West Wing
Somerset House
Strand, London
WC2R 1LA

VIP and Press Preview:
Thursday 15 October, 11:00 – 19:00

Public and VIP Opening:
Friday 16 October, 11:00 – 19:00
Saturday 17 October, 11:00 – 19:00
Sunday 18 October, 11:00 – 18:00

Source: Larkin Durey

The post Larkin Durey presents Léonce Raphaël Agbodjélou, Gonçalo Mabunda, Anina Major, Lavar Munroe and Marc Padeu, at 1-54 London 2026 appeared first on waau art.

In this edition, Perve Galeria presents a selection of works by four artists who are fundamental to the construction of modernity and contemporary art on the African continent and its diasporas: Ernesto Shikhani (1934-2010, Mozambique) Reinata Sadimba (born 1945, Mozambique) Teresa Roza d’Oliveira (1945-2019, Mozambique/Portugal) and Manuel Figueira (1938-2023, Cape Verde).

The presentation brings together four distinct artistic trajectories that, although rooted in different geographical and cultural contexts, share an engagement with issues of identity, memory, tradition, transformation, and the construction of modern African artistic languages.

Ernesto Shikhani (1934-2010, Mozambique) occupies a central place in the history of modern Mozambican painting. His work is characterized by a powerful symbolic and spiritual dimension, articulating ancestral memory, social experience, identity, and reflections on the transformations of modern African society. His practice developed a very personal visual language in which figuration, abstraction, and symbolic forms coexist.

Reinata Sadimba (born 1945, Mozambique) is one of the most internationally recognized Mozambican artists and a leading figure in contemporary African ceramics. Drawing from the sculptural traditions of northern Mozambique, Sadimba has transformed clay into a deeply personal language, populated by human and hybrid figures. Her works explore the boundaries between traditional knowledge, individual expression, gender, memory, and contemporary art.

Teresa Roza d’Oliveira (1945-2019, Mozambique/Portugal) developed a unique body of work, marked by an intimate engagement with issues of identity, memory, femininity, displacement, and belonging. Her practice occupies a distinct position in the history of Mozambican art, combining personal and symbolic imagery with a complex reflection on cultural and social experience.

Manuel Figueira (1938-2023, Cape Verde) is considered one of the most important figures in modern Cape Verdean art. His work is deeply connected to the cultural landscape of the islands, incorporating elements of daily life, landscape, memory, and local traditions into a refined and highly distinctive pictorial language. His contribution to Cape Verdean visual culture spans several decades and remains fundamental to understanding the country’s modern artistic heritage.

Together, these four artists offer a perspective on African modernity that transcends geographical and chronological boundaries. Their works reveal how artistic languages can emerge from the encounter between inherited traditions, lived experience, cultural memory, and the transformations of contemporary society.

Through this presentation, Perve Galeria continues its long-standing commitment to the research, exhibition and dissemination of artistic legacies from Africa and the Portuguese-speaking world, contributing to greater visibility for artists whose contributions are essential for a broader and more plural understanding of global art history.

Source: Perve Galeria

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Géraldine Tobe’s works emerge from deeply personal and collective histories of spirituality in the Democratic Republic of Congo. After burning her canvases early in her career, she began painting with the smoke of an oil lamp, transforming fire and soot into drawing tools. This process becomes a ritual act that connects the visible world to the invisible realm of spirits. Her compositions often depict fragmented bodies, dancing figures and African masks, reflecting the tensions between ancestral cosmologies and Christian doctrines imposed during the colonial period. Through smoke, Tobe creates symbolic images that evoke trauma, exorcism and resilience, positioning art as a spiritual space of healing.

Mathew Eguavoen work is deeply rooted in the symbolism of laamb. The wrestlers, adorned in traditional attire, their bodies glistening with sacred earth, embody both physical and spiritual strength. The arena becomes a microcosm of the world stage, where Africans fight to assert their place, dignity, and humanity. Each piece in this series captures the tension, movement, and energy of the fight, but also the quiet moments of preparation, reflection, and community that surround it. These moments remind us that the fight is not solitary; it is collective, intergenerational, and deeply connected to the land, culture, and history that sustain it.

Eva Obodo’s sculptural reliefs and installations are constructed through acts of wrapping, tying and bundling charcoal and fibre. These gestures echo ritual practices of binding and weaving found across many cultures, while simultaneously referencing economic and ecological systems tied to resource extraction. Charcoal, produced through burning, evokes both transformation and depletion, pointing to Nigeria’s environmental and industrial histories. His works operate as metaphors for interconnected human networks: communities, trade routes and cultural exchanges. In this sense, Obodo transforms humble materials into symbolic structures that render visible the invisible threads binding individuals to collective histories.

Ozioma Onuzulike approaches clay not merely as a medium but as a symbolic substance deeply embedded in African cosmologies. His works often consist of accumulations of small units created through repetitive processes: pounding, crushing, wedging and firing. These gestures recall both craft traditions and ritual acts of transformation. Clay embodies the tension between fragility and permanence. His work suggests that the material itself carries cultural memory, functioning as an archive of histories shaped by political upheaval, economic struggle and resilience.

Nasreddine Bennacer’s paintings evoke the legendary gardens of Babylon, often associated with the ancient myth of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Rather than reconstructing historical architecture, he embraces ambiguity: fragments of columns and ruins dissolve into lush vegetation rendered through dramatic chiaroscuro. In these dreamlike landscapes, myth becomes more powerful than historical proof. The imagined gardens symbolize humanity’s enduring desire for harmony and beauty, even amid contemporary conflict in regions historically linked to Mesopotamian civilization. Bennacer’s works thus operate as poetic spaces where myth bridges past and present.

Hervé Yamguen’s bronze sculptures depict hybrid figures that merge human, animal and plant forms. These metamorphic beings echo mythological traditions in which the boundaries between species dissolve, suggesting a cosmology in which all forms of life are interconnected. His practice, shaped by decades of interdisciplinary experimentation in visual art, writing and performance, invites viewers to contemplate a broader ecological and spiritual unity. The sculptures embody symbolic transformations, celebrating the vitality and beauty of existence while proposing a worldview rooted in wonder and coexistence.

Through his multi-dimensional works, Mouhcine Rahaoui offers an immersion into the layered memory of the miners that has shaped Jerada, his hometown. The stories, gestures, and testimonies inherited from his father, a former miner, and from his community have left a profound imprint on his visual practice. Rahaoui transforms these memories into matter, reincarnating the mine through coal, rope, wax, candles, and fragments of everyday life. Through abstraction, the Moroccan artist does not simply represent the mine; he excavates its memory, allowing the presence of those who worked—and continue to work—within it to linger, haunt, and inhabit the materiality of his work.

Source: AFIKARIS

The post AFIKARIS presents Géraldine Tobe, Mathew Eguavoen, Eva Obodo, Ozioma Onuzulike, Nasreddine Bennacer, Hervé Yamguen and Mouhcine Rahaoui, at 1-54 London 2026 appeared first on waau art.

Booth S8 features works by Zana Masombuka, Xanthe Somers, Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga and Yacout Hamdouch. Highlights include new photographic works by South African artist Zana Masombuka, which are framed with intricate Ndebele beadwork, celebrating indigenous knowledge, cultural identity and resilience. Rooted in the artisanal traditions of KwaNdebele, her practice responds to the erosion of cultural heritage caused by rapid modernisation and urbanizasion. In Akhulumile Amabhudango: Scenes from Dreams – Journeys with Kosabo, Masombuka honours her late grandfather through dreamlike explorations of kinship, ancestry, and spiritual guidance. Beaded motifs reference iiRholwane zabo Baba – neck rings worn by Ndebele patriarchs – while circular frames woven from indigenous grasses evoke cyclical relationships with nature, underscoring the interconnectedness of cultural continuity, ecological balance and ancestral memory.

Xanthe Somers debuts Carer, Cleaner, Mother, Maker, a new series examining women’s labour postcolonial histories and environmental injustice across the Global South. Somers combines ceramic, basketry and textile traditions of Zimbabwe to create elaborate sculptural forms Her ceramics draw on a rich vocabulary of contemporary symbols to examine what she refers to as the “subtle treason of objects”. Their hand-coiled forms bristle, morph and move, fusing political commentary with a strong sense of domestic intimacy. Centred on the motif of unravelling, the works explore fragility, memory and social cohesion, reclaiming craft as a powerful vehicle for storytelling and amplifying the often-overlooked experiences of generations of women.

The recent paintings by Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, are richly layered works that examine the enduring legacies of colonial exploitation in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Set against stark grey backgrounds, his meticulously rendered figures wear imported “African” textiles and hold botanical specimens that evoke histories of extraction, displacement and resilience. Referencing Belgium’s exploitation of the Congo’s natural resources—from rubber and plantation agriculture to today’s industrial mining—Kamuanga draws compelling parallels between colonial violence and contemporary global supply chains. Integrated circuit patterns inscribed on his figures’ skin connect historical injustices to the minerals powering modern technologies, affirming heritage as a site of resistance and renewal.

Yacout Hamdouch presents Une haie de volubilis à Carvoeiro, (A hedge of morning glories in Carvoeiro), 2026, from her recent series, Poetic Landscapes. In these works, Hamdouch traces the process by which what she calls ‘mirages’ develop. Memory sculpts the mirage, which transforms into a landscape that becomes a window allowing us to frame in review those precious, transient moments. Her paintings are created by an exquisite layering technique, using gradually shifting colours and tones as a reflection of the gradations present in human experience. Her palette is informed by a contemporary interpretation of colours associated with the African continent. In Hamdouch’s work the past is never fixed; it is a live, shifting and deeply personal presence. This subtle yet profoundly introspective approach draws viewers inwards, encouraging questions of one’s own relationship to time, memory and experience as potentiated by these shared moments of recognition.

Booth S7 presents works by LR Vandy, Romuald Hazoumè Sokari Douglas Camp CBE and Alexis Peskine, each offering a distinct sculptural language grounded in storytelling and united by a bold, exploratory approach to materials. Following her acclaimed solo exhibition Rise at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, LR Vandy presents new and significant works from her celebrated rope figure series. Using rope and found materials, Vandy transforms a medium historically bound to architecture, maritime trade, colonialism and slavery into powerful sculptural expressions of resilience and liberation. Through binding, sewing and manipulation, her dynamic forms challenge the historical absence of the female body in abstraction while evoking the movements of dance, carnival masquerade, hunting rituals and spirit traditions across the African diaspora. Vandy’s practice reimagines material histories, celebrating collective joy, cultural memory and the enduring power of trans-formation.

Romuald Hazoumè uses sculptural forms as potent metaphors for African place, history, and identity. This presentation follows his inclusion as a major artist in Benin’s inaugural pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and coincides with his sixth solo exhibition at October Gallery. Since the mid-1980s, Hazoumè hasbeen widely recognised for his incisive masks and installations constructed from discarded plastic containers and petrol canisters. Through visually compelling assemblages Hazoumè work confronts both local and global issues, from political corruption in Africa to the environmental consequences of global consumption.

Sokari Douglas Camp presents a recent sculpture created in galvanised sheet steel, Free West Indian Dominicans, 2025. Her work often explores themes of trade, power and colonialism within an African and Caribbean context. Despite Douglas Camp’s weighty subject matter, her works retain a playfulness and agil-ity that reflects her impressive skills as a sculptor. She comments upon how people of diverse ethnicities, social positions and occupations effected the emergence of distinctive sartorial cultures across the Atlantic world by imbuing material fabrics and modes of dress with new meanings. Douglas Camp’s work is currently exhibited in The Music is Black: A British Story, the first exhibition to be held at the V&A East Museum, London, which continues until 10th January, 2027.

Alexis Peskine is represented by breathtaking mixed-media portraits that explore identity, resilience and the lived experiences of the African diaspora. Inspired by people he encounters during international artist resi-dencies, each work transforms personal connection into richly layered visual narratives. This emotional reso-nance—formed through connections between person, place and experience—is embedded within the materials he uses. Meticulously constructed from hand-hammered nails on stained wooden panels, the portraits are enhanced with gold, silver, palladium or Japanese oxidised leaf, creating luminous surfaces of remarkable depth. Referencing the spiritually charged Minkisi power figures of the Congo Basin, Peskine’s works combine natural pigments, such as coffee, earth, hibiscus, curcuma and sacred herbs to affirm presence, dignity and artistic freedom through a powerful and distinctive contemporary practice.

Source: October Gallery

The post October Gallery presents Zana Masombuka, Xanthe Somers, Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, Yacout Hamdouch, LR Vandy, Romuald Hazoumè, Sokari Douglas Camp CBE and Alexis Peskine, at 1-54 London 2026 appeared first on waau art.

THE DETAILS
VIP and Press Preview:
Thursday 15 October, 11:00 – 19:00

Public and VIP Opening:
Friday 16 October, 11:00 – 19:00
Saturday 17 October, 11:00 – 19:00
Sunday 18 October, 11:00 – 18:00

Location
Somerset House
Strand, London
WC2R 1LA
United Kingdom

Source: 1-54 London

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In the heritage gallery, Treasure Mlima Reflections
Treasure Mlima approaches consciousness as a bodily experience rather than a fixed idea. His work isolates the quiet moments when the body performs, and records the strain that history and colonial structures leave on the self. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s writing on psychological displacement and the internalised white mask, he asks what it takes to name the world and to belong without the exhaustion of spectacle.
Through slow, rhythmic carving, Mlima develops a formal language that values emergence over resolution and improvisation over polish. After a career spent studying the body, he now presents it as evidence: a physical record of internalised performance and institutional conditioning.

Source: Press Release

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Romuald Hazoumè revisits his iconic masques bidons (Fr. bidon* – flask, container, bottle)—presenting a striking series of masks made from repurposed plastic containers that are adorned with an eclectic array of found materials. Wittily imagined as portraits of figures inhabiting particular places in the contemporary geo-political landscape, these new sculptures come freighted with Hazoumè’s biting commentaries on current issues of global concern. Displaying a wicked eye for detail, each mask dances before our eyes animated by his irreverent sense of humour. Revitalising the sculptural form for which he is best known, Hazoumè’s ironic avatars offer timely reflections on the precarious nature of the world we all inhabit. Once again, these powerful works, taken collectively, underline Hazoumè’s willing acceptance of the artist’s responsibility to confront patent abuses of authority while speaking truth to power.

Creating ‘masks’ from plastic containers, the majority of which are blue in colour, allows Hazoumè to play with associations that echo two separate yet distantly related ideas. The immediate reference is to the young Picasso’s ‘blue period’, when the majority of his canvases were dominated by an all-pervading blue tone, as he became fixated upon melancholic themes of youth, poverty, old-age and death. At the same time, Hazoumè’s title also suggests ‘the Blues’, that uniquely African-American form of music, rooted in traditions transported from central west Africa, which developed throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the US. The distinctive genre of Blues music draws its power from the heartfelt expressions of marginalised people who, although powerless in the face of the conditions that surround them, unite in shared expressions of affirmative music that—even if only temporarily—offer transformative relief.

Hazoumè’s work is well known for addressing such complex matters as slavery (historical and modern), migration and the brutal realities developing in postcolonial Africa. Somehow, these blue masks seem to penetrate deeper still, adopting darker, more ominous tones, reflecting anxieties fed by the many interconnected crises of the present day. Their titles, often forenames or placenames, supply disquieting clues as to the undercurrents of thought currently colouring Hazoumè’s approach. Kongo (2024/25), alludes directly to the endless conflicts over natural resources that blight that immense country’s past, present and probable future. Autlan de Navarro (2024/25), flickers between contrasting visions of a once-proud indigenous people and the wretched survivors of a downtrodden minority eking out impoverished lives on the margins of a paradise where they once lived in balance with the biosphere that maintained them. Each mask pulls into focus another emergency or potential flashpoint: the ongoing ‘situation’ in Gaza; the Israeli-American coalition at war with Iran, the vicious spiral of hostilities in Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and the potential for any one of these to spill over, at any moment, into nuclear conflagration. Ever the agent provacateur, Hazoumè’s tongue-in-cheek borrowing of Picasso’s blue tones for this present period of work shows little evidence of dejection or despair. Rather, we can sense, radiating from within each mask, the fiery reds and incandescent whites of Hazoumè’s focussed indignation.

Source: October Gallery

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Newly independent African countries wanted to project—both inward and outward—a forward-looking, progressive, and cosmopolitan self-image, and modern architecture embodied this aspiration. A new architectural identity engaged with the political ideas of Pan-Africanism and Africanization, and was shaped by architects both from the continent and abroad.

Architectural drawings, models, and archival images, as well as newly commissioned site-specific photographs and videos, are among the exhibition’s 400 objects. Nearly all are being shown publicly for the first time. Spanning Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon, Architects of Liberation is a revealing look at a region reimagining its future.

Please note that Gallery 4E will be temporarily closed on Monday, September 28 from 4 to 4:45 p.m.

Source: MoMA

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Read the full article here: Wallpaper*

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Reaffirming the importance of Parks’ legacy in the 21st century, the exhibition provides fresh insight into his work, as memory and anecdote animate photographs long-since analyzed, studied and examined, revealing levels of detail and depth previously unavailable. Written reflections include those from Kathleen Cleaver (The Black Panthers, 1970), Kate Clark Harris (The Doll Test, 1947), Kyle Johnson (The Learning Tree, 1969) and Cora Taylor (Segregation in the South, 1956), each direct subjects of Parks’ photographs. Additional reflections have been provided by Lonnie Ali, widow of Muhammad Ali; Qubilah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X; Gloria Vanderbilt’s son, CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper and Ingrid Bergman’s daughter, actress Isabella Rossellini. Contributions have also been made by filmmaker Ava DuVernay; Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative; Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple (1982), and her daughter, writer and producer Rebecca Walker; Thelma Golden, Ford Foundation Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Deborah Willis, University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University; artist Hank Willis Thomas; and Ambassador Andrew Young, who participated in the 1963 March on Washington that Parks photographed.

“Over the last twenty years, The Gordon Parks Foundation has built relationships with many of the people that Gordon Parks photographed and got to know personally. We are honored to have so many of their stories brought together in an exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery, one that will allow us to continue learning from them, so that the past may continue to inspire us,” said Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr., Executive Director of The Gordon Parks Foundation.

In 1947, Kate Clark Harris’ parents, Dr. Kenneth Clark and Dr. Mamie Clark, were photographed by Parks as they conducted their ‘doll tests’—groundbreaking experiments that revealed the psychological effects of segregation on African American children. The tests were conducted using several dolls, all identical except for skin color, that were put before Black children, aged 3–7, who were asked to identify which one they preferred. The majority preferred the white doll, leading Drs. Clark to conclude that ‘prejudice, discrimination and segregation’ damaged their self-esteem and caused Black children to develop a sense of inferiority. In Doll Test, Harlem, New York (1947), Parks’ photograph shows a young boy in the midst of the test and pointing at a white doll held next to a black one. Harris remembered these tests and their psychological toll at length, concluding with the following sentiment: “One of the things that Gordon was so good at is getting beyond the surface and getting the feelings beneath. And so the pictures convey that, you can’t ignore it—you can’t.”

As one of his many projects for the magazine throughout his life, in the summer of 1956, Life sent Parks to Alabama to document the daily realities of Black Americans living under Jim Crow laws in the rural South. Eschewing a journalistic approach that focused on the leaders and momentous events of the struggle for civil rights, Parks’ empathetic approach instead portrayed the common humanity of his fellow Americans going about daily life in unjust circumstances. In At Segregated Drinking Fountain, Mobile, Alabama (1956), Parks photographed a young girl being helped up to drink from the ‘colored only’ water fountain in front of a general store, as two women look on. In excerpts of her full remarks, one of these women, Cora Taylor, remembers the moment and the photograph: “I wondered what was going on, because you didn’t know who to trust and who not to trust. I let my mother know about the photograph, in case anything went wrong. A few weeks later I saw the picture in Life magazine, and I just couldn’t believe it.”

One of Parks’ most indelible portraits, Eldridge Cleaver and His Wife, Kathleen, Algiers, Algeria (1970), was made while on assignment for Life to report on the Black Panthers and their leaders. After serving a prison term, Cleaver was on parole when authorities ordered him back to prison because of his involvement in a Panther-police incident. He subsequently fled the country and moved to Algiers, where Parks met and interviewed him and his wife Kathleen Cleaver, who reflected on that time and the power of photography, excerpted here: “This photograph was taken in a very remote, isolated place. If you saw where we lived, it was not that historic. That’s the joy of photography—you isolate what’s important.”

Accompanying these intimate stories are the insights from those who collaborated or worked with Parks during his life and were able to observe both his working methods and his personal character, such as Academy Award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who worked as a publicist for Parks’ 2000 documentary, Half Past Autumn. Encapsulating the importance and poignancy of Parks’ work, DuVernay’s words offer a powerful summation of what the chorus of contributors to Voices in the Mirror articulate in their own singular way: “He did not bring elegance to Black life. He captured the elegance that is Black life.”

About The Gordon Parks Foundation
The Gordon Parks Foundation supports and produces artistic and educational initiatives that advance the legacy and vision of Gordon Parks—recognized as the most significant American photographer of the 20th century, as well as a writer, musician and filmmaker, who used the arts to further “the common search for a better life and a better world.” The Foundation was co-founded in 2006 by Parks with his longtime friend and editor at Life magazine, Philip B. Kunhardt, Jr., to preserve his creative work and support the next generation of artists advancing social justice.

Through exhibitions, publications and public programs, organized in collaboration with institutions internationally and at its exhibition space in Pleasantville, New York, the Foundation provides access to and supports understanding of, the work and contributions of Gordon Parks for artists, scholars, students and the public. The Foundation’s archive houses Gordon Parks’s photographs, negatives, contact sheets, publications and a selection of ephemera related to his work in photography, film, music and writing. The archive also includes collections by related artists.

Drawing inspiration from the pivotal role of a fellowship Parks received early in his career, the Foundation’s educational and grant-making initiatives are core to its mission and year-round activities. Through fellowships, prizes and scholarships, the Foundation provides vital support to artists, writers and students—current and future generations of creatives whose work continues his legacy. These initiatives are made possible through The Gordon Parks Arts and Social Justice Fund, established by the Foundation in 2019.

Source: Jack Shainman Gallery

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