Brett Murray is a South African artist mostly known for his steel and mixed media wall sculptures. He was born in Pretoria, South Africa. Murray has a master's degree in fine art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, 1989. Referred to by critic Brenda Atkinson as "the dark prince of South African pop (art)", Murray is one of the country's most popular artists, often using easily recognisable media images with the addition of a subversive and bitterly funny twist. Murray's work addresses the wars of the cultures, the clash between Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, the old and the new South Africas. "With my work I hope to critically entertain. Through satirical and tragic reflections on South Africa, I hope to shift people's perspectives and change people's minds, indulgent, arrogant and pretentious as this might sound," he says. More recently, his work has explored his own personal experiences and identity. Murray was also the founder of the sculpture department at Stellenbosch University.
Chéri Samba or Samba wa Mbimba N’zingo Nuni Masi Ndo Mbasi is a painter from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is one of the best known contemporary African artists, with his works being included in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A large number of his paintings are also found in The Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) of Jean Pigozzi. He has been invited to participate in the 2007 Venice Biennale. His paintings almost always include text in French and Lingala, commenting on life in Africa and the modern world. Samba lives in Kinshasa and Paris.
Chilala Moco is an Angolan photographer and the oldest son of former Angolan Prime Minister Marcolino Moco.
The Palazzo della Farnesina is an Italian government building located between Monte Mario and the Tiber River in the Foro Italico area in Rome, Italy. Designed in 1935, it has housed the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs since its completion in 1959. A reference to "La Farnesina" is often to be intended as a metonymy for the hosted institution, namely the Ministry itself.
Simon Njami is a writer and an independent curator, lecturer, art critic and essayist.
Abdoulaye Konaté is a Malian artist. He was born in Diré and lives and works in Bamako.
Bili Bidjocka is a contemporary Cameroonian artist best known for his installations and sculptures. He was born in Douala, Cameroon, lives in France since the age of 12, and works in Paris, Brussels and New York City.
Abrie Fourie is a South African born artist. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Marcia Kure is an American-based Nigerian artist and member of the University of Nigeria-based Nsukka School known primarily for her mixed media paintings and drawings that engage with postcolonial existentialist conditions and identities.
Mustafa Maluka is an artist and cultural analyst. He is known for theatrically confronting the intersection of contemporary critical theory and global politics with his provocative large-scale portraits.
Youssef Nabil was born on the 6th of November 1972. He is an Egyptian artist and photographer. Youssef Nabil began his photography career in 1992 by staging tableaux in which his subjects acted out melodramas recalling film stills from the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Later in the 1990s, while working as a photographers' assistant in studios in New York and Paris, he began photographing artists and friends, producing both formal portraits as well as placing his subjects in the realms of dreams and sleep, on the edge of awareness, far from their daylight selves.
Contemporary African art is commonly understood to be art made by artists in Africa and the African diaspora in the post-independence era. However, there are about as many understandings of contemporary African art as there are curators, scholars and artists working in that field. All three terms of this "wide-reaching non-category [sic]" are problematic in themselves: What exactly is "contemporary", what makes art "African", and when are we talking about art and not any other kind of creative expression? Western scholars and curators have made numerous attempts at defining contemporary African art in the 1990s and early 2000s and proposed a range of categories and genres. They triggered heated debates and controversies especially on the foundations of postcolonial critique. Recent trends indicate a far more relaxed engagement with definitions and identity ascriptions. The global presence and entanglement of Africa and its contemporary artists have become a widely acknowledged fact that still requires and provokes critical reflection, but finds itself beyond the pressure of self-justification.
Ananias Leki Dago is an Ivorian photographer.
Sindika Dokolo is a Congolese art collector and businessman. He owned one of the most important contemporary African art collections, which includes more than 3,000 pieces.
The Contemporary African Art Collection (CAAC) is a private collection created in 1990 by Italian business man, Jean Pigozzi after his encounter with French independent curator, André Magnin. Magnin specializes in art from non-Western cultures, and especially sub-Saharan art. The CAAC came into being at a time when non-Western contemporary art was largely ignored on the international scene. It was founded shortly after the seminal exhibition The Magicians of the Earth at the Pompidou Center in Paris, curated by Jean-Huber Martin. It was the first truly international exhibition where contemporary works from all over the world were shown on an equal footing.
The Archivio di Nuova Scrittura is a cultural association founded in 1988 in Milan, Italy by art collector Paolo Della Grazia. The archive preserves a large artistic and documentary heritage about any form of artistic expression featuring the use of both the word and the sign. Born from the encounter between Della Grazia and artist Ugo Carrega, in the 1990s the ANS became the main Italian research center on visual poetry, organizing exhibitions, meetings and other cultural events. In 1998 the Archivio di Nuova Scrittura was deposited in part at the Mart in Rovereto and in part at the Museion in Bozen. The artwork section of the ANS includes about 1,600 works by international artists at Mart and about 2,000 at Museion. The ANS archives preserve, apart from the internal archive of the association, the Fraccaro-Carrega fonds, containing the papers of collector Marco Fraccaro and visual poet Ugo Carrega. The library section, preserved at Mart, contains more than 18,000 volumes, among them 600 artist's books and hundreds of futurist first editions, and 600 art magazines including about 300 international artist's magazines.
Michèle Magema, born in Kinshasa in 1977, is a Congolese-French video, performance, and photography artist. She was born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo in 1977. She emigrated to Paris, France in 1984, and currently resides in Nevers.
The Angolan pavilion, representing the nation of Angola, has participated in the Venice Biennale since 2013. As one of the biennial international art exhibition's national pavilions, Angola mounts a show in a Venetian palazzo outside Venice's Giardini. The first Angolan pavilion, which featured the photography of Edson Chagas, became the first African national pavilion to receive the biennial's top prize, the Golden Lion for best national pavilion. Chagas displayed poster-sized photographs of resituated, abandoned objects and weathered architecture in the Angolan capital of Luanda. Reviewers praised the interplay between the photographed subject matter and the Italian Renaissance artwork that adorned the hosting palazzo's walls. The 2015 Biennale hosted a group show of five Angolan artists on themes of intergenerational dialogue.
Firelei Báez was born in Santiago de los Caballeros in the Dominican Republic and lives and works in New York City. She makes intricate works on paper and canvas as well as large scale sculpture. Through a convergence of interest in anthropology, science fiction, black female subjectivity and women's work, her art explores the humor and fantasy involved in self-making within diasporic societies, which have an ability to live with cultural ambiguities and use them to build psychological and even metaphysical defenses against cultural invasions.
Joseph-Francis Sumégné was born on 30 July 1951 in Bamenjou, Cameroon. Painter and sculptor since 1976, he is a self-taught artist. He lives and works in Yaoundé (Cameroon).
