Gathered on the occasion of the Mediterranean Season, this exhibition brings together artists whose works seem to share certain common sensations: blue, heat, shores, maritime circulations, open horizons, but also a certain gentleness of the gaze on everyday gestures and inhabited landscapes.

From one horizon to another, the paintings and consoles of Ben Arpea display landscapes and still lifes bathed in motionless light. The refined forms of Aldo Chaparro and the silent horizons of Javier Toro Blum prolong this meditation on space, emptiness and clarity. The ceramics of Yoann Estevenin bring forth a discreet bestiary of hedgehogs, frogs, snails and butterflies, like so many presences escaped from a Mediterranean garden or a memory of reading.

Further on, the sea appears in the boats of Rob Tucker, in the knots and deep blues of Hyacinthe Ouattara, as well as in the deployed sails of Lorenzo Vitturi, where Issus and his bodies merge into the wind.

At the water’s edge, Christa David’s photographs explore the sensitive encounter between female bodies and the ocean. The works of Joana Choumali take a careful look at African coastal territories and their discreet rhythms. At Thandiwe Muriu’s, silhouettes blend with fabrics inspired by the tie and dye fabrics of Mombasa, in a play of patterns and colors that extends those of the sea and sky.

The Mediterranean is also a space of circulation, encounters and shared stories. Hassan Hajjaj vividly celebrates the richness of Moroccan culture, between popular traditions and contemporary imaginations. Roxane Mbanga’s paintings evoke the luminous softness of Guadeloupe, the open terraces on the horizon and the suspended moments of summer days. Shourouk Rhaiem’s sculptures evoke the memory of journeys to Tunisia, where everyday objects become fragments of an intimate story.

Without seeking to offer a unique vision of the Mediterranean, the exhibition thus composes a sensitive cartography made up of light, manners, memories and movements. The sea appears less as a border than as a common poetic space—an imaginary territory where views, narratives, and horizons meet.

Source: 193 Gallery

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From this space of thought, the gallery becomes host to a shapeshifting body of work imbued with afro-futurism, rock cycles, Cornish folklore, and West and Southern African mythologies.

Central to the exhibition are a pair of floor to ceiling cyanotype banners, which act like a veil between worlds of strata, exposed with sunlight in Windhoek, Namibia, and Cornwall, UK. The work borrows its title from Octavia E. Butler’s speculative fiction novel, Wild Seed, (1980).

A series of drawings punctuate the gallery walls like portals, intimately sharing experiences of Black and Brown identifying-women in the Cornish West Penwith landscape. Libita has worked with these women, who are also artists, through walking workshops since 2023. Their voices echo throughout the gallery in a multi-channel sound work composed of vocal (dis)harmonies layered with field recordings and low frequencies.

The sound installation culminates in a circular resonating seat, inviting listeners to rest, and feel what they are hearing and seeing. This process of listening is reflected in the large-scale photograms which surround the seat. Made with an experimental analogue technique of exposing light photosensitive paper with sound and light simultaneously. The title of each photogram refers to the process used in this series to sonify matter, such as sand, crystals, hair and thorns, as a way to speak to and with gaps in history.

ZED LOVE is rooted in research to better understand African diasporic, working class, mixed and multi-racial experiences in rural Britain. Libita draws on her own British-Namibian-Cornish heritage to open up complex dialogues of thought about racialised identities.

A public programme of events, both in the gallery and offsite, will accompany the exhibition. This will include performance, an artist talk, and workshops.

Source: Newlyn Art Gallery

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The exhibition centers on the Hotel Impala in Kolwezi, once owned by the artist’s great-uncle. Requisitioned twice during conflicts in Katanga, this family property—claimed by history—becomes the point of departure for a broader narrative. Like termite mounds, constantly under construction and marking the landscape, Landscape Lens unfolds as a layered temporal field in which Western archival images meet vernacular archives, the voices of Katangan women and men, and contemporary photographs.

Baloji’s work examines the status of images themselves: how they are used, how people represented themselves, and how we read them today. In Landscape Lens, photographs of environments, landscapes and portraits are set alongside autobiographical narratives and family and European archives—including Paris Match—to challenge dominant narratives about Congolese history and the country’s colonial-era borders. Baloji thus stages an evocative and subjective encounter between large-scale history and micro-histories: that of the artist’s family, those of the actors and victims of the Katanga secession and the two Shaba wars, and contemporary accounts of the DRC confronting the extractivism of global capitalism.

Source: Les Rencontres d’Arles

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Meaning “with you”, “alongside you”, or more broadly “oneness” in isiZulu, Kanye Nawe reflects a philosophy of shared presence that underpins Muholi’s longstanding commitment to documenting, preserving, and celebrating Black LGBTQIA+ lives while challenging historical erasure. Opening shortly after Faces and Phases 20, an off-site presentation of the project held during the 61st Venice Biennale, the exhibition coincides with various personal and historical anniversaries that have shaped the trajectory of Muholi’s practice. Among them are 20 years since the inception of Faces and Phases (2006–ongoing), 20 years since South Africa’s Civil Union Act legalised same-sex marriage, and the 30th anniversary of South Africa’s Constitution.

Central to the exhibition is Faces and Phases, widely regarded as one of the most significant visual records of Black LGBTQIA+ lives globally. Initiated in South Africa in 2006 in response to the violence and hate crimes faced by Black Queer communities, the series sought to challenge their absence and misrepresentation within public and historical records. Since then, it has expanded into a transnational project encompassing participants photographed across multiple continents. Kanye Nawe brings together early portraits made in South Africa alongside recent additions produced in London, Porto, Panama City, Los Angeles, Salvador, São Paulo, Venice, and Rio de Janeiro.Another section of the exhibition presents works from Only Half the Picture, Being, Mo(u)rning, LiZa, and ZaVa, series that explore intimacy, desire, and the complexities of Queer relationships. Together, these photographs bear witness to tenderness, vulnerability, loss, and connection, foregrounding relationships as sites of care, solidarity, and mutual recognition.

In Somnyama Ngonyama, the artist uses their own body as a site through which histories of race, labour, gender, sexuality, and representation are examined and reclaimed. Created while travelling for exhibitions, residencies, and research, the portraits function as a form of visual journaling, responding to the places Muholi inhabits and the objects and encounters that surround them. As Faces and Phases builds a living archive of community, Somnyama Ngonyama traces a parallel record of self-reflection. The works presented in Kanye Nawe include recent self-portraits made in Cape Town, Paternoster, London, Los Angeles, Panama City, Rio de Janeiro, and Venice.

Drawing on personal memory, spirituality, and the body as a vessel of both vulnerability and resilience, three large-scale bronze sculptures explore themes of protection, mourning, ancestry, and survival. Across disciplines, Muholi’s practice remains rooted in the act of bearing witness, affirming dignity, self-determination, and the enduring presence of Black Queer lives.

Source: Southern Guild

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March 6, 1957: after more than a century under British rule, Ghana, formerly the Gold Coast, celebrated its independence, driven by the determination of its leader Kwame Nkrumah and his political circle. As a key proponent of the Pan-African project, the country helped open the way toward political emancipation for the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. With this newfound freedom, complex times emerged, as Ghana had to build the structures of its state, assert its political authority within the context of the Cold War, and forge a collective identity.

Among the many economic, social and political challenges, redefining a distinct cultural and intellectual identity was at the heart of Ghana’s project of emancipation. Music, theater, dance, literature and the visual arts all took part in this dynamic, giving form to the recent experience of freedom.

Photography played a crucial role in shaping the image of the young nation, both within its borders and abroad. Banknotes, brochures, illustrated magazines, postcards, stamps and even textiles served as vehicles for this new national image. Proud of its early achievements and admired beyond its borders, Ghana sparked a wave of publishing activity in the early decades of independence, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The country’s image was thus analyzed, documented and celebrated in many forms across numerous photography books. Works such as the now-iconic Ghana: An African Portrait (1976) by Paul Strand, or The Roadmakers (1961) by American photographer Willis E. Bell and Ghanaian playwright Efua Sutherland, opened up
new spaces of representation for the
country and its people, far removed from colonial-era imagery.

Ghana! Dreaming Independence explores this visual world, which flourished especially in books and more broadly in print culture during the early decades of independence. In dialogue, the contemporary artists featured in the exhibition examine and shed light on this visual legacy, which remains alive—between doubt, hope, and nostalgia—today.

Source: Les Rencontres d’Arles

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The Ghanaian artist and preacher Kwame Akoto stands out due to his unique journey. In 1972, he opened his studio in Kumasi, where he began painting signs, but quickly moved away from commercial orders, freeing himself to develop a personal universe, combining faith, social criticism and humour. Rooted in local life, his work is also marked by an outspoken view of the world.

Under the name of Almighty God, he is a preacher and a respected character in his neighbourhood. In his studio, Almighty God Art Works, he designs powerful images where the text plays a key role. His works blend moralising slogans, spiritual messages and everyday scenes in a direct, explicit style. The painter also frequently depicts himself in self-portraits challenging the status of creator.

The exhibition is a tribute to this major figure of the contemporary West African artistic world. It explores his themes of preference and showcases the influences, meetings — especially with the artist Hervé Di Rosa — and beliefs that have shaped his unique artistic approach.

This exhibition is held with the support of the Embassy of France and the Institut Français in Ghana, under the ‘Création Africa’ initiative.

Source: Musée du quai Branly

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For Maceo, this attentiveness to the world first emerged through the photo novel before expanding into sculpture and installation. Trained at the Arts Décoratifs, he draws from his immediate surroundings to shape his work. Following a solo exhibition at the Museum of Mineralogy in 2025, where he questioned the status of the mineral world, he extends this dialogue with nature by turning his attention to the garden. Tree bark becomes faces, subtly revealing figures of surveillance; branches are trapped within glass or wire mesh; bird wings bring shutter stops to life. Playing with scale and illusion, his sculptures destabilise familiar points of reference.
While the artist constantly explores and questions materiality as we know it, craftsmanship remains central to his practice.

Casting, silicone, and the assemblage of humble materials such as stones, bark, and feathers give rise to hybrid forms.

In doing so, he reflects on the passage of time and seeks to preserve the living within a form of permanence. Natural elements, once collected and cast, retain a latent vitality, as though suspended in time.

For Emmanuel Awuni, who was born in Ghana and moved to the UK, where he completed his master’s at the Royal Academy schools; his attentiveness to reality takes the form of a slow immersion in his immediate environment. Rather than seeking to dominate what surrounds him, he attempts to attune himself to the flows that move through the world: the oral traditions of his childhood, the movement of rivers, the flight of birds, and natural rhythms. He momentarily steps away from the pace imposed by contemporary society in order to slow down, a slowing down he also asks of the viewer.

His painting demands time. It does not reveal itself immediately, but gradually unfolds through a meditative experience. Although his canvases may initially appear non-figurative, they slowly disclose silhouettes or fragments of landscapes to those willing to pause and truly look.

Deeply rooted in rhythm and orality, his work draws equally from present forms and childhood memories to construct a vibrant and timeless abstraction. Guided by instinctive gestures, Awuni seeks to translate musicality into painting. Every colour becomes a note, a pulse.

A nearly spiritual dimension runs through the works of both artists. The idea of healing emerges not explicitly, but as a process: that of renewing one’s relationship to oneself, to others, and to the world. Both artists reject direct narration in favour of open forms through which the viewer is invited to experience a story, one in which nature itself becomes the storyteller.

To observe the living world with precision, to capture the rhythm of water and the forms of nature in order to redirect and reinscribe them elsewhere: a metamorphosis takes place.

Source: MAGNIN-A Gallery

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La présence de l’eau reflète deux perspectives différentes dans leurs oeuvres. Dans le travail documentaire de Baudouin Mouanda, l’eau apparaît comme une force naturelle incontrôlable, révélatrice de la vulnérabilité humaine face aux catastrophes climatiques qui frappent régulièrement son pays. Ses photographies témoignent des conséquences des inondations sur les personnes et leur environnement.

Dans les peintures de Wilfried Mbida, l’eau investit les espaces domestiques de manière silencieuse. Présente au cœur des intérieurs, elle coexiste naturellement avec les figures représentées et devient un élément de réparation, de purification et de fertilité. L’artiste convoque ainsi une dimension spirituelle de l’eau.

Tantôt naturelle, tantôt spirituelle, l’eau s’infiltre dans les espaces d’habitation pour finir par coexister avec les individus. L’exposition propose une réflexion sensible sur la manière dont l’eau façonne à la fois les territoires physiques et les mondes intérieurs.

Source: Galerie PERSON Bruxelles

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Bam has two connected series of sculptures, the Ifas and Abstract Vessels. She creates the Ifas by embracing wet clay against her body to form vessels that collapse, crack and fold. She is interested in how physically connecting with the raw material also makes her feel more spiritually connected with the earth.

Inspired by textiles and language, the Abstract Vessels are covered with pattern and colour. Bam pierces the surface of the vessels by hand, revealing the glaze inside. The act of rolling out the clay, puncturing and studding the surface with pattern, painting with glazes, and then firing combines all the elements – earth, air, fire and water.

Bam views clay as the most primal material, made of raw earth and water, processed by hands, and the fire of the kiln. She connects this to the concept of the primal feminine, the idea that there is an instinctive source of creation and wildness in all beings.

At the SLG, Bam will also debut a new film produced in Osun-Oshogbo, a sacred site of the Yoruba fertility goddess Osun. The film tracks the river’s path and human impact on the landscape.

ABOUT RANTI BAM
Ranti Bam lives and works in Paris. Bam has exhibited internationally including Anima, at James Cohan, New York (2024), Hard/Soft: Textiles and Ceramics in Contemporary Art, Museum of Applied Arts, Austria, (2023), and Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2023). In June 2026, Bam will unveil her permanent public artwork for ‘Climate Clock’ curated by Alice Sharp, Invisible Dust for Oulu26 Finland, European Capital of Culture. Ranti Bam was invited to be the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Koyo Kouoh.

Source: South London Gallery

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For someone rooted in ancestral rites and divinatory ceremonies specific to the Bamiléké region where he was born, the world is governed by a constant dialogue between opposing yet complementary principles. On one side, totemic figures of patriarchal power stand as organizers of a social and political life governed by immutable laws; on the other, maternal figures embodying matriarchal strength shape an intimate and familial sphere defined by care and protection. This distribution of roles, which some might view as conservative, should instead be understood as a form of harmony that does not exclude forms of emancipation. Portraiture thus affirms, in an almost anthropological sense, the structuring of a world whose principles and forms of wisdom seem timeless.

Hako Hankson celebrates a world of heroes and heroines whose roles span centuries. Alongside tribal chiefs— intercessors between the world of the living and that of the ancestors, recognizable by their masks sometimes adorned with feathers—appear female figures, at times cradling a child, acting as intercessors between generations, identifiable by their rich adornments and finely detailed headdresses, crafted by the artist using Posca markers. These figures are inseparable from birds which, for the painter and the community to which he belongs, symbolize intermediaries between the world of the living and the beyond, much like ritual statuettes and masks. For this series, Hankson also draws on the iconography of masks from Papua New Guinea, which recall those of his native Cameroon, as rituals and symbols share deep anthropological constants. Are human beings not shaped by the same desires and imaginaries, despite their differences?

Yet it would be reductive to assign this work a purely ethnographic dimension. On the contrary, it is constantly nourished by a dialogue with an art history that is, by nature, universal, and with its Moroccan context of production, which one might describe as fraternal. A kinship of spirit connects these portraits to Picasso’s Cubist painting, itself informed by the fascinated discovery of what was once termed “primitivist” art. Totemic masks and sacred statuary here recover their full visual force. But it is above all with urban art—particularly graffiti, with its immediacy of execution—that Hankson’s work resonates. While the often monochrome backgrounds are carefully worked, drawing remains the catalysing force of the canvas. First sketched in broad strokes, with a controlled inclination toward caricature or satire, drawing forms the structural backbone of each portrait.

It also appears within the canvas through a series of small marker-drawn vignettes depicting scenes of everyday life. Musicians, gatherings of elders, passersby at leisure: a shared frontality shapes these images, often accompanied by phrases reminiscent of graffiti or by letterforms borrowing from hieroglyphs or calligraphy. A desire to narrate life in all its inexhaustible diversity becomes apparent. A discerning eye will notice here a motorcycle taxi—whose drivers are known as “bendskins” in Cameroon—elsewhere a cart that seems almost fused with the donkey pulling it, bearing the letters “MARR”, evoking the city of Marrakech. Finally, an intergenerational dialogue emerges with a recognized figure of contemporary art, whose name is inscribed across several canvases: Abdelkrim Ouazzani. Hankson discreetly echoes his hybrid, anthropomorphic creatures—his skeletal fish or wheel-birds—as a gesture of affinity toward an art that is spontaneous, free, and playful; much like Picasso, who said he spent a lifetime learning to draw like a child.

Source: L’Atelier21

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