Jo Ractliffe: Under a State of Emergency
“Ractliffe’s work, whether consciously or not, emerges at a time when the impossibility of representing experience started to gain purchase in discussions around the medium’s shortfalls.”
Category Archives: Africa
Thana Faroq: I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows
Thana Faroq’s I Don’t Recognize Me in the Shadows is a book of complicated subjects. First, there is the subject at the heart of it all, namely Thana and her experience as a Yemeni Refugee who found her way to the Netherlands through the gruelling and heart-wrenching ordeal of leaving her family in Yemen where […]
Piotr Zbierski: Echoes Shades The Ethnography of Shadows
“Are classifications necessary? What are there limits? Who can photograph who and what? “ I am always curious by what we consider the exotic in photographs. I often find myself thinking of the vestigial media forms of the past- all the inconsistencies, problematic discourses, and general selling of anything “other” in photographs, magazines and […]
Samuel Fosso Autoportrait SIX SIX SIX
"Our point of view of the self is hidden and although personal subjectivity is widely considered to be the foundation of image-making at present, we have deluded ourselves for a great number of years suggesting that photography could ever be anything more than the self exposed through images of the exterior." The greatest gift [...]
Chaos in the Landscape: Nico Krijno’s How to Leave Your Body Behind
“Krijno’s images are threaded through with references to South Africa’s colonial history and its fragile post-apartheid democracy.”
António Júlio Duarte: Against the Blackest of Days
“There is noise, distortion, grain and the magnetic tape in my mind completely fails in parts to distribute any information at all. The images are dark, stained by the passing of time and the incredulous weight of dry heat. Throughout the song “Blackened” by Metallica plays over and over…” When I look at […]
Artist Kara Walker – ‘I’m an Unreliable Narrator’ (2019)
Fons Americanus is a 13-metre tall working fountain inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London. Created by artist Kara Walker for the 2019 Hyundai Commission, it is one of the most ambitious installations in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall to date. Rather than a celebration of the British Empire, Walker’s fountain explores […]
Guy Tillim: Things Come Together
“It is this binary position that implies the view that African colonization created only victims incapable of looking after themselves, impotent against their oppressors and incompetent without.”
Lorenzo Vitturi: We Need More Markets
“It is an aesthetic examination of the material of everyday life that barely impinges on representational issues and I love that about it.”
Emmanuelle Andrianjafy: Nothing’s in Vain
“Everything about the city made me uncomfortable and raised questions: the landscape, the atmosphere, the situation, the agitation, etc. It seemed so imperfect. I wanted to understand this chaos.” To the West, is the Atlantic Ocean and the Americas. Facing East, the huge Sahara Desert. The city of Dakar in Senegal sits in between these […]
Chloe Sells: The Morass of Sacred Geometry
“Trees, leaves, flowers are all given the Sells treatment and become abstracted metaphors of the sacred geometry still found between light and organic materials within the aforementioned natural world.”
Elly Rwakoma: Sinking All the Tricks.
“He recalls developing his negatives by moonlight, having to make his way to the ferry on a road thick with often-time un-negotiable elephant herds. He tells of carrying his chemicals with him and cutting down his negatives to get a surplus of possibilities. I never had this.”