A look at all things art in Africa
Agnes Waruguru: Dreaming of Purple Palm Trees
Nature is kind of an over-explored topic in visual arts but Agnes Waruguru makes these themes feel fresh and new in a way few modern artists can. Read More
Art
Michael Musyoka: Desexualising Sexy Saints
What do Musyoka’s subjects in Time and Other Constructs II and a medieval sex riot have in common? Read the article to find out if you guessed right. Read More
Gor Soudan: We’re All In This Together
Sudan approaches the idea of the political as the
personal, and this approach explicitly sets itself against the idea of liberal individualism in a
way that completely reframes commonly held beliefs on activism Read More
‘Chasing’ Nwaobiala: On filmmaking, Collaboration, and The Curse of Perfectionism
nwaobiala sent me their film to watch and thirty seconds in I already had so many questions. It’s...
Nandipha Mntambo: Ye Olde Monsters and Modern Mythology
Her series Metamorphoses reveals the importance of not just participating in our own narratives but inventing new ones. Through her imagination the monstrous is powerful, and the ugly becomes beautiful and compelling. Read More
Paul Onditi and The Adventures of Smokey The Time Traveling Ghost
In an increasingly disparate and ever- changing landscape, Smokey is the anchor that floats in the foreground. The isolated, anonymous figure pulls the eye right away. There’s a longing to Smokey as he moves about unchanging, in between time and space, a singularity in all the chaos. Read More
Jebet Naava: It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s your Mum in Space
They’re often alone, but not small, not shrunken down or shuffled off to the side. Naava’s mothers take centre stage, they are the subject, they are the protagonists of their own stories. Read More
Not Your Average Disney Princess
The heroine of the fairy tale is always alone, she is cut off. A villainous mother on one side, an absent father on the other, clears the way for her prince to swoop right in. Feminist theorist Carol Gilligan observes that this creates a world where adolescent girls "have to give up their relationship with the world of girls and women, the world they have lived and loved in ... for the sake of relationships that have been prescribed for them in male-led societies". Read More
