial outlawing of witches, showing how labelling the natural as deviant served to enforce arbitrary control. The Witchcraft Act and similar colonial laws positioned witchcraft as unnatural, outlawing leadership forms embedded in local knowledge systems and replacing them with Christianized regimes designed to regulate access to land, resources, and ancestral practices. As de Sousa notes,

“there is nothing natural about the governance of law,”

and Kalambata’s work makes this explicit: the outlawing of witches is a direct example of how colonial power defined fugitivity, turning cultural and natural practices into criminalised acts while subordinating entire communities. Through this lens, the witch emerges not only as a figure of resistance but as a living embodiment of the arbitrary imposition of authority and the persistence of fugitivity in the face of state power.

Bwanga Kapumpa continues this exploration of prophetic and ancestral authority. At the Biennale, Kapumpa invited a fictional Ng’aka, Doctor Bwanga, to occupy a reimagined shrine: a German phone booth crowned with a Zambian thatched roof. Visitors could call the healer and receive advice, algorithmic, ancestral, or a blend of both, to soothe the disillusionments of modern life. Posters plastered across Berlin announced the healer’s arrival, promising healing, luck, protection, and guidance, just as in bustling Zambian cities. Doctor Bwanga prompts reflection on who we call when seeking answers, and who answers back, questioning hierarchies of knowledge and authority across ancestral and modern systems. Together, Haloba, Kapumpa, and Kalambata show that the artist, like the witch, healer, or jester, can operate from the margins to reveal truths and offer guidance in the spaces between power and resistance.

Law as Jester’s Orchestra: Sinthujan Varatharajah & Moshtari Hilal

If Haloba and Kapumpa summon prophetic and ancestral voices to unsettle authority, then Sinthujan Varatharajah and Moshtari Hilal render the law itself as a jester’s orchestra, exposing the bureaucratic choreography behind justice. Their work traces the paper trails of international law, showing how justice is mediated, repeated, and yet often stalled. Words accumulate slowly, meaning is negotiated, and humanity is recorded and trialled in bureaucratic form. In this choreography, the law is neither neutral nor natural; it is bound by the conditionality of capitalism, commodification, and historical inequities. Human rights frameworks, designed as universal ideals, frequently function as conceptual tools monopolised to benefit Western powers, leaving structural violence and unheeded suffering intact.

Even the Biennale’s graphic design by Enver Hadzijaj (Kosovo) performs this act of subtle deviation. The font Times is the go-to typeface of legal business, bureaucracy, and academia. It is the industry standard for court documents, so familiar that we no longer perceive it as designed, but as a carrier of power and certitude. Rhymes, however, used by the Biennale’s graphic designer, slips in as a covert deviation. Drawn between 2017 and 2021 from early discarded forms of Times, it almost passes for the standard—an act of identity theft. But in the end, it is a quirky changeling, a smokescreen truth. Like law itself, it deceives us into a false sense of security while quietly reshaping meaning.

Varatharajah and Hilal trace this paradox through video and documentation, mapping the histories of international law alongside mass crimes. Piles of paper echo the burden of bureaucracy, while an accompanying booklet details the legacy of People’s Tribunals, civil society forums where justice is claimed in response to violations committed by states, militias, or corporations. For the 13th Biennale, Paper Trail extended from two tribunals: one on the systematic persecution of activists in Sudan, the other on cultural repression as a tool of civil rights suppression in the Philippines. Over time, the critics will continue filling the space with essays, maintaining the work as a living, ongoing investigation.

Here, the law is recast as a jester: a performer that exposes both the absurdity and the violence of its own authority. Bureaucracy becomes the stage, and the paper trail becomes the instrument. In this framing, Varatharajah and Hilal position the artist as fugitive once more: negotiating institutional power, mediating histories of harm, and staging truth from the margins. Their work connects to the broader Biennale narrative, where witches, healers, comedians, jokers, and fools alike operate to reveal, resist, and survive within constrained and often instrumentalised systems.

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Comedy as Fugitivity: Mila Panic

This thread of defiance and truth-telling continues in Mila Panic’s While Other Kids Played with Legos. On the occasion of the Biennale, Panic opened the comedy club Big Mouth, performing 45-minute shows over six evenings with guest comedians, alongside ironic self-portraits, neon wall works, and an outdoor sound installation. Drawing from her personal experiences growing up in Bosnia during the war and relocating to Germany, Panic addresses war, migration, and victimisation. For her, stand-up comedy becomes a form of contemporary art, a way of creating moments of freedom. Collective laughter in the face of trauma generates affirmation: there is still hope, we have not gone mad yet, and if we do, at least we do so together. Humour, like the fool, becomes a strategy of fugitivity, resisting despair while illuminating uncomfortable truths.

Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s The Joker extends this lineage, reminding us that we have all been made fools in the games of peace and governance. The Joker is reclaimed not as comic relief but as a truth-teller. In his imagination, the fool exposes the absurdity of hierarchies, the injustice of power, and the necessity of imaginative resistance, joining the same line as witches, healers, and comedians: figures who unsettle, provoke, and survive through cunning and play.

Creative Trauma: Helena Uambembe & Huda Lufti

Helena Uambembe and Huda Lutfi carry these archetypes further into the terrain of trauma. Uambembe’s How to Make a Mud Cake deadpans, “The more creative with your trauma, the better,” a line that frames her biting, absurd, and satirical video. She pokes at the expectation that artists aestheticise pain for public consumption, weaving empire, displacement, memory, and performance into her mock tutorial. Lutfi’s The Fool’s Journal similarly confronts trauma through tomfoolery, adorned with paper cutouts from Egyptian newspapers tracing the aftermath of the Tahrir Square uprising.

Her work speaks in its native tongue to volatile feelings, and the fool’s hat embraces otherness, refusing containment. Together, they expose the pressures on artists from war-torn or displaced contexts to make pain legible and palatable, showing that trauma can be voiced through irony, foolery, and cunning gestures that resist commodification. They ask the viewer to read between the lines, to recognise the creative strategies through which truth slips out.

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The Berlin Biennale feels deeply themed for our time. While genocide in Palestine is televised, these works remind us, through the fugitive, what it means to witness, survive, and respond. Witch, healer, comic, joker, fool, and clever fox navigate institutions, unsettle hierarchies, and offer guidance in the spaces between power and resistance.

Central to this edition is the creation of an internationale, a collective, anti-colonial network of artists and practices that prevents hierarchies of solidarity from forming. Solidarity here is not performative, not a staged gesture for recognition, but an active, ongoing practice of connection, action, and care. Within this framework, the role of the jester is reinterpreted, operating covertly, reading between the lines, revealing truths, and guiding action from the margins.

From Haloba’s opera to Panic’s comedy, from Yawngwongse’s joker to Varatharajah and Hilal’s bureaucratic orchestra, from Uambembe’s satire to Lutfi’s creative confrontation, deviance emerges as an ethic of solidarity. It fosters spaces for resistance, alternative forums of justice, and imaginative interventions where governance fails. The Biennale becomes a stage for fugitives, where survival lies in breaking scripts, reclaiming agency, and enacting solidarity as a lived, collective practice rather than a performance.

and attracting serious buyers, numerous galleries welcome both new and familiar faces.

I’ve slowly carved out my own rhythm with galleries in Brussels, Mathilde Hatzenberger’s space among them. We’ve become pleasantly acquainted, and from time to time (read: often). I slip into the art bookshop run by her partner, who keeps a selection that always tempts. Just above the store is now Mathilde’s new gallery space, where I often check in on the latest exhibition.

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On a recent visit, I was blown away by the works on view with the title AfriqueS, and last Saturday I had the joy of returning to host a tour in collaboration with the Pink Poodle Society, a creative members club marking the show’s exclusively extended opening on its final weekend.

The tour was not a continuation of gatekeeping, open to poodle members and beyond, as I’ve been excited to find new ways to open up these spaces to others. As the arts are not just a pastime activity for the rich and culture connects us in ways that transcend buying power. Instead, a magical and deeply connected feeling is what I felt when I was sent into a rhythmic trance after seeing this exhibition.

The exhibition brought together Moroccan artists from Essaouira’s vibrant art singulier movement of the late 20th century, alongside Benjamin Deguénon from Cotonou, Benin, and artists such as Roxanne Jackson and Gérald Vatrin, whose practices have been shaped by African contexts.

Essaouira itself has long been an artistic magnet. Known for its windswept port city charm, it became a vital centre for Morocco’s art scene from the late 1980s. Danish gallerist Frédéric Damgaard was instrumental in this, championing self-taught artists who worked outside formal traditions and bringing their works into international circulation. Many of the pieces in AfriqueS date from the 1990s, a period now seen as historically pivotal for this movement. The works bear an imaginative force, personal and unrestrained.

Work from this special hub of Essaouira is often described as singular because it sits outside academic training and formal schools of art. The artists here forged practices rooted in personal vision, memory, and lived experience. Self-taught and perspective-free, their work resists easy categorisation, carrying both the intimacy of isolation and the universality of shared expression.

Beyond Abstraction: Stories, Spirits, and Survival in Essaouira’s Art

Among the artists on display is Mohamed Tabal, one of the only darker-skinned artists in the exhibition. He often includes self-portraiture in his work, appearing as a horned creature or a mirrored figure turned upside down. His melanated figures assert: We are here.

His name, Tabal, meaning drummer, ripples through the rhythm of his compositions, full of movement, pulse, and creaturely forms. Essaouira has long been a centre of Gnawa culture, where music, trance, and spirituality intertwine. That same rhythm and intensity of spiritual energy sit quietly in his work. His mystical creatures feel rooted in oral tales and the trance-like states of Gnawa ceremony, where boundaries between human, spirit, and animal blur. In this way, Tabal’s canvases feel deeply personal.

In his aquatic scene’s Azeddine Sanana, once a fisherman, playful fish and water spirits drift across the canvas. That seafaring past lingers in his imagery, a peaceful fluidity both grounded and whimsical. I like this image of a practice cultivated around his life, the other idea that the artist is a full-time thinker of the scene, but rather a fisherman full of the beauty at sea. Sanana reminds us of this self-taught, rich, artistic culture of the region; his craftsmanship and his skills as a fisherman were absorbed in his work, and it wouldn’t be clear to know how or if you could separate the two.

Mohamed Babahoum illustrates how this era of artists from Essaouira worked in a perspective-free style. In this hub, art was made by the artist for themselves, guided by insular interests and spirituality. Gestural, bold, and yet grounded in culture, his works depict market life as well as fantastical scenes, often in a naïve style. They are deeply rich for what they are: contextual. Rural life appears in earthy browns and vivid orange tones. One of my guests on the tour confessed they had only ever seen such a shade in Morocco, “a brown-orange.” Everyday colours, yet extraordinary in their unfamiliarity. Babahoum’s scenes were painted on found cardboard, giving them an immediate presence.

Gestural Abstraction

Within this scene, Saïd Ouarzaz stands out. Known as the “Pollock” of Essaouira for his fast, gestural dripping technique applied to canvases and found objects, he creates work that is meticulously detailed, paired with a surreal undercurrent, balancing discipline and dream. Although often categorised as abstract, I love that his work remains so deeply figurative. This is what makes abstraction compelling: that which we can still see, feel, and engage with even as it fractures and dissolves.

I speculated, encouragingly with Mathilde, about the object value of such categorisations, intellectualising strokes when what truly brings them to life is emotion, depth of figuration, and movement. I think the label “Pollock of Essaouira” is a little reductive; what he does is deeply spiritual, richly figurative, and masterful in its creative flexibility.

One of my favourite works in the show is a ghostly abstract. Hovering over the entire canvas are dark figures, their eyes gazing outwards, while at the front, a small yellow castle anchors the scene. This castle is Castelo Real de Mogador, known locally as “Castel Melo,” one of the Portuguese fortifications built in Essaouira in the 16th century. Unlike Pollock, Saïd tells depthful stories of past and present, his canvases are not only gestures but commentaries, anchored in place, history, and lived experience.

In conversation with Benjamin Deguénon

Mathilde added the work of three non-Moroccan artists to show the bridges, inheritances, common points, and artistic descents are wonderful to observe and subtly impose the idea that all art, if it is art, can only be raw. Among them is Benjamin Deguénon is from Cotonou; his mixed-media practice folds in mirrors, assemblage, and layered imagery, offering fractured yet rhythmic reflections of contemporary life.

I had the pleasure of getting in contact with Benjamin, and he shared some insights about his work.

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These works ask what remains when art created in isolation travels into other contexts, what survives translation? And what happens when art is curated for tourists, read through the European frame, are we consuming tourist art(read: mass reproductions)? I wondered how much I was adding to hearsay in my interpretation, yet what was clear was the unspoken movement and depth this work sparked, as many talked about it with Mathilde present to spark minds, as she would say.

Many of the artists were shaped by everyday life rather than external expectations. Azeddine Sanana was a fisherman, painting aquatic scenes rooted in his lived experience, not preparing works for European markets. Mohamed Babahoum depicted rural life and markets in earthy browns and vivid oranges, painting on found cardboard, deeply embedded in local colour and memory.

When artists from the continent (read: Africa) sell only through the largest galleries in Cape Town or New York, what does that do to the localising of art? Do artists question who they are you selling to, and what they’re selling? Is it the accolade of being deemed collectable, or is there something else at stake: belonging, recognition, reciprocity? These questions linger long after the gallery doors close, reminding me that art is never just about objects, but about the contexts and lives touched.

A heartfelt thank you to Pink Poodle for the collaboration and to everyone who joined the tour with such curiosity and care. And to Mathilde for her generosity of time and mind. The gallery continues its rhythm this week with a new exhibition opening worth stopping by.

See recap of the tour here

What’s On:

Mathilde Hatzenberger Gallery, Brussels:Pier Vittorio Aureli Solo “Tavolette” at 9, rue Lesbroussart, 1050 Ixelles 📅> 23Nov 23

A Foundation, Brussels: What's the word? Johannesburg! 📅11 Sept- until 21 December

Whitehouse Gallery, Brussels: The other’s gaze with Clara Brörmann - Nino Kvrivishvili Ninokvrivishvili 📅04 Sep - 04 Oct

Berlin Bienale: Final Week 📅>14 Sept

Berlin Art Week: 📅10-14t Sept

La Loge,Brussels : 𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗥𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀 كَيْ لا نَنْسَى (𝗞𝗮𝘆 𝗹𝗮 𝗻𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗮) 𝗯𝘆 @inas.halabi
📅4 Sep-30 Nov

Brussels Art Week 📅4-7 Sept

Autograph, London: I Still Dream of Lost Vocabularies⁠
📅 Thursday 9 Oct

Ikon Gallery, Birmingham: Donald Locke-Resistance Forms (FREE)📅 1 Oct– 22 Feb 2026

M HKA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp: The Geopolitics of Infrastructure | Özgür Kar | King Kong

Confession: I’ve been gallivanting… That’s not new, but at the moment it’s been more than usual, back-to-back. I fear my habit of hoarding impressions until I cook up something whole won’t hold. So, I thought I’d share some thoughts separated from the whole, while I slowly prepare the larger chunks that make sense together. I went to see the 13th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art—the bigger whole I’m still digesting. But I also made it to Toyin Ojih Odutola’s exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof, which felt strikingly on theme.

Ojih Odutola's work explores social and political dynamics through the medium of skin, the fluidity of expression, and the meanings of darkness and light. Much of her work speaks to being transported across time and place, echoing the feelings that surfaced for me while in motion, gallivanting en route.

I was fully swallowed by her figures. Her portraits trace the lives of various protagonists, drawn in everyday or monumental settings interwoven with architectural detail. In the East Cabinet of the gallery, she transformed the space into ‘Adijatu Straße,’ a fictional station on the U22 underground line, an imaginative site that explores the interplay between movement and history, and where stories stretch across time zones and emotional states, much like my own reflections while in transit.

The U-Bahn is Berlin's lifeline: it transports vibes, people and goods and its average transit time of 30 to 40 minutes stages the spatial weight for stories and memories. I have a specific memory of being on the U-Bahn, wondering where I’d be in a couple of years, asking myself to muster patience and reflect on all that had already come to pass. Towards the end of that stint in the city, I remember a distinct feeling of getting along while still feeling lost. There was still a lot of easing into self that needed to happen.

This trip to Berlin felt nostalgic as hell, and the still gaze within Toyin Ojih Odutola’s U22 Adijatu Straße, named after her Muslim first name in the West African Yoruba language, reminded me how being in motion has always felt like stepping into a time machine. It’s part of why I cherish these in-between moments: time to transcend, to imagine.

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Upon entering the exhibition, visitors hear announcements from a fictional underground line, whose stations bear the titles of the artist's exhibitions. Spoken by the artist’s cousin, who lives in Berlin, they reinforce the fusion of reality and fiction in the exhibition space.

The gallery space Hamburger Bahnhof, too, feels staged in time, the terminus of the Berlin-Hamburg railway, closed to rail traffic in 1884. Taken off the rail line but still within it, we alight into Toyin’s subway, into a world of intimate encounters. This is because the construction of the station coincided with the colonial expansion of the German Empire into parts of the African continent. The exhibition title also refers to social conflicts arising from the renaming of streets from colonial rulers to resistance fighters.

Engaging with this history, Toyin’s station holds a new world. A cityscape with a station as common to culture and close to home as Americanaaah, and a questioning of real African presence: my city has no name Damm. Toyin’s exhibition is dreamy. It calls for the same pace that being in transit demands: patient, yet alert to the people around us and to all that can evolve. Space, history, and politics unfold here, and this movement, both internal and external, is deeply beautiful.

Language also plays a central role in Ojih Odutola's practice: she publishes detailed narratives about the figures she draws, integrates texts into her graphic works, and brings the exhibition to life through spoken voices. Stations such as A Colonized Mind (2008, Alabama), To Wander Determined (2017, New York), and A Countervailing Theory (2020, London) are located on an imaginary route totalling 25,000 kilometres. Toyin Ojih Odutola’s artistic practice explores how narratives shift as they move through different places.

I found the mirrored gazes particularly mysterious and comforting. Toyin brings us into intimate spaces such as bathrooms and bedrooms, where the gaze looks back. Are they looking at us, or meeting each other across imagined platforms, world to world, wall to wall? Where are we?

Glances across the exhibition space reveal relationships between the protagonists. Some figures seem connected by family ties, others by shared paths or spontaneous encounters. Like strangers who meet fleetingly on a train platform.

Her drawings feel like a manifestation of an inner world made external. Through her everyday monumental settings, we sit across from figures in intimate spaces, allowing their presence.

While I’m still in the process of becoming, this trip made me realise there’s been real movement in that in-between space since the last time I was in Berlin. As I return each year, coming back feels like a kind of litmus test for growth. I felt seen in Toyin's metaphor of the subway beyond a place of passage. Whether in Paris most recently or Berlin, the subway is a space where intimacy, curiosity, and vulnerability can be shared. Likewise, seeing art becomes a realm to build and communicate possible worlds.

Toyin Ojih Odutola: U22 Adijatu Straße at Hamburger Bahnhof is on view from 13 June 2025 to 4 January 2026
An exhibition of the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

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For fuck’s sake! The director of a well-known museum had floated past us during lunch, hovering over the ground like an Issey Miyake-adorned monk. If you know, you know type energy, like a normal person…

This is not what I had been looking at all day. But I loved it.

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After fair week, I feel the tension of (critical) art within the commerciality of fairs is not just a contradiction but a reflection of the very contradiction we live in. Artists push back and create new worlds, even as the system desperately clings to itself by recycling distractions. I fear that one of those distractions may even be (critical) art itself, as it becomes something to be bought and sold, absorbed into the market it seeks to critique.

I believe this mirrors a broader global struggle between resistance and the forces that suppress it. Where the cost of living continues to rise, basic needs become supermarket hauls, and wars rage on even as sales are made. We are watching images of violence and collapse on our phones while standing in white-walled booths discussing aesthetics. These contradictions aren't just present; they are the conditions of our lives. And artists, knowingly or not, are responding to and shaped by them.

And yes, this is precisely where art’s magic lives. Artists mirror the times and try to communicate the world as we’re living in it: the contradictions, the pressing questions, the joy and the chaos. At its best, art disrupts. I saw many attempts to capture this sense of the disorienting contradictions of our moment.

Across the fairs, I felt this stacking of realities, this tension and interplay, everywhere. The push and pull were palpable in many works. Recurring themes emerged: scale in sculpture, chaos in abstract, the layering cost of past and present, and the whirl of reality infused with subliminal messaging.

The work of Istifan was my first hit of this tension, taking shape in what Jeff Magid recently recalled as “douche bag art.” The term stuck with me: relatable, branded. bold and instantly recognisable, to the common person. This is ready-made art you could spot from ten metres away. The kind of thing that photographs are, meme-friendly, adorned in the iconography of wealth.

The descriptors, visibly expensive, instantly recognisable, and designed to signal wealth, felt the opposite of the art on offer. Instead, the emphasis is on singularity, rarity, and a value that is already known and substantiated before the fair, as seen in works like El Anatsui’s pieces.

Everyday Objects Vuittonified: scale in sculpture.

We live suspended between a longing for beauty and the weight of everyday excess—a contradiction embodied in Shamiran Istifan’s work, where kitsch becomes a language of survival, memory, and misplaced luxury. The Swiss-based visual artist works with Middle Eastern symbolism and modern luxury kitsch. Her objects draw on the symbolism of daily life, showing how banal items become charged with meaning, sometimes even sacred, through the lived impressions of a culture that never set out to define them.

An object not traditionally seen as valuable, like the satellite dishes used by migrant populations to adorn high-rise flats and stay connected with home, is transformed in Shamiran Istifan’s work into a sculptural, marketplace-ready artefact. Her pieces are Vuittonified and Kanye adjacent, but they handle their juxtapositions with intention. They’re not exactly subtle, but they don’t pretend to be selling you something intangible either. Istifan’s work, though glossy, prods at the politics of consumption and asks: whose cultural currency is being put on display and for whom?

Unlike much of what is made primarily to sell at fairs, this year many sculptures felt created to be experienced and felt deeply. I feel the presence of sculptural works, both within and beyond the main Art Basel parcours, signals a shift away from fun-sized, easily movable pieces, toward works that demand engagement and reflection. If not sculptural, the works were large and haunting—figures and texts that occupied space with a powerful presence.

One standout example is Istifan’s double-sided sculptural installation The Lease Is Almost Up, presented at the main Art Basel fair and awarded the 2025 Swiss Art Award. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s writing on institutional memory, it merges architecture and narrative, incorporating inscriptions such as Girls play here to explore questions of visibility, memory, and who is allowed to occupy space. The work asks whose traces endure, who is rebuilt, and which absences are permitted to be acknowledged.

It reminded me of art’s deeper commitment, not just to beauty or critique, but to recording memory honestly. Which works register the contradictions of our moment, and which ones perform them? Artists, in this sense, take on the role of killjoys. And the killjoy’s commitment, to borrow from Ahmed again, is to expose the problem by embodying the problem.

Istifan’s work does exactly that while still inhabiting the contradiction of being sold. But perhaps that is the most honest position art can take today: sitting inside the system while still holding up a mirror to its absurdities.

Art, Capital, and World-Making: the layered cost of past and present.

Another challenge artists face when engaging with memory is price points. There is a clear awareness of the market dynamics at play within the fair. I’ve been reflecting on how pricing and access remain tightly controlled, and how artists might interpret or respond to this unavoidable reality. In Basel, artists are inevitably positioned within an economy where their work becomes part of systems they sometimes seek to critique.

Taqwa Ali’s, Netherlands-based Sudanese artist's, presence at VOLTA holds pricing constant; her “Mother’s Garden” series engages directly with the contradictions rooted in materiality, economy, and decoloniality. She traces the structural hegemonies of global trade through the very materials she uses—hibiscus and Arabic gum. Both are commonly used in Sudanese art and practices and are historically tied to trade and colonial extraction. In doing so, she draws deep connections between body, memory, and circulation, complicating the very notion of value in the art world.

In her large wooden frames, hibiscus bleeds and stains, leaving behind delicate traces that map how far these histories stretch. For Taqwa, materials carry memory. A ceremonial act, like making hibiscus tea from leaves her mother sends from Sudan, sparked an ongoing reflection on the emotional geographies and inherited ritual materials held. Her presentation in Basel manifests the continuation of trade, but on different terms. Yes, the work is being sold again, but this time, at a (fair) price that acknowledges the labour, the material, and the histories embedded within them.

Another striking exposure of our economic realities is Andrea Fraser’s Index III (2024). The chart in the work suggests it may already be too late to invest in rare whisky. While it critiques banking systems and shows investment in whisky surpassing investment in art, you still find yourself at art fairs where people come to invest. The question becomes—is this chart hyperbole, or are you looking at stock trends right now? That uneasy mix of critique and commerce.

And then there's the cost of hope. At Photo Basel, Gallerist Barbara Polla shared the importance of holding onto hope, past and present. She was referring to the Geneva-based Gallery Analix Forever's presentation of The Beginning of Hope. Among which was an engraved slab by Guillaume Chamahian that gave me chills. A snapshot in time, just as the world was profoundly changed by one man, then taken. “Is that what I think it is?” Yes. But also, a quiet reminder through these images that at the beginning, there was always hope.

Memory, Belonging, and New Narratives: The whirl of reality infused with subliminal messaging.

A highlight was the arrival of Africa Basel, the first edition of this special international contemporary art fair showcasing works and artists from Africa and its diaspora, while making space for creative exchange and dialogue among galleries, collectors, and art enthusiasts, and promoting global interest in African art. The fair’s discussions hosted urgent and generative conversations. Renowned figures such as Ibrahim Mahama, recipient of an ‘Established Artists’ Art Basel Prize, spoke on the evolving infrastructures needed to support African art on the continent. Sammy Baloji, whose practice weaves together research, archival material, and poetic visual strategies, expanded conversations around memory, material, and the role of the artist as witness.

The fair actively reimagined the space contemporary African art occupies, pushing beyond representation toward agency, authorship, and structural change. Without such contextual depth, African art risks becoming a commodity aesthetic rather than a site of knowledge. The fair insisted on that difference.

An example of this insistence is Artworld Passport by Richard Mudariki, created with artHARARE. This satirical project offered limited-edition passports at a consular desk in the courtyard, inviting visitors to apply for a “visa” on-site, for a surprisingly high fee. The cost (400 francs per visa) was part of the critique, drawing attention to the economic and bureaucratic barriers in the art world. Mudariki himself couldn’t attend due to visa restrictions, the very issue his work addresses. He appeared via screen behind the desk, a powerful presence that underscored the work’s message about access, exclusion, and mobility.

The whirl of reality feels especially impermeable in photography. It mirrors what either is or is not. A work either touches you or feels distant, regardless of who is selling it or their intentions for profit. This feeling surfaced again as I wandered through the quieter corners of Photo Basel and Africa Basel, where works by Danielle Dailleux and Nabil Boutros lingered in my mind. Boutros’s 2010 project explored how clothing and appearance in Egyptian society communicate identity and social status, questioning their reliability by transforming himself into various male characters through changes in hair and beard styling.

That tension around identity and appearance resonated strongly because Basel week, in particular, felt like fashion week but for art. The curated looks, even the museum director, who floated like a Miyake monk. Dressing the character felt built in, a performance tied to cultural capital and blurring the lines between art and social signalling.

While Denis Dailleux captured an honest otherworldliness of home and joy.Not Ghana, but that sensation of ease, of flowing. His images are kind and fair, quietly calling you in. Here, the whirl of Jamestown unfolds as fishermen work and children dream. Their fractured narratives and symbolic cues played with disorientation, pulling viewers into reflection or echoing what I’ve come to think of as the whirl of reality infused with subliminal messaging.

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Istifan’s work was a welcome anchor during my first Basel experience. Amid the whirlwind, artists continue to leave subliminal crumbs—subtle ideas about value, visibility and cultural capital. These are more than aesthetic gestures; they are notes on art, capital and cultural currency. Ultimately, artists reflect diverse voices, stories and aesthetics, inviting us to rethink what art is and what it can become: a mirror of our contradictions, a form of resistance and a catalyst for change.

The larger question remains: can art be created and circulated outside the entrenched economic systems that shape so much of its meaning and accessibility? What might true pluralism in art markets look like, and how could it reshape cultural dialogue and power dynamics? Fairs like Liste already carry this radicality within, while Africa Basel points to new possibilities, centring dialogue, context and community engagement alongside commerce. These emerging models offer hope that art markets can evolve beyond purely commercial logic and become spaces for critical exchange, representation and reimagination.

Not to make everything about class struggle, but also yes. The evolving roles, struggles, and dynamics within today’s art system reveal how class struggle continues to play out in the art world vis-à-vis the context of neo-capitalism, where everything meaningful can be commodified.

My fear is that art, at fair scale, is the manifestation of this casino slot machine: money goes in, and out comes the artist producing. This production of beauty is often highly niche, created for the highest bidder, who pays to add “beauty” and value to their life. The bourgeois call it “elevated living”.

The buyers at fairs are not everyday art lovers. But in reality, many arrive in fast cars, not to appreciate, but to acquire, hoarding pieces as “assets.” Don’t get me wrong. I understand that art collecting can be a way to secure wealth. But I also believe in preserving the integrity of art, as craft rather than production, or the emotional or political work it sets out to do.

I want to believe that art should serve its moving, stirring duty first, and if an artist gains success over the years and puts out a thoughtful, well-priced collection, all the better. It’s this second purpose of acquiring art that I remain unsure about. And while it might be naive, I understand that buyers enable an artist’s livelihood. Still, surely it shouldn’t only be the extremely rich who can afford to own art.

It’s also the inherently classist nature of buying art that creates an environment, I feel, that deters many people from engaging with it, so you see, my real problem might be with the bourgeoisie all along. And the snobby gallerist who assesses your outfit or Googles your name before paying you any mind. I found that attitude cold at first, but, strangely, also to my advantage. I've started to enjoy galleries because I’m paid no mind, left alone to enjoy the art on my terms. Still, I have to admit that the museum offers a much more accessible experience overall.

My suspicion is that distinction already hints at who the art fair is really for and shows in the kind of art on display, which I’ve long speculated wouldn’t speak to me. And that cold, nose-in-the-air crowd was exactly what I expected to find at an art fair.

After the event, we spoke briefly. I told her I was looking forward to seeing her new work.
“When?” she asked with a smile.
I hesitated—I knew she had work on display at the fair, which, truthfully, was one of the main reasons I was tempted to go.
“I hope soon,” I replied.

So instead of standing on the outside as a sceptic, on the rare chance that I manifested a ticket, I had to go.

Lebohang Kganye’s light

I walked past the champagne bar and the overly commercial displays, weaving through the fair until I reached the Le Parternoir booth. And there, just around the corner, were the large hangings by Lebohang Kganye. Mosebetsi wa Dirithi Kganye extrapolates figures of family members from photo albums to create unique, life-size, textile-based works.

Born in South Africa (b.1990), Kganye began her artistic journey in 2010, shortly after the passing of her mother. That loss sparked a personal pilgrimage across the country, where she gathered family stories—fragments of memory and experience that continue to shape her work today. Through her family history, Kganye explores South Africa’s political past and its resonances in the present. Her works embody this passage of time, of identity, of memory.

After hearing a woman comment Ah, very nice fabric as if not knowing how to engage otherwise. I thought again about value, who assigns value, at what level, and which depths remain unacknowledged or unattained by the public?

During the Q&A at A foundation, I had Kganye asked;
Your very personal work is doing well in Europe, yet its context, the nuanced implications of apartheid in South Africa, isn’t always apparent to the public. There’s a kind of dissonance here, juxtaposed with how open and emotionally resonant your work is. Perhaps the public’s inability to grasp these subtleties reflects a broader deficit, I wondered whether this is a cost artists are aware of.

Kganye felt it’s not always the artist’s task to over-explain to the public. Maybe this is where those writing about the work come in, she suggested…to do the long-form labour of contextualisation. (I loved this wink—also an acknowledgement of the labour already carried out by the artist in making the work itself.)

For her, the challenge lies in rendering that feeling into something three-dimensional, like the curfew lights in her Le Parternoir exhibition. In apartheid South Africa, curfew lights were used to control the movement of the Black population at night, a haunting reminder of surveillance and spatial restriction.

Her last name, fittingly, also means light. Mosebetsi wa Dirithi translates as “the work of shadows” in Sesotho.as she brings light and life to layered postcolonial histories is an animating thread in her practice

Nadim Choufi ‘s Diplomatic Bestiary

“Radical” work I was not expecting to see at an art fair was Nadim’s work. Josilda da Conceição represented a solo presentation of Nadim Choufi, a Netherlands-based Lebanon-born artist. I first encountered Nadim’s practice at the Van Eyck Academy, where he was a resident until 2024, developing what would become Diplomatic Bestiary, a series of sculptures completed in mid-2023, tracing the modular legacy to colonial campaign furniture. Originally scheduled to be shown in April 2024, then postponed to October, the exhibition is now on hold indefinitely due to the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the war in Lebanon.

The project explores how diplomacy becomes a material in itself, that warps, mutates, and distorts the people, land, and objects it seeks to govern. And in many ways, the project is undergoing mutation, shaped by the very geopolitical forces it reflects.

I was drawn to the work because it lays bare how easily conceptual peace can be made and just as easily undone. In other pieces, he explores peace missions that, while framed in the language of global development, were fundamentally colonial in nature. His reflections interrogate the malleability of development: who defines its value, and who seizes land under its banner.

Without a sincere commitment to purpose, diplomacy can slip into pure bestiality. Just as furniture can be designed to support or to restrain, so too can diplomacy. What appears functional may, in fact, conceal violence. That duality, and the fragility of our so-called world order, is deeply confronting.

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Louise Delanghe’s searching is becoming

Louise Delanghe (b. 1994), a graduate of KASK, Ghent—where I saw many exciting graduates last year, seems part of a breeding ground for work created in the context and relevance of the vibrant present. Inspired by classical paintings of the past, she brings new life to the genre, humorously technical and featuring women prominently throughout her work.

Her reflections on women coming of age offer a refreshing take on what might otherwise resemble classical painting. While technically serious in method, her works are full of surprise in texture, scale, and the comic rhythm of subject engagement. She paints many directions, with some works even transforming into sculptures. Classical scenarios, like “man on a horse”, are reimagined as a woman on a cow, a playful nod to self-portraiture and her upbringing on a farm.

In the work of Delanghe, i see the dance of becoming with the swinging tendencies of being. This body of work is a search through time and space, beginning at the moment of conception, reaching toward endless coloured peaks of womanhood. I enjoyed the honesty of these pains of the unknown, resulting in unexpected paintings whose subject matter embraces awkward tension rather than finalised, perfected beauty.

Her paint moves deftly between light and dark, past and future, memory and longing. What we see are passages of inner interest, shifts that transform into sculptures and paintings made from the material of the moment-like the fleeting instance they try to hold. Turning old wood intocanvasSearching is becoming.

I'm excited to be surprised like this. Her gallery carries the same spirit: an energy of young people bringing youth back into the trade and craft. This feels like a new epoch of painting. I’m keen to visit the gallery and see more of the work on their books.

Ewa Partum’s active poetry

Towards the end, I found a conceptual gem: the work of feminist and conceptual Polish artist Ewa Partum (b. 1945). Her practice is about creating signs that lead to more. As acts of linguistic and performative play in search of a new artistic language. Partum believed painting had exhausted its potential to generate new or transformative ideas, turning instead to interventions that questioned meaning, space, and visibility. Her work touches on the notion of public space, female subjectivity, and the political tensions of the 1980s, all with a clarity and quiet force that continues to resonate.

“In Poland, during the seventies, avant-garde art was a male-only domain. ”An example of her pionering is Women, Marriage is Against You! (1980), where she dressed in a wedding dress, wrapped herself in transparent foil, and topped it with a sign that read “For Men.” Then, she cut through the dress and foil, emerging naked, powerfully challenging societal expectations around women and marriage.

Her work reminded me of how I fell in love with art through the Fluxus artists who dealt with the poverty of art, focusing on the transfer of ideas rather than mere objects to consume. Similary, she engages deeply in the ideas of art itself.

Her artistic legacy is carried forward in Artum Foundation along with her daughter, artist Monika Partum, and her work is represented by Ewa Opolaka Gallery in Poland. The gallery was the winner of the 68 Forward Prize at this year’s Art Brussels fair, and rightfully so, for bringing the work of such a giant to the foreground again. I was also in awe of how much of a triumph this was, considering that small galleries bear the cost of attending fairs, which often results in the market being saturated by larger galleries.

if you want to say something , speak in the langauge of the language -Ewa Partum

Overall, not sure if buying art as an extension of lifestyle is entirely wrong, seeing artist benifit from such purchases but I had a great time discovering new work while also seeing some familiar artists exhibited here. While I remain wary, Fairs also feels like a valuable stage to expose a new kind of audience to radical, carefully crafted work that engages deeply with the creation of art itself, exploring art in the language of language.

Other artists I encountered included Cassi Namoda, represented by Xavier Hufkens Gallery, whose vibrant works delve into the complexities of personal identity and history. Additionally, Go Mulan showecased Dion Rosina's compelling pieces, offer profound, jazz-infused photographic paintings inspired by spirituality, alienation, and historical reflections on the African diaspora and the nuances of personal and collective memory.

I’ve found myself drawn deeply into Betty’s story, as well as the broader role of the political figures who shape how we remember liberation movements. While her husband is widely celebrated and, admittedly, I’m equally charmed, I wanted to know about her.

Betty Kaunda, born Beatrice Kaweche Banda in Chinsali, Northern Province of Zambia, is remembered as “Mama Betty”, a mother of the nation, not by ceremony but through action. She helped define what it meant to be a revolutionary partner, walking in lockstep with the liberation movement rather than standing in the shadows.

Betty Kaunda nearly pursued a career as a teacher early in her life, a respected path for women at the time, but her life took a different course when she married Kenneth Kaunda, who would later become Zambia’s first president. Instead, her leadership, deeply rooted in service and mentorship, went on to embody the values of unity and commitment, much like a teacher shaping and supporting her students.

As Kenneth Kaunda faced imprisonment, surveillance, and detention for his involvement with the Zambian African National Congress and later UNIP, Betty held the home front with grace and resolve under extremely difficult conditions. During her husband’s detention, she visited him regularly and served as a calm, resilient public presence, showing colonial authorities that intimidation would not weaken the movement.

Beyond her role as a mother of the nation, she held active roles in the struggle. She played a vital supportive role within the United National Independence Party (UNIP)and its Women’s League, encouraging women’s political participation and helping to anchor the party’s ethos of unity and collective care. She actively sustained the struggle by sheltering activists and freedom fighters operating under the radar, she also delivered covert messages. Despite constant police harassment, she remained steadfast in her belief in justice and independence.

The Matriarch

Unearthing these photographs, I’ve always felt that Betty Kaunda embodied a profound regality and respect. As a couple, Betty and Kenneth Kaunda seemed like true role models. Married for 66 years and parents to nine children, Dr Kaunda often spoke candidly in public about how much he adored her, even breaking into song to serenade her. I suspect that this mirrored the way women are treated in Zambian society till today, where matriarchs hold deep influence, guiding families, communities, and important decisions.

This quiet authority, the soft power, Mama Betty, made leadership look like care. In return, she was widely respected. I don’t think we can take such affection for granted; it was rare to have a First Lady so publicly loved. She was not merely an accessory to power, but a realistic aspiration for women. Her humility in this likeness was her strength, a true example.

Pan African Fashion

Alongside UNIP’s enthusiasm for pan African liberation, it hosted the ANC headquarters in Lusaka for several years. Mama Betty emboldened a wider Pan-African dignity and strength of women in liberation struggles with her fashion, as a public presence. Rejecting luxury or excess, she often appeared in traditional chitenge, sending a powerful message about simplicity, service, and cultural pride.

Quite the opposite of Grace “Gucci”, I recently came across a TikTok video about the former First Lady of Zimbabwe, whose lavish shopping sprees earned her that famous nickname. Mama Betty, by contrast, exudes humility and grace, standing far apart from the extravagant spending we now generally associate with presidents’ wives. Public money, of course, during her husband’s presidency.

Moreover, the chitenge cloth was more than just fashion during Zambia’s independence era. It was a visual tool of political solidarity, particularly under the United National Independence Party (UNIP). Worn widely by members of the UNIP Women’s League, including figures like Betty Kaunda, the cloth featured slogans, party emblems, and portraits of Kenneth Kaunda. This attire was strategically worn during rallies, public holidays, and community mobilisations, transforming women into visible agents of the movement. It symbolised allegiance, resistance, and pride, uniting women under the call for liberation and, later, for national development. Embodying this pride with grace and grounded, Mama Betty was visibly a rallying point for women’s involvement in nation-building.

Across the continent, fashion was a language of resistance. Women like Ghana’s Ama Ata Aidoo and Nigeria’s Buchi Emecheta used clothing and aesthetics to express political commitment and cultural sovereignty. Nigerian women, too, tailored their wrappers short for movement, pairing them with extra fabric draped over the shoulder or arm and bold, sculptural head ties. These choices were not just about style, they were declarations of identity, pride, and refusal to conform to colonial norms.

Even during official functions and state celebrations, women would wear UNIP chitenges draped elegantly, often with extra cloth carried over the arm or styled into dramatic headwraps. This fusion of politics and fashion marked a period where nation-building and self-expression coexisted—and where women continued to lead, not just through activism, but also through style

Mama Betty Kaunda passed away on 18 September 2012 in Harare, Zimbabwe, while visiting her daughter, Musatilanji Kaunda Banda—affectionately known as Musata. A trained teacher by profession and a national icon, Mama Betty was posthumously recognised in 2023 by the African Union (AU) as a Freedom Activist and founding member of the Pan African Women’s Organisation. She was honoured alongside other women freedom fighters whose contributions have often been overlooked in past commemorations.

This year, the AU’s theme is Reparations, a call to acknowledge and address the enduring impacts of colonialism and systemic injustices across the continent. Reparations, in this declaration, go beyond financial compensation; they encompass justice, healing, and restoring dignity to those and their descendants who suffered under oppression.

I was particularly keen to learn about the cultural pillar and the role of remembering as an act of power, a political and cultural act that acknowledges the realities of injustice and the courage it took to resist them. It was powerful to see how this iconic Zambian woman is honoured within this act of remembrance, as Africans continue to reclaim their stories and strengthen the struggle for justice and equality.

Thank you for reading this far. I jotted down these reflections while working on the Cecelia Miller exhibition and looking at archive footage on Zambia’s rich history and culture. I’m currently working on a couple of articles and Gallivant reviews, but wanted to share some of the lovely photographs and icons that have captivated me recently.

Going to Town is Cecelia Miller’s second solo exhibition. The project uses archival images to reimagine the infrastructural memory of the capital city we all love, Lusaka, Zambia. In her signature style, Cecelia draws on the archive to trace her family history, which is closely tied to Lusaka’s development. To witness this history, one simply has to follow the journey from her family home in Lilayi to the Every Lusaka gallery and then into town.

When we began to think about how we could give words and colour to the story of home, I thought back to my last trip in 2023. Otherwise known as “the summer I quit my job to fully focus on my Summer “(10/10 experience). It was only my second time returning as an adult—I’d left at a young age and always went back with my parents. This trip was different. Over the years, I’d built friendships with people based at home, so I knew where I could land and planned to navigate from there. While fighting off dread about this necessary decision, a profound feeling of belonging gave me purpose and filled a gap I felt in Europe.

The month unemployed came with internal screams and the occasional fear of self-damnation, but I embraced my new role as Minister of Enjoyment, with Rema’s Holiday as my soundtrack. Six full weeks where my roots lie. I passenger-princessed on a road trip through the bush with friends. Between dodging “why are you still single?” blows and chasing gallivant quests, I dug through my grandmother’s political archive and spent time in Lusaka with art bae Sana Ginwalla(the gallerist and Curator of the Bunch), who took me to countless art sites. I bought, arrived, and felt at home. Through city drives, detours, and the friends I made, I carved out my slice of home.

Belonging Through Memory

The title of the exhibition came as I was thinking out loud about how even the most mundane journey, like going to town, came with all the familiar cues of being home.

As a long-time gallivanter, tagging along to run errands with anyone who ventured out was my favourite pastime growing up. Revisiting this activity while home, I noticed with newfound curiosity and listened with sensory sharpness to the urban commotion: the hooting minibuses, street vendors calling out prices, and chance encounters with family members who didn’t yet know I was back in the country. The still-standing colonial-built shop façades lining downtown were etched in my memories like cartoon cowboy saloons.

Going to town was, in a way, going home, with everything that comes with it: unfinished conversations, uncles with layered laughter, and the unshakable sense that memory sits somewhere in the middle, between past and present.

Works like Cecelia’s Freedom House remind me of how belonging finds its way through our roots. I learnt from my grandmother, while eagerly listening to her political commentary (it was election season, after all), that thought-daughtering runs through my veins. She was a political person in her heyday: chairwoman of a district appointed by the United National Independence Party (UNIP), Zambia’s first ruling party after independence. I devoured her stories of the pre-independence Cha Cha Cha campaign of civil disobedience days, rifling through her archive, we came across post-independence campaign time pictures: “And here,” she laughed, “we danced so hard!” A little cocky, she added, “I’m afraid we lost this campaign.” But at peace with that defeat, it had become a sweet memory.

My grandmother’s old stomping ground, also known as UNIP Camp- Freedom House, embodied the party’s humanist philosophy rooted in collective care and African socialism. It became a hub for gatherings and political outreach. Today, it stands as a symbol of Zambia’s political heritage and solidarity with regional independence movements. Its legacy reflects both the fragility and resilience of liberation dreams.

Heritage is Healing

This familial connection is similar to Cecelia’s connection to Zambia. Her forefathers and matriarchs had moved to the country during its boom years—in 1902, when her great-grandfather arrived in what was then Northern Rhodesia as a contracted engineer on the Cape to Cairo railway project. He worked on the line from Livingstone to Lubumbashi, and in 1912, settled the family in Lilayi, where Lilayi Farm, her childhood home, still stands.

It felt natural to explore belonging through history, as identity is shaped by our roots. The making of a person—or a people—is tied to lineage, with ancestral memory still threaded through us. The project took on three layers: historical context, physical infrastructure, and (oral) stories passed down through generations. Reminiscing on everyday encounters, we meditated on how belonging is felt through people and place, especially in a young nation whose foundations remain visible.

Cecelia initially hesitated to place her family history at the centre of the work. The vulnerability of exploring whiteness, belonging, and personal lineage in postcolonial Zambia felt sensitive. But in unpacking her archive, rich with family photographs and memories, she found a language that was both plain and deeply felt. I felt the richness of the story was worthwhile and possible, as the project reminded me of Penny Siopis’s work, a Greek South African artist whose exploration of personal and national memory reveals entangled histories of coloniality, ritual, and accountability. There is something similarly affecting in Cecelia’s gesture: to trace one’s history without spectacle, to hold the past in view while asking what it means to belong now.

A recent post on a popular Zambian forum questioned why the national swimming team at the Commonwealth Games in 2014 appeared overwhelmingly white. The comment section quickly became a reckoning. Someone finally offered: These families have been in Zambia for generations. They’ve contributed, lived, loved, and remained. Their children feel at home.

This untold story of white Zambian belonging, often left out of national narratives, migration as an avenue to generational belonging, was part of what this exhibition hopes to explore. By tracing these connections and celebrating them with care, we sought to tell a complete story of what Zambian belonging looks like.

The Archive is Alive.

The Zambia Belonging Archive became vital, as it documents a lineage often left out of dominant narratives. Initiated by curator Sana Ginwala in 2018, the archive is an ongoing project that gathers personal photographs, oral histories, and objects from people connected to Zambia, creating a counter-archive of home, identity, and belonging. It helped shape this story by offering reference images that could be reflected on with care.

Cecelia is one of four artists who have worked with the archive, but her response is distinct, interpreting archival imagery through painting rather than lens-based media. By blending family archives with painting, she offers a deeply personal reflection on Lusaka’s history.

Everyday moments across Lusaka serve as springboards for this exhibition’s narrative, revealing how political independence, sovereign food production, and the circulation of goods continue to shape daily life. Going to Town highlights the infrastructure that sustains the city, with depictions of Freedom House, the NMC building, and EW Tarry. These spaces are not only functional but symbolic—Freedom House as a site of liberation and organising, the NMC building as a testament to food sovereignty and national industry, and EW Tarry as a marker of commercial exchange. Together, they chart the rhythms of a city built on movement, memory, and self-determination.

The latter is one of the earliest commercial structures on Cairo Road, the main commercial artery of Lusaka. Its name is drawn from the Cape to Cairo Road project, a colonial-era vision imagined by British imperialist Cecil Rhodes to connect British colonies from Cape Town to Cairo through a continuous road and rail network. Originally built to support Rhodes’ economic expansion, it played a central role in the colonial trade networks that facilitated the British South Africa Company’s influence in the region. Over time, the building changed hands, from its early commercial use to ownership by UNIP and later the Ginwala family. Once at risk of demolition, it has since been restored and recognised as a heritage site.

Today, it also houses the Everyday Lusaka Gallery, Sana Ginwala’s project that now has a physical space in the heart of the city dedicated to showcasing art grounded in everyday realities in the city. For this show, we focus on everyday routes, from Lilayi to Cairo Road, that reveal stories about Zambia that are lived but rarely formally showcased. The gallery’s present location feels poetic: a meeting point of past and present, where histories are made visible.

Oral History

One of Cecelia’s key works in this exhibition explores oral history and resistance through the figure of Zanco, whose story is immortalised in Zambia’s Freedom Statue. Unveiled in 1974 during the 10th Independence Anniversary, the monument honours Mpundu Mutembo, nicknamed Zanco, who famously broke free from his chains at gunpoint, refusing to remain shackled under colonial rule. His defiance became a national symbol of resistance, embodied in the sculptural form that stands on Independence Avenue today. Cecelia revisits this story through layered imagery and storytelling, drawing out the emotional and symbolic weight of Zanco’s gesture.

Another symbol that appears in her work is the bicycle. The known phrase “even independence was achieved on a bicycle” echoes through Zambian collective memory. Bicycles appear, not just as everyday objects but as emblems of resilience and grassroots mobilisation. It speaks to how nationalist leaders travelled across vast terrain to spread political awareness—humble yet powerful, the bicycle remains a symbol of agency and transformation in Zambia’s journey.

This transformation, both physical and symbolic, is best captured in Cecelia’s Cairo Road series. The city’s renewal, marked by the restoration of historical sites and the construction of new, locally inspired structures, is mirrored in these paintings as a visual echo of broader transitions in the business and governance sectors. The “Zamification” process entailed rebranding commercial and public institutions to assert national pride and self-reliance.

Roads such as Independence Avenue (formerly King George Avenue) and Lumumba Road (formerly Connaught Road) were renamed to mark the historic moments Lusaka took part in. In what Zambia’s first president, Dr. Kaunda, called the “New Africa,” these changes were conscious acts of solidarity that continue to reflect the country’s Pan-African spirit. At the same time, names like Cairo Road have been preserved, telling a broader story of connection and political alignment, anchoring Zambia within a continental and liberation-era narrative. Monumental edifices stand not only as urban landmarks but also as symbols of transformation, where memory converges with a vision for an independent future. By painting iconic and historic photographs of Lusaka, Cecelia offers a mirror on a rapidly changing city that remains to honour the full story of becoming and belonging.

Diasporic Belonging

I often remembered how, during the summer of 2023, the sunset arrested my restless, meaningless anxiety and engulfed me in beauty. Home felt like the most beautiful place, and simply being there made life feel meaningful. A vivid sunset is quintessentially Lusaka, as it signals the end of the day, “knocking off time.”

Home is like the sun, constant, ever returning, and grounding. This work captures the everyday experience of home through journeys on foot, minibus, car, or bicycle. Just as the sunset closes the day, it also gestures toward the promise of kwacha, a word that means “a new dawn” and is also the name of the national currency, anchoring hope in cycles of return, movement, and the quiet power of the ordinary.

In the same way, things started to make sense when I was home. In the community, the swinging door of care and presence wouldn’t allow what I’d normalised as just “being in a mood” to spiral. Like clues, parts of home came rushing back, sensations from my early years that never truly left. It’s reassuring, as part of the diaspora, to feel that home is just a flashback away. In unveiling Zanco and Cecelia’s stories, we hoped to show how personal and national histories intertwine, revealing how the city and the country at large have been shaped by many hands, voices, and lives. I hope those who see the show feel a trace of that belonging, that they can recognise something familiar and relish the richness of a heritage still visible in the city.

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The Going to Town Exhibition at Everyday Lusaka Gallery runs from 17th May until 31st May. You can find more of Cecelia Miller's work online. Check out the Zambia Belonging Archive on Instagram and follow the gallery for all upcoming shows.

• Read more on the Zambia Belonging Archive

At the end of 2024, Chrystel Mukeba (b. 1983) and her father André travelled to Kinshasa. It was a significant journey for them both: she had never been to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and he had not returned in 46 years. With this exhibition, through still and moving images, Chrystel documents a physical return and a layered homecoming marked by longing, distance, and rediscovery. The exhibition traces this shared journey across continents, memories, and emotions, offering a deeply personal meditation on the past as it lives on in the present.

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Trending displacement vs generational voids

In a moment when diasporic storytelling seems to be everywhere, on screens, on panels, in festivals, one might wonder: Is this surge a thematic trend, a way to engage white publics with semi-romantic, digestible tales of ‘otherness’? Or worse, is it a form of decolonial coping, a palatable reframe of trauma for the sake of visibility?

Mukeba’s work suggests the contrary. Her filmic practice doesn’t dilute the depth of these stories; instead, it affirms their complexity and multiplicity. After all, what stories should a filmmaker know more intimately than their own—those of their people, lineage, and dislocated homes? Why should stories about Black European lives be considered less ‘universal’ than When Harry Met Sally? If anything, Mukeba’s storytelling engages with history, specifically, the history dealt to people with immigrant backgrounds, often without consent and certainly without context.

It is a compelling visual essay grappling with memory, displacement, and identity themes. Through archival footage, personal narration, and a striking use of sound and silence, Mukeba invites viewers into a deeply intimate yet politically resonant reflection on diasporic life and inherited memory.

This rings especially true within the Belgian context. Her work is deeply influenced by history. Following Congo’s independence from Belgium in 1960, a wave of Congolese migration to Europe began, particularly to Belgium, the former colonial power. Many came to pursue studies, others sought safety, opportunity, or were sent abroad by their families in the hope of a better future. These journeys often came with rupture: of language, of land, of generational continuity. Mukeba’s work isn’t just about personal memory, but also about the inherited histories of migration—stories shaped by the Belgian colonial past and its lingering effects. Mukeba’s father was among those who left at a young age, part of a generation raised in Europe yet shaped by the silences and absences of a place they no longer knew, but could not forget.

The diasporic story of second-generation Congolese children—now adults—resonates with a wider present-day population. Mukeba’s work aids in remembering, in being mesmerised by the landscape. Her story also embodies that familiar experience of generational silence that can be similar to different publics -the weighted voids it creates. She asks for these absences to be acknowledged and gently be makes them visible.

Authentic Positioning

What I find particularly a triumph in Chrytels’s work is how she navigates her positioning while working with such personal material. Many artists grapple with the tension of personally engaged making, how to insert oneself without consuming the frame. Although I would love to discuss this directly with Chrystel, the first thing that stood out to me is her shift in subject matter, towards something more personal. While her previous work also engaged with the topic of Congo, it did so through portrait-style photography. This new direction feels more intimate, layered, and emotionally charged. Her use of colour and documentary imagery is striking, underscoring the very point I’m trying to make. Perhaps filmmakers can only tell the stories they know best—those for which they hold deep curiosity. Shouldn’t artists lean into the stories closest to them, rather than retreat into safer, more distant narratives?

The work is not about her directly, but about understanding the void through her father—a homecoming for them both. She turns the camera on him to facilitate her reckoning, acknowledging the distance of her becoming as something sculpted by his experience. Each frame carries the echo of trauma held in another body. The film rings with curiosity and integrity, marking this not as a trendy choice of subject but as an authentic position from which to tell an authentic and critical story.

The images and sounds she collects are not just about archiving the past but about arresting it—grasping the past in the present in real time as she moves through this new timeline. Moments such as those shared with her aunt, captured while en route, hold a quiet intimacy that speaks volumes. There’s a documentary process of decoding, encoding, and narrating. A continual cycle of memory work. Interactions with her aunt allude to the void between past and present; their exchanges hold weight in what is unsaid.

Share

The process of Memory Through Image

How she makes visual choices also reflects tension and her chosen pov; Mukeba’s black and white images and deliberate use of silence in her moving images add colour to this tension, there is no over-politeness, no over-explanation. Her position within and outside the story is visual, not just narratively, but formally. We see her point of view rather, neither fully in it, nor entirely out. Watching, waiting, perhaps to be invited in, indulged, or at her father's pace, for whom this journey is live, raw, and unfolding in real time. It is a homegoing of sorts, a return to a home once titled to the back of memory, now brought into the present. A different present—not necessarily better or worse (though at times noticing change, as he remarks on once tree-filled street now swallowed by traffic). Mukeba doesn’t dramatise this change; she sits with it, and in doing so, invites us to sit with it too.

How was the past?

I see universality in this story, speaking with the father, the father speaking with her while not speaking directly, but revealing carefully. What are the stories our parents share, or are meant to share? It’s made me think of the coming-of-age experience we engage in when we begin to know our parents. Who they were before X—which could be our birth, that marriage, that tragedy, the migration. How was the past?

It reminds me of how much I appreciate photography as a medium, and how that love has unfolded over the past few months. One such photo that reminded me of this mellow feeling, where you’re transported to a familiar emotion, is the photo above. This could have been taken at the top of my childhood home. We see a weathered gate, a palm tree, and the landscape ahead. Like myself, I don’t think this was necessarily a depiction of Chrystel’s home, but of Home, and what that feels like. The top of a hill, looking at a gate that could have been mine or my best friend’s. The best friend I’d play with. I’m transported to a hot summer in Africa, seeking a playdate. The familiarity of gated suburbia is in the symbol of the gate—a sanctuary portal, not a barrier. It was sweet as I stood still in front of this photo, remembering the many colours of a friend’s house. To remember the "beware of dog" signs that lied—the dogs were friendly, wouldn’t hurt a soul. Or rather, they knew who to keep safe.

Chrystel, in this picture, is at home in a way, with the depth of an insider. There’s hesitation, but seeing through the viewfinder is like dust settling. She’s becoming close to it. No figure in the frame, just observing and taking in a hot summer day at home.

Homecoming’ is the first part of Mukeba’s ongoing project, I’ve Never Seen My Father Cry. As this is only the beginning of the journey, I’m eager to see what Chrystel has in store for us and herself.

The exhibition Chrystel Mukeba – I’ve Never Seen My Father Cry is on view at FOMU in Antwerp until the 4th May 2025. I’m personally looking forward to hearing Chrystel speak about this journey in conversation, scheduled to take place sometime toward the end of the exhibition.

Other works:

• Portraits Style Congo

• Confrontation

At the end of 2024, Chrystel Mukeba (b. 1983) and her father André travelled to Kinshasa. It was a significant journey for them both: she had never been to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and he had not returned in 46 years. With this exhibition, through still and moving images, Chrystel documents a physical return and a layered homecoming marked by longing, distance, and rediscovery. The exhibition traces this shared journey across continents, memories, and emotions, offering a deeply personal meditation on the past as it lives on in the present.

Trending displacement vs generational voids

In a moment when diasporic storytelling seems to be everywhere, on screens, on panels, in festivals, one might wonder: Is this surge a thematic trend, a way to engage white publics with semi-romantic, digestible tales of ‘otherness’? Or worse, is it a form of decolonial coping, a palatable reframe of trauma for the sake of visibility?

Mukeba’s work suggests the contrary. Her filmic practice doesn’t dilute the depth of these stories; instead, it affirms their complexity and multiplicity. After all, what stories should a filmmaker know more intimately than their own—those of their people, lineage, and dislocated homes? Why should stories about Black European lives be considered less ‘universal’ than When Harry Met Sally? If anything, Mukeba’s storytelling engages with history, specifically, the history dealt to people with immigrant backgrounds, often without consent and certainly without context.

It is a compelling visual essay grappling with memory, displacement, and identity themes. Through archival footage, personal narration, and a striking use of sound and silence, Mukeba invites viewers into a deeply intimate yet politically resonant reflection on diasporic life and inherited memory.

This rings especially true within the Belgian context. Her work is deeply influenced by history. Following Congo’s independence from Belgium in 1960, a wave of Congolese migration to Europe began, particularly to Belgium, the former colonial power. Many came to pursue studies, others sought safety, opportunity, or were sent abroad by their families in the hope of a better future. These journeys often came with rupture: of language, of land, of generational continuity. Mukeba’s work isn’t just about personal memory, but also about the inherited histories of migration—stories shaped by the Belgian colonial past and its lingering effects. Mukeba’s father was among those who left at a young age, part of a generation raised in Europe yet shaped by the silences and absences of a place they no longer knew, but could not forget.

The diasporic story of second-generation Congolese children—now adults—resonates with a wider present-day population. Mukeba’s work aids in remembering, in being mesmerised by the landscape. Her story also embodies that familiar experience of generational silence that can be similar to different publics -the weighted voids it creates. She asks for these absences to be acknowledged and gently be makes them visible.

Authentic Positioning

What I find particularly a triumph in Chrytels’s work is how she navigates her positioning while working with such personal material. Many artists grapple with the tension of personally engaged making, how to insert oneself without consuming the frame. Although I would love to discuss this directly with Chrystel, the first thing that stood out to me is her shift in subject matter, towards something more personal. While her previous work also engaged with the topic of Congo, it did so through portrait-style photography. This new direction feels more intimate, layered, and emotionally charged. Her use of colour and documentary imagery is striking, underscoring the very point I’m trying to make. Perhaps filmmakers can only tell the stories they know best—those for which they hold deep curiosity. Shouldn’t artists lean into the stories closest to them, rather than retreat into safer, more distant narratives?

The work is not about her directly, but about understanding the void through her father—a homecoming for them both. She turns the camera on him to facilitate her reckoning, acknowledging the distance of her becoming as something sculpted by his experience. Each frame carries the echo of trauma held in another body. The film rings with curiosity and integrity, marking this not as a trendy choice of subject but as an authentic position from which to tell an authentic and critical story.

The images and sounds she collects are not just about archiving the past but about arresting it—grasping the past in the present in real time as she moves through this new timeline. Moments such as those shared with her aunt, captured while en route, hold a quiet intimacy that speaks volumes. There’s a documentary process of decoding, encoding, and narrating. A continual cycle of memory work. Interactions with her aunt allude to the void between past and present; their exchanges hold weight in what is unsaid.

Share

The process of Memory Through Image

How she makes visual choices also reflects tension and her chosen pov; Mukeba’s black and white images and deliberate use of silence in her moving images add colour to this tension, there is no over-politeness, no over-explanation. Her position within and outside the story is visual, not just narratively, but formally. We see her point of view rather, neither fully in it, nor entirely out. Watching, waiting, perhaps to be invited in, indulged, or at her father's pace, for whom this journey is live, raw, and unfolding in real time. It is a homegoing of sorts, a return to a home once titled to the back of memory, now brought into the present. A different present—not necessarily better or worse (though at times noticing change, as he remarks on once tree-filled street now swallowed by traffic). Mukeba doesn’t dramatise this change; she sits with it, and in doing so, invites us to sit with it too.

How was the past?

I see universality in this story, speaking with the father, the father speaking with her while not speaking directly, but revealing carefully. What are the stories our parents share, or are meant to share? It’s made me think of the coming-of-age experience we engage in when we begin to know our parents. Who they were before X—which could be our birth, that marriage, that tragedy, the migration. How was the past?

It reminds me of how much I appreciate photography as a medium, and how that love has unfolded over the past few months. One such photo that reminded me of this mellow feeling, where you’re transported to a familiar emotion, is the photo above. This could have been taken at the top of my childhood home. We see a weathered gate, a palm tree, and the landscape ahead. Like myself, I don’t think this was necessarily a depiction of Chrystel’s home, but of Home, and what that feels like. The top of a hill, looking at a gate that could have been mine or my best friend’s. The best friend I’d play with. I’m transported to a hot summer in Africa, seeking a playdate. The familiarity of gated suburbia is in the symbol of the gate—a sanctuary portal, not a barrier. It was sweet as I stood still in front of this photo, remembering the many colours of a friend’s house. To remember the "beware of dog" signs that lied—the dogs were friendly, wouldn’t hurt a soul. Or rather, they knew who to keep safe.

Chrystel, in this picture, is at home in a way, with the depth of an insider. There’s hesitation, but seeing through the viewfinder is like dust settling. She’s becoming close to it. No figure in the frame, just observing and taking in a hot summer day at home.

Homecoming’ is the first part of Mukeba’s ongoing project, I’ve Never Seen My Father Cry. As this is only the beginning of the journey, I’m eager to see what Chrystel has in store for us and herself.

The exhibition Chrystel Mukeba – I’ve Never Seen My Father Cry is on view at FOMU in Antwerp until the 4th May 2025. I’m personally looking forward to hearing Chrystel speak about this journey in conversation, scheduled to take place sometime toward the end of the exhibition.

Other works:

• Portraits Style Congo

• Confrontation

The archive is never a neutral space despite the “owners'” objectivity. Such an understanding would assume the objects are passive, merely collectibles, and even that would assume they are embedded in some value, should they be displayed. This shifting in meaning around the museum and agency of its objects has occupied my mind over the last months while I have consumed different films as reference points.

Reference one: Nii Kwate Owoo’s You Hide Me

Ghanaian filmmaker Nii Kwate Owoo’s 1970 documentary You Hide Me reminded me of how this question has not aged. The first function here seems to be the idea of the museum as a clearing house of meaning; the objects are cleansed of maker and origin and neatly laid out for safekeeping. The majority are not displayed but stored, sometimes less meticulously than priced objects would be. As a trip to the British Museum unfolds, Owoo’s show-and-tell evolves and attempts to answer the question: Why is Europe still filled with ethnographic collections?

In You Hide Me, Owoo exposes how looted African artefacts are stored in museum basements in a hoarder-like fashion rather than properly exhibited or returned. His work calls for the rehabilitation of African art—its restitution to Africa and restoration to its rightful place in history.

In this instance, ethnographic museums can be seen as presenting merely “The African Facade”—a stripped-down version of objects displayed in Western institutions, detached from their original cultural, spiritual, and historical contexts. Owoo argues that these collections function as a facade, reinforcing the idea that African art is primitive and static. This detachment is not neutral; it is an active exercise in erasing meaning and reinforcing colonial narratives that cast Africa as a passive subject in the story of European civilization.

This ongoing detachment has lasting consequences. Generations remain disconnected from their origins and cultural wealth when the objects themselves are missing. Though these histories are still written about, remembered, and circulated within Africa, most of the artefacts remain physically located in the US and Europe, out of reach from the communities to whom they belong.

In a 2021 interview, director Nii Kwate Owoo spoke candidly about how he had to pose as a gentleman in a borrowed three-piece suit to gain permission to film inside the British Museum. The film was initially presented as a respectful portrayal of the institution’s efforts to “preserve” African artefacts. However, filmed clandestinely, You Hide Me does the opposite: Owoo dismantles the colonial narratives of preservation and issues a clear call for restitution.

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Reference two: Mati Diop’s-Dahomey

There is a spiritual obstruction in Mati Diop’s 2024 Berlinale-winning film, which, though set in the present, reflects on the enduring impact of the absence of spiritual monuments and the colonial vilification that accompanied their removal. The film brings to the foreground the functionality of looting within a religious scope. Religious objects were taken as part of a broader effort to discredit and suppress local religions. The return of such an artefact also opens space for dialogue on colonial crusading and spiritual revolution. Voodoo, once a respected practice, is now widely vilified. Some participants in the dialogues the film follows even fear the idea of particular objects returning, fearful of their power and the potential blasphemy tied to reclaiming a native spirituality that had long been suppressed-difused.

The documentary explores the broader scope of restitution by following the return of looted objects from France to Mali alongside the public dialogues and perceptions surrounding their repatriation. This time, Mati Diop gives the artefacts a voice. Dahomey is an influential visual spectacle in its subject matter and distinct narrative perspective. Diop evokes a sense of claustrophobia that mirrors their long, dislocated journey by allowing the artefacts to speak. At its core, the film examines themes of restitution, homecoming, and freedom. Freedom from the museums in which Europe takes pride and the colonial narratives that have shaped the continent’s history.

One might expect that, in the spirit of good governance or the democratic ideals often championed by the West, the return of looted artefacts would be straightforward. Yet the process remains slow and selective, exposing persisting, deeper power imbalances. Diop’s short film conveys a sense of disbelief about this: How can African leaders possibly accept the conditional return and or ransom of stolen cultural property?

Unrivalled Art and power play

Building on this, it’s difficult to cleanse the museum’s name as a colonial institution, and I’m holding back from mentioning the Africa Museum in Tervuren. Were these spaces ever meant to be neutral, or were they always, at their core, imperial institutions? The more I reflect on this, the more I see how their grand halls and glass cases often tell a story of power, objects taken, displayed, and made to serve a particular narrative.

The display indicates power relations, subjecting objects to new interpretations and explanations. The institutional direction of meaning-making divorces these objects from their makers and memory. This authoritative system of ownership and exclusion puts the European expert in an intellectual monopoly over African art and its creators or preservers. Africans are often depicted as uneducated about their own culture, and the educated European steps in to interpret it. However, European practice has been primarily one of conservation, theorizing, hypothesizing, and categorizing objects looted from their original source, a process that mirrors colonial practices.

The idea that the West can define what is African is as ironic as colonialism itself. For example, no African museums offer an African explanation of what Europe is, let alone display stolen European objects. Owoo touches on this paradox: once labelled as primitive, Europeans now regard African art as "unrivaled”.

Yet, the notion that these extracted objects could serve as proper "education" is deeply flawed. A particular scene comes to mind: a parent with their young children stands before an African artefact, attempting to familiarize them with what is African. "There are many animals in Africa... oh, that’s an African drum! Yes, Africans are very musical..." They move on to musical instruments, then to the next display, you get the picture.

The notion that 'Africa' can be neatly placed in vitrines for the voyeur’s gaze... I don’t know, man, it’s a lot. Owoo’s You Hide Me argues that the heritage collection was deeply intertwined with the ideology of colonialism.

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The African Façade also alludes to the idea that African history, culture, and customs must be diluted and fed back in a governable version acceptable within the frameworks set by former colonizers.

In this massive collection, seen in You Hide Me, the valuable objects are unveiled as if it was a Hoarders episode, revealing the vast expanse of African art stolen by English colonial ventures. Its function Owoo further describes the “African Façade”. As a version of Africa deconstructed by the colonizer, its history twisted, its cultural artefacts stripped from their context and displayed in ways that reinforce Western ideas of ownership and authority. What makes my ear itch is the unsettling realization that these objects, once part of living traditions, now sit behind glass, frozen in time, their meanings reshaped by institutions that were never meant to hold them.

Owoo’s ability to deliver this crux within the limited time of a short film is incredible. We can tell he didn’t just “gentleman” himself up for that interview; he truly finessed the institution, demonstrating a deep understanding of what he wanted to say and his assessment—not just of the museum’s formal function but of its present exercise. After all, why hold objects for ransom if they no longer have value today?

Some of these so-called “primitive” objects were, in fact, the blueprint for many celebrated Western artists. I’d invite you to follow the spiral of Kirchner and his wife’s time in the tropics—though that’s a story for another time. Kirchner is a prime example of this pick-and-mix vibe: drawing freely from Indigenous forms and aesthetics while stripping them of their original context. This selective showcasing of specific works over others often carries a signalling function, creating a visual contradiction to Western modernity. Even in praise, African objects were framed as exotic inspiration—primitive, raw—while their own royal and grand nature was sidelined.

I felt uneasy after seeing a set of Benin wooden carvings displayed alongside Picasso’s work at the L’Orangerie in Paris. Though the label credited “inspiration,” the context wasn’t about shared artistic exchange if the maker can’t even be named. Paintings like Picasso’s are, in many ways, copies, flattened interpretations of spiritual, intricate works.

Iconically, Owoo ends You Hide Me with vibrant footage from a royal celebration in Ghana, reclaiming space, pride, and ceremony. It’s a bold demand for the immediate return of African-held objects—set not in a museum but at home, where they belong.

Reference three: Isaac Julian’s ONCE AGAIN... (STATUES NEVER DIE)

In similar future thinking, Isaac Julien’s 2025 film delves into the complex relationship between Dr. Albert C. Barnes, an early US collector and exhibitor of African cultural artefacts, and Alain Locke, the renowned philosopher and cultural critic known as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance.” I first encountered this work during his exhibition, What Freedom Is to Me, at the Bonnefanten in Maastricht, where Julien’s layered storytelling really stood out. Like Owoo’s You Hide Me, Julien’s film opens a conversation about the absurdity of how African art has been revealed and framed. It critiques how European ethnic culture specialists have historically controlled the narrative, dictating what is considered the most advanced while ignoring the origins of these artefacts and the looted circumstances in which they were taken.

His blend of fiction with historical facts creates a sense of unmutilated unity, imagining histories where civilization thrived, untainted by the spectacle of exploitation- the African emotion in a new setting. Julien’s work is a conversation with a counter voice, reducing the African façade through the lens of Locke. It presents the idea of the museum as a space for exchange, a space for actively creating awareness. While the backdrop remains the vitrines, there is a circular movement of meaning-making. Julien proposes a structurally different system for decolonising with the archive. It is within this setting that newer forms of curation encourage the public to reveal personal and individual relationships to the structures and systems of power housed within the museum.

Julien’s vision offers more than critique; it offers a blueprint. By placing Black voices at the center and engaging history through a lens of possibility, he invites us to imagine museums, archives, and futures that no longer speak about Africa but with it. Alongside Owoo and Diop, we see not only a critique of institutional power but the emergence of new cultural blueprints. Their work challenges how we remember, who gets to narrate, and what restitution might truly mean. In their hands, the archive becomes a site of resistance—and the future, a space for radical reimagination.

There’s so much work at the moment that I’m excited about, and I can’t wait to share more with you. Let’s embrace this imagination while engaging history in meaningful ways. Perhaps this is the next step: not only to return what was taken but to reimagine what can be built in its place.

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Explore

• Isaac Julien | Artist Interview | Once Again . . . (Statues Never Die) | 2024 Whitney Biennial

• Nii Kwate Owoo on his film You Hide Me (1970)

• DAHOMEY | Official Trailer | 2024

Zanele Muholi (they/them) is a South African visual activist and photographer renowned for documenting queer identity. Their acclaimed works, Somnyama Ngonyama and Faces and Phases, have been exhibited globally, including at the Venice Biennale and Documenta 13.

I was grateful to receive the exhibition book from Muholi’s 2020 Tate show. Having never seen their work in person, immersing myself in their visual activism was a gift. One that documents disruptions and feels especially urgent today. As hostility toward marginalized identities grows, Muholi’s work reminds us that queerness is not just about identity but about care, resistance, and claiming space. Their images demand recognition, not just for those they portray but for all of us.

This felt like a fitting read in light of some of the thoughts I’ve been having about the increased hostility towards the LGBTQ+ community and the rise of fascism in Europe. It underscores the urgent need for works like Muholi’s to be shared in-depth, as they challenge such harmful narratives and provide a much-needed visual representation of the “other” as a counterpoint to the rising tide of fear and division.

It’s the confrontational nature of Muholi’s photography that urges but also exclaims I am here - we are here. Their subject matter takes centre stage, and similar intention rests in their choice of colour and composition, as the black-and-white leaves no space for whimsical distraction. One must absorb everything, as they often look straight back at us. Like Carrie Mae Weems, Muholi presents themselves within their work, using the intimacy of their gaze to insist that the viewer bears witness. Their subjectivity is undeniable, and their presence commands attention.

Capturing the Community

Muhole is dedicated to documenting/unboxing those along the margins. Along with the Muholi self-portraits series, they have captured the LGBTQI+ folk in South Africa. They seek to preserve and archive the community's life at weddings, funerals, and public spaces (often under the threat of danger).

Their context: South Africa, despite its progressive legal framework, remains a place where queer individuals face discrimination, violence, and social exclusion. Hate crimes, including so-called "corrective rape" and homophobic attacks, are stark realities that persist, particularly in townships and rural areas. The work of Muholi and their peers serves as both an act of resistance and a testament to the resilience of this community in the face of structural and everyday violence.

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Series such as The Pageant, Somnyama Ngonyama, and Faces and Phases focus on documenting these intimate and powerful moments, allowing a fuller picture of the strength, beauty, and survival of queer lives in South Africa. By archiving these stories, Muholi affirms their community's existence and challenges the erasure and systemic oppression many continue to endure.

"I am re-writing a black, queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our existence, resistance and persistence," says Zanele Muholi.

Coloniality and the Margins

The Pageant, in series particular, reclaims visibility and joy in a society that denies both to queer individuals. Through beauty pageants, Muholi captures defiant self-expression, dignity, and resilience—challenging exclusion while asserting the right to exist in public space.

The power of photography allows Muholi to transform the reality of participants’ place in the world while documenting evidence of these realities. Although apartheid officially ended, its categorizations and hierarchies persist. And at the bottom of this structure of otherness and marginalization remains the queer community. Muholi has also documented to bear witness and corroborate the abuses they face, institutional failures, and difficulties in attaining justice. Capturing pain, intimacy, joy, and future, they have co-created work that inhabits a broad range of emotions and phases of their communities.

They describe their work as more of a co-creation and refer to participants rather than subjects. Working from an insider's perspective, they rarely interview strangers, instead engaging with people familiar to them—a wider community of friends and friends of friends.

Visibility is Muholi’s tool towards justice, as stigma fails to silence the community. By granting access to these testimonies, participants are transformed from victims into more than just subjects of violence—they become truth-tellers and, in a sense, public prosecutors. Here, the archive functions as activism.

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

-Zora Neale Hurston

Liberal Diversions

I believe there is a need for Muholi’s work beyond South Africa, and it is my joy to see their work celebrated globally. While liberalism, in an 'all lives matter' fashion, makes an effort to include otherness, it lacks the ideological backbone to follow through. Something that will be crucial in today’s increasingly hostile political climate. I’m particularly concerned about the culture of care that liberalism promotes and its limitations in actively holding space for the other. This has been a struggle, especially in celebrated liberal societies like the Netherlands, where I spent part of my upbringing.

Normative assimilation of culture and identity accommodates different 'boxes' of identity but doesn't address the building blocks for cohabitation, which requires active care, understanding, and dialogue between those boxes. Simply “allowing” you to have your box frames tolerance as temporary, as if it’s a ticking time bomb. Instead, we should move beyond mere tolerance. "I tolerate you" is not the same as "I respect you, I see you, and I stand with you."

One of the significant challenges of such assimilated or liberal cultures of acceptance today, revealed to me in so-called “strongly worded debates,” is that we don’t promote a community of care. We promote a community of boxes and isms. It’s a "not in my backyard" mentality, which becomes glaringly obvious in supposedly progressive yet exclusionary wealthy suburbs and even more so in cities—the supposed liberal melting pots.

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Insiders, by which I mean those with the luxury of a lack of shame, will engage in conversations where (age-mates) casually justify fiscal conservatism as if it were Coke Light when, in reality, it’s Coke Zero = zero empathy, zero responsibility, zero fuc*s given to the margins. The avoidance in these discussions is striking: fiscal conservatism isn’t just about limiting taxes; it has a funny way of conveniently limiting rights.

Do we understand that our liberal politics lack the backbone if they fail to fundamentally denounce—not just in words, but in action—the systemic barriers that limit others' existence? I’m fun at parties, as you can probably tell. But what does it even mean to be “liberal or progressive” if the very structures we claim to uphold are built on the backs of the marginalized, both economically and socially?

Queerness Will Save Us All

Rather than relying on a liberal notion of inclusion, we can adopt a queer politics of care. One that foregrounds mutual aid, solidarity, and resistance to oppressive structures. True inclusivity does not come from merely expanding existing categories but from dismantling the hierarchies that confine us.

Queerness can be broadly defined as a rejection of fixed, normative identities and a challenge to rigid categorizations of gender and sexuality. It embraces fluidity and nonconformity, resisting binary thinking and fostering a relational culture rooted in connection rather than rigid classification.

As a political framework of care, queerness moves beyond individual identity to emphasize relationality, interdependence, and collective well-being. It challenges systems of exclusion and prioritizes creating spaces where marginalized identities are not just tolerated but actively cared for.

Muholi’s activism embodies this ethos, intersecting issues of race, class, and gender. Their work reminds us that queering is not just about identity—it is a mode of resistance, a challenge to the status quo, and a force that can shift power dynamics to create a more just and compassionate society. Queering demands that we break free from conventional expectations, creating space for those who have been marginalized or silenced. In this sense, it does not merely advocate for LGBTQ+ rights but calls for a broader restructuring of society that centres on care, justice, and equity.

Their images serve as provocations toward liberation—an insistence on freedom, self-expression, and the affirmation of identities beyond societal constraints. Muholi’s work is not just art; it is a community-building practice, with participants and the artist collectively shaping a campaign for acceptance, understanding, and equity. The sheer presence of their work across various platforms reinforces this message, demanding recognition through its frequency and visibility.

Collectivity as an Ethical Imperative

At the core of queering our ethics is empathy. When we deny others the right to self-identify, we also diminish our own space for self-expression. Bigotry does not exist in isolation. It thrives on the gradual erosion of empathy. Tactics such as dismissing people as "snowflakes" undermine the validity of care and understanding, making vulnerability a target rather than a strength.

As Selda Koydemir notes

being labeled as sensitive for reacting to disrespect is a form of manipulation.

This is about dismantling imposed boxes and reclaiming identities that have transformed, engaged, and educated the public. Visibility is fundamental. Learning and actively fostering a culture of empathy, often dismissed as "wokeness"—threatens those who seek to conserve limiting social and economic rights.

Queering, as a radical act of empathy, creates space for coexistence across all walks of life. It teaches us to think beyond rigid binaries—whether in identity, constitutionalism, or the classist foundations of fundamentalism. It asks us to lead with our hearts rather than adhere to inflexible ideas that strip us of the humanity we owe each other.

Queering will save us all.

Muholi's exhibition at Tate Modern in London concluded on January 26, 2025. Their work is currently featured in several exhibitions worldwide:

• SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah, Georgia, USA): From February 24 to July 6, 2025, the museum presents a selection of Muholi's works, including pieces from the Somnyama Ngonyama series.

  scad.edu

• IMS Paulista (São Paulo, Brazil): The exhibition "BELEZA VALENTE" will be on display until June 22, 2025.

  artnetworkafrica.com

• Bowdoin College Museum of Art (Brunswick, Maine, USA): An exhibition featuring Muholi's work is scheduled from January 16 to June 1, 2025.

  mutualart.com