In his latest solo exhibition, In Order of Appearance, Moldovanos explores identity and urban culture through the fluid dynamics of human connection. The body of work captures a range of bonds, from fleeting everyday encounters to lifelong friendships and serves as a visual anthology of the figures who enter, exit and shape our personal narratives.

Moldovanos continues to expand on the distinct visual language that has become his signature: figurative works that are carefully constructed, then deliberately broken down into bold colour fields, geometric patterns and simplified silhouettes. The figures remain grounded in anatomy but are pushed towards abstraction until they feel as if they are constantly shifting between recognition and illusion.

Facial features are intentionally removed, replaced with thick strokes of impasto paint, stripping away personal identity from the subjects and removing the distraction of specific likeness.

His paintings explore the question of identity in an increasingly image-conscious world, examining how what we wear can become a form of self-expression, signalling everything from personality and confidence to culture and belonging. By fragmenting and reconstructing his subjects through colour, pattern and abstraction, he creates works that invite multiple readings, much like identity itself: layered, evolving and rarely as straightforward as it first appears.

Sotiris Moldovanos (b. 1977) is Cape Town based, born in Johannesburg, and graduated from the Tshwane University of Technology in 1999. He paints with a preference for portraiture and figurative work that combines bold colours with geometric patterns; his figures, while anatomically accurate, are simplified into abstract outlines and silhouettes, producing an optical illusion combined with abstraction that allows viewers to form their own unique interpretation of each painting. Moldovanos has held five previous solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group exhibitions.

Source: WORLDART

The post WORLDART presents “In Order of Appearance” by Sotiris Moldovanos appeared first on waau art.

In Kala, Buthelezi extends this enquiry into the realm of measurement, asking how we might take account of ourselves and the world at a cultural moment of uncertainty. The isiZulu imperative that is the title translates to “weigh it” or “measure it,” invoking both the logic of calculation and the limits of it. In a pervasive societal milieu where value is increasingly determined by metrics, productivity, and modes of extraction, Buthelezi attempts to measure what refuses calculation: hope, memory, collective dignity, spiritual inheritance, and the distance between who we are and who we might yet become. What forms of knowledge remain, she asks, when conventional systems of measurement no longer suffice?

Across the exhibition, spheres, topographies, concentric circles, and fragmented landscapes manifest as recurring forms. The works recall celestial maps, geological formations, and ancient tools of navigation, occupying a material and conceptual space between the terrestrial and the esoteric. These forms become tools with which Buthelezi attempts to locate the self within a world that feels increasingly unstable: to take measure of how far we have strayed, what has been lost, and what might still be recovered. Rather than describing the world, the works propose another way of reading it, one where intuition and calculation, matter and memory, the mundane and the metaphysical coexist.

Through repetition and methodical labour, she treats materials as carriers of knowledge: repositories of information that can be accessed, exchanged, and transformed through making. Glass beads, natural fibres, clay, and found earth matter are layered into densely worked surfaces that record time as much as form. The work unfolds intuitively. Rather than imposing meaning onto the materials, Buthelezi allows it to emerge through sustained engagement with them.

This sustained engagement with material becomes a form of measurement in itself. Every reiterated gesture, woven strand, and positioned bead records duration, attention, and embodied labour, transmuting time itself into a visceral presence. In Kala, calculation becomes less about arriving at certainty than about cultivating a heightened awareness of the relationships that bind body to landscape, the individual to the collective, and the present to ancestral, multi-directional time. Making becomes a mode of enquiry through which systems of knowledge are not illustrated, but both preserved and produced.

A monumental sphere, titled Mhlaba, becomes a focal form for the exhibition’s central themes. Neither complete nor intact, the work appears suspended in state between formation and erosion. It evokes the Earth, but also a charged body; one marked by extraction, transformation, and latent potential. Its surface is layered with tactile constellations built from cut segments of ‘icansi’, traditional mats hand-woven from iNcema bulrushes. Used across South Africa in ceremonial, ritual and domestic contexts, these mats carry cultural and spiritual significance that extends beyond their everyday function.

The Abacus, an extensive wall-hung installation, transforms an ancient tool of calculation into a distorted meditation on what cannot be counted. Ebonised, handmade clay beads shift across a series of open contour lines. Released from the confines of the abacus’s conventional four-sided boundary, the instrument becomes mutable and porous, exposed to forces of motion, time, deduction and addition. Together, the exhibition’s recurring forms – orb, contour, grid, and horizon – function less as symbols than as devices of orientation. They suggest that the act of measuring is inseparable from the act of locating oneself: within history, within landscape, within inherited frameworks of knowledge and belief.

This search for orientation is also a return to the source. “I am aware that I am ancient”, Buthelezi has shared, gesturing toward the understanding that this knowing moves across generations through ritual, ancestral lineage, spiritual gifts, and the embodied act of art-making. Her materials become a didactic device, a kind of spiritual technology: holding information from the past, while generating new insights for those who come after. Here, making is simultaneously an inward journey and an outward act of transmission, locating the artist within a continuum that extends beyond the limits of an individual lifetime.

Kala proposes that before we can imagine a way forward, we must first take account of the conditions of the present, quantifying not only what has been lost through extraction and dehumanisation, but also what continues to endure through connection, ritual, and community. Ultimately, Kala asks not how we measure the world, but what we choose to measure. It invites an alternative currency of value; one rooted in attention, care, and the belief that making remains a vital way of processing the conditions of the present.

Source: Southern Guild Cape Town

The post Southern Guild Cape Town presents “Kala” by Simphiwe Buthelezi appeared first on waau art.

The title itself carries a profound dual meaning. The Arabic word انسان (Insaan) translates to “human being,” originating from two distinct roots: انس (uns), meaning intimate or love, and نسي (nasyia), meaning forgetful. This defines the human being simultaneously as the intimate one and the forgetful one. It is a poetic fragrance often alluded to by Islamic mystics and scholars, poignantly delivering us to the essence of humanity: that our core reality is rooted in love, a truth we so often forget within our terrestrial, ethereal, and Divine planes.

Salaam’s work ties this sacred ancestral land and its hominid remains, its river and its polluted state, and our global environmental shortcomings alongside deeply intimate, personal moments. Through this juxtaposition, Insaan asks if perhaps love—or the reminder of it—might ease the anxieties, tensions, and personal fears that we project outwardly into the echo chamber of forgetfulness.

This narrative unfolds across three physical and conceptual spaces. In the Screening Room, Chapter 1 anchors the presentation with Abrahams’ film alongside water, earth, and light, reminding us that we are embodied souls whose transcendence is achieved through our earthly experience, and that our planet is but a reflection of our communal state. Moving into the Covered Space, Chapter 2 resonates with tones of the heart and time, where change is most true. The journey concludes in the Residency Studio with Chapter 3, the immediate space of physical translation and making.

“My earliest conscious memories were on a farm in a small town called Riversdale beneath this really tall mountain… It was a really just as primitive and as close to a primordial existence as i think the early 90s could have offered.”

Chapter 1
“I have found in my own practice that making inspires more making, and transcending oneself even when one is exhausted… that’s when you really disappear. I mean, my work is not about me; it’s about realities and sensations beyond me, but these are realities and sensations that we all share as beings, embodied souls.”

Chapter 2
“The title of the show is Insaān, which is the Arabic word for human being. There are two roots to that word: one is uns which means intimacy or love, and the other is nasia which means forgetful. And I think that as a species we tend to forget that our essence is love.”

Chapter 3
“I have found in my own practice that making inspires more making, and transcending oneself even when one is exhausted… that’s when you really disappear. I mean, my work is not about me; it’s about realities and sensations beyond me, but these are realities and sensations that we all share as beings, embodied souls.”

The work emerging from Salaam’s residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris begins with a theological and metaphysical question: what is form if it is never finally fixed? Through sculpture, painting and material exploration, he investigates matter as something continually renewed—held between appearance and disappearance, permanence and transformation.

Informed by the Islamic concepts of khalq jadīd (continuous creation) and the barzakh (the threshold between states), these works propose existence not as something fixed or complete, but as an ongoing process of becoming. Matter, image and perception become sites through which renewal, relation and the unseen are made subtly perceptible.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Abdus Salaam (b. 1989) is a visual artist who lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

Salaam is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist whose practice is informed by nature, ecology and spirituality. Working across sculpture, painting, film, photography, poetry and sound, he explores the metaphysical language of the natural world, translating its forms, rhythms and silences into contemplative works that meditate on materiality, transcendence and the relationship between the physical and the immaterial. Rooted in poetry and spiritual inquiry, his practice moves fluidly between mediums while maintaining a sensitivity to three-dimensional spatial expression and the evocative potential of materials, form and colour.

Working in solitude, Salaam imbues each work with deliberate intention, creating poetic worlds that range from intimate objects to large-scale installations. His work draws together Western, Eastern and African sensibilities, shaped by his international upbringing while remaining deeply rooted in the landscapes and spiritual traditions of South Africa.

Salaam spent his formative years on a remote farm in South Africa, where he began painting and sculpting with earth, stone and clay. These early experiences fostered a profound connection to the natural world and continue to inform his practice, which seeks moments of stillness, contemplation and spiritual resonance through material exploration.

Salaam is represented in prominent international private and institutional collections, including the EKARD Collection, Farjam Collection, Mohammed Afkhami Collection, Rupert Collection and the Scheryn Collection. He has presented in critically acclaimed institutional exhibitions at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, Oude Leeskamer, Stellenbosch, and the NIROX Foundation following his residency at the Foundation in 2024. Salaam was also a finalist for the Art Figura Prize in 2023, which culminated in an exhibition at the Perla Castrum Museum, Germany.

His notable residencies include the Institute of Public Architecture’s Blockhouse Residency on Governors Island, New York (2023), the Giorgio Angeli Residency (2024), and the Studio Maretti Residency in Pietrasanta, Italy (2025). This was followed by his first public solo exhibition in Italy with the Medici Foundation and Pietrasanta Arts Council.

Salaam has presented with THK Gallery at Art Cologne, Abu Dhabi Art and Art Düsseldorf, and is currently developing a major sculptural commission in the Middle East, set to be unveiled in 2026.

Source: THK Gallery

The post THK Gallery presents “FROM EARTH TO ELSEWHERE: ABDUS SALAAM’S CONTINUING JOURNEY” appeared first on waau art.

Born in 1976 in Altdöbern (former GDR/East Germany), Opoku later relocated to Accra, Ghana, to reconnect with her ancestral roots. She now lives and works in Accra, represented by Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City). Her multidisciplinary practice, deeply rooted in personal history and cultural heritage, explores the layered intersections of identity and memory, bridging cultures, geographies, and time.

For Opoku, this dialogue becomes a form of visual storytelling—an evolving, textured archive of identity that is both intimate and quietly powerful. Trained in fashion design and photography in Germany, Opoku extends her command of textiles into a layered visual language, moving fluidly between photography, printmaking, and textile-based installation. Fabric emerges as a generative medium through which questions of identity, memory, and ancestral lineage are thoughtfully explored. These themes unfold across the breadth of her practice, as she turns to printmaking, photography, and sculpture as complementary mediums for reflecting on selfhood and lived experience.

This survey maps the artist’s trajectory over the past decade through several major bodies of work, anchored by three recurring elements: Water — signalling the fluidity of practice and sanctification of daily rituals, as seen in After the prayer / before the prayer (2018); Breath — the life force that feeds the spirit, suspended between life and death, explored in The Myths of Eternal Life (2020–2024); Ground — the stabilising force of nature, a site of comfort, rootedness, identity, and familial belonging, depicted in Queen Mothers (2016), Unraveled Threads (2017) and Give Me Back My Black Dolls (2024–ongoing).

The title, We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight, is drawn from the Book of the Dead—also known as Coming Forth by Day—an ancient Egyptian funerary text guiding the soul beyond the physical world. In Opoku’s interpretation, it becomes a quiet declaration: a record of passage through turbulence and a signpost to the path ahead. The full extract reads: I proceed in the footsteps of the sunlight. I am one who knows the path of secrets (and) the Gate of the Field of Reeds. I exist therein. See me, I am come. I have overthrown my enemies upon the earth. My corpse, it is buried.

We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight forms part of Zeitz MOCAA’s ongoing series of in-depth, research-driven solo exhibitions that centre and contextualise the practices of significant artists from Africa and its diaspora, while engaging with pivotal themes in Pan-African history. Extending beyond the continent’s borders, this programme embraces enduring and emerging entanglements, positioning Africa within a global context, and the world within Africa’s.

As a groundbreaking institution dedicated to preserving and promoting contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora, this exhibition reflects the museum’s vision to produce and present cutting-edge contemporary exhibitions, deepen art historical knowledge, amplify the careers of Africa’s most talented artists, strengthen education programmes, and ensure access for all.

Zeitz MOCAA’s exhibition and curatorial programming is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation and BMW South Africa.

MEET THE ARTIST
Zohra Opoku

Zohra Opoku’s multidisciplinary practice is grounded in her personal history and cultural heritage. Born and raised in East Germany and later relocating to Ghana to reconnect with her ancestral roots, Opoku explores the complex intersections of identity and memory. Her work navigates the space between these experiences, bridging cultures, geographies, and time.

Opoku’s practice often begins with photography and evolves through a tactile process of deconstruction and reconstruction. Photographic images are screen-printed onto pre-dyed natural fabrics and subsequently transformed through hand stitched embroidery and collage. These techniques, rooted in both traditional craftsmanship and experimental composition, form the foundation of her richly layered textile works, installations, and sculptures.

Personal identity and its complex nuances are central concerns in her work. Drawing from her own life and body, Opoku reflects on themes of belonging, memory, and representation. She often integrates family heirlooms, personal symbols, and elements from Ghana’s visual culture, including references to West African brass-making traditions. The result is a body of work that is both cathartic and resonant, anchored in lived experience yet capable of addressing broader questions shared across the African diaspora and beyond.

The work of Zohra Opoku has been exhibited internationally, including in the 15th edition of Sharjah Biennale (United Arab Emirates, 2023), the 14th edition of the Dak’Art Biennale (Senegal, 2022) and at 7th Athens Biennale (Greece, 2021).

Institutionally, her work has been presented at the Louvre Abu Dhabi (UAE, 2024–2025), the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Minneapolis, 2025), the Brooklyn Museum (New York, 2024), the Cleveland Museum of Art (Cleveland, 2018), RAW Material Company (Dakar, 2024), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, 2024), Palais Populaire (Berlin, 2024), Wereldmuseum (Rotterdam, 2024), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg (Wolfsburg, 2022), SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin, 2022), Tate Modern (London, 2022), Southbank Centre / Hayward Gallery (London, 2020), Kunsthaus Hamburg (Hamburg, 2020), the Archeological Museum of Mykonos (2019), the National Museum (Nairobi, 2017), Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, 2015), Musée d’Ethnographie (Bordeaux, 2013), CCA Lagos (2010), and Kunsthaus Hamburg (2010), among many others.

Her work is held in renowned public and private collections, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), CCS Bard College Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-on-Hudson), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art (Gainesville), Faurschou Foundation (Copenhagen), Royal Museum of Ontario (Toronto), Tate Modern (London), Onassis Collection (Athens), Eskenazi Museum of Art, (Bloomington), Cleveland Clinic Art Collection (Cleveland), and Dean Collection (New York).

Zohra Opoku was born in 1976 in Altdöbern (former GDR/East Germany). She lives and works in Accra, Ghana, and is represented by Mariane Ibrahim (Chicago, Paris, Mexico City).

Source: Zeitz MOCAA

The post Zeitz MOCAA presents “We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight” by Zohra Opoku appeared first on waau art.

SLIPSTREAM: Uncharted Realities & the Eternal Now is a dreamlike threshold.

Seven international artists explore cultural heritage as a lens for imagining alternative, beyond-Western, futures through video, sculptural and interactive installations.

Science fiction has long operated as a medium to envision potential futures, yet its alternative realities have often reproduced colonial worldviews, overlooking Indigenous perspectives and other systems of knowledge, or in some cases, casting accounts of colonialism as ‘adventure stories’.

SLIPSTREAM brings together artists who reclaim the decolonial potential of speculative fiction. Central to the exhibition is the concept of ‘slipstream,’ whose origins in Native science fiction literature are rarely acknowledged. Reasserted through this lineage, ‘slipstream’ carries a decolonial charge. It reconfigures the power structures prevalent in mainstream sci-fi, placing Indigenous figures as active agents rather than colonised subjects. To live in the slip-space is to drift between temporalities, where past, present and future flow together like currents in a navigable stream, and between states of consciousness.

Taking ‘slipstream’ off the page and into the gallery space, the exhibition moves one step further. Presenting works by Angeline Meitzler, Josèfa Ntjam, Natalie Paneng, Rebeca Romero, Kinnari Saraiya, Skawennati and Wendi Yan, the exhibition offers audiences new ways to imagine estranged worlds through decolonial lenses, opening onto geographies, temporalities and imaginaries of what could otherwise be.

ARTISTS BIO
Angeline Meitzler is an artist, writer and experimental animator currently based in Berkeley, California. Her work utilizes fiction, cinema, history and natural phenomenon to engage with the complexities of cultural value.

Josèfa Ntjam is an artist, performer, and writer whose practice combines sculpture, photomontage, film, and sound. Gathering the raw material for her work from the Internet, natural science books, and photographic archives, Ntjam employs the method of assemblage—of images, words, sounds, and stories—to deconstruct hegemonic discourses on notions of origin, identity, and race.

Natalie Paneng is a Johannesburg-based transmedia artist. Paneng’s work and research are centred around natural phenomena, indigenous technologies, and the act of creating playful speculative methodologies we can relate to. She is interested in developing accessible metaphors for complex systems, often drawing connections to quantum physics, digital mysticism, and the sense of wonder that emerges from these fields.

Rebeca Romero is a London-based artist working across sculpture, installation, and moving image. Her work engages with Indigenous American material cultures to explore how people make sense of the world, and their place within it, through objects, rituals, and stories. Using contemporary digital technologies alongside traditional sculptural processes, she creates speculative artefacts that chart alternative worlds, opening up new ways of seeing the past and imagining the future.

Kinnari Saraiya is an interdisciplinary artist, dancer and curator based in London. Her practice spans interactive installation, film, performance, sound and custom-built interfaces, drawing on South Asian embodied knowledge, colonial archives and speculative worldbuilding to explore how technology, memory and choreography can produce counter-archives and alternative temporalities.

Skawennati is an internationally exhibiting artist who has spent this millennium imagining utopic futures. From her dual perspectives as an urban Mohawk woman and a cyberpunk avatar, she creates speculative fiction machinima, costumes and quilts, among other things. Her practice is gradually coalescing into an alternate universe.

Wendi Yan constructs speculative epistemologies through research-driven worldbuilding and metafictional simulation, using CGI technology, game engines and sculpture to probe the artifice of knowledge. She collaborates with scientists to explore the frontier between imaging and imagining. Yan was an inaugural Steve Jobs Archive Fellow and the Grand Prix recipient of the 6th VH Award.

Source: arebyte

The post arebyte Digital Art Centre presents “SLIPSTREAM: Uncharted Realities & the Eternal Now” appeared first on waau art.

The women in Mckinney’s paintings possess a timeless quality, often situated within familiar domestic scenes that evoke a subtle nostalgia. While viewers may recognize the intimate spaces or the emotions reflected in the subject’s knowing glances, the paintings also maintain a distance. Mckinney balances this deep emotional resonance with the essential unknowability of the subject, reminding us that the full familiarity of another’s inner world remains outside our reach. This tension between the known experience and the private self creates a magnetic pull, transforming moments of quiet introspection into meditations on solitude, respite, and shared human connection.

Beyond the subject, Mckinney’s technique – her engagement with the history of art, color theory, and longstanding traditions of portraiture – further contributes to the allure of her paintings. Her figures emerge from dark grounds, recalling the tenebrism used by artists for centuries to focus the viewer’s attention and heighten atmosphere. The compositions also contain literal references to Modern painting, not only through the gestural strokes of paint, but also through the inclusion of paintings within paintings with allusions to works by artists such as Matisse and Picasso.

Shelter is Mckinney’s largest museum exhibition to date. It will offer a collective understanding of the artist’s gift for weaving together art history, emotionally resonant subjects, and beautifully rendered paintings. Layering technique and reference, Mckinney’s sensual interiors become necessary sites of spiritual restoration, proving internal shelter is fostered through authority over one’s own time. As Mckinney has shared: “We live in a world where we’re running. There’s beauty in rest.”

Source: The Norton Museum of Art

The post The Norton Museum of Art presents “Danielle Mckinney: Shelter” appeared first on waau art.

The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections informed by governmental processes and community organizing: Remarks, Organize, Records, Dissents, and Petitions. Through photographs, paintings, prints, sculpture, installation, and archival materials, artists examine how we can influence public discourse and inspire civic action.

Turn the volume up! highlights how seemingly ordinary acts, such as voting, petitioning, protesting, taking photographs, or making speeches, can become part of larger movements that strengthen communities and influence history. The exhibition’s title references New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s quotation of Bronx rapper KRS-One’s 2020 anthem, “Turn the Volume Up,” after his election victory—a moment that underscored the power of everyday people participating in local democracy.

Featuring works by influential artists such as Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Guerrilla Girls, and Sam Durant, Turn the volume up! offers a range of perspectives on power, representation, and the ongoing work of building a more equitable future. Artworks will be rotated throughout the exhibition’s run, pulling from the Nasher Museum’s deep collection of works connected to social justice and community organizing.

Featured Artists
Juan Abreu, Francis Alÿs, Holly Bass, Chuck Close, Robert Colescott, Luis Cruz Azaceta, Jamal Cyrus, Bruce Davidson, Karla Diaz, Sam Durant, Jordan Eagles, Tom Farris, Bill Fick, Laura Fields, Leonard Freed, Juan Genovés, Ralph Gibson, Guerrilla Girls, Lyle Ashton Harris, Ken Heyman, Thomas Hirschhorn, Reggie Burrows Hodges, Vitaly Komar, Alexander Kosolapov, Dapper Bruce Lafitte, Pedro Lasch, Pepe Mar, Mary Ellen Mark, Spider Martin, Paul Pfeiffer, Marielle Plaisir, John Rhoden, Larry Rivers, Dario Robleto, Milton Rogovin, Sheldon Scott, Leonid Sokov, Lou Stoumen, Carol Summers, Mark di Suvero, Barthélémy Toguo, Carlos Vega, Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, Peter Williams, Purvis Young, and Ross Bleckner, Louise Bourgeois, Mike Kelley, Simon Leung, Lorna Simpson, Kiki Smith, and Nancy Spero for ACT UP.

Source: The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University

The post The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University presents “Turn the volume up!” appeared first on waau art.

The exhibition emerges from a simple, almost universal question: what are we made of? For Hervé Yamguen, a human being can never be reduced to outward appearance. Each of us carries within us landscapes, voices, memories, wounds, inheritances, encounters and dreams. The places we have passed through continue to live within us, just as family histories, personal experiences and collective upheavals silently shape the way we perceive the world. Identity therefore appears as a shifting cartography, composed of layers in which the intimate and the wider world are constantly intertwined.

As the artist writes in his poem La fenêtre de mes rêves (The Window of My Dreams):

“Words raise
Before us
A great mirror
Where faces, memories,
And landscapes drift by.”

Here, language becomes a territory. It reveals the invisible landscapes that inhabit us and opens a space where memory, imagination and sensory experience converge. It is within this inner geography that the artist’s work takes root.

The figures that inhabit Hervé Yamguen’s works embody this understanding of being. Bodies, faces, silhouettes, trees, birds and vegetal forms merge into one another without ever fully becoming one. Rather than offering a fixed representation of identity, these metamorphoses reveal a world in constant transformation. Informed by African cosmologies, animist thought and the philosophy of Ubuntu — “I Am because We Are” — his work asserts that existence is always shaped through relationship. Humanity never appears as separate from the living world, but as one of its many expressions, carried by the memories of those who came before us as much as by the presences that surround us.

Although the bird continues to appear subtly throughout certain works, it is no longer the exhibition’s central subject. It nevertheless remains a figure of the creator: the one who, having endured the turbulence of the world, retains the ability to transform experience into song, to transmit, imagine and re-enchant what seemed lost. This idea of movement and transmission extends into the very materials of the works. The wooden masks enter into dialogue with bronze sculptures created through the lost-wax casting technique in Foumban, bringing ancestral craftsmanship into conversation with a distinctly contemporary artistic language. Drawings give rise to volumes; volumes extend the paintings. Each medium becomes a translation of the same breath. Nothing is fixed: forms move from one state to another, just as memories travel across generations.

The exhibition also marks an important shift in the artist’s practice. The introspection it explores never constitutes a withdrawal into the self. These intimate geographies are traversed by the fractures of the present: political violence, ecological upheaval, social transformations and individual vulnerabilities settle within them like layers of lived experience. What happens in the world becomes part of who we are; what inhabits us, in turn, shapes the way we act upon it.

Through this exhibition, Yamguen invites a form of attentiveness. Becoming aware of our intimate geographies means recognising what moves through us, while also acknowledging our belonging to a wider community of life. The series Conscience agro-poétique(Agro-poetic Consciousness) extends this reflection by calling for a renewed awareness of the interdependencies that connect humans, animals, plants and the cosmos. Against an era built upon separation and domination, the artist imagines a more hospitable way of inhabiting the world, one in which art contributes to reinventing our relationship with the living.

“It is from the window
Of my dreams
And from all that reaches me
As I walk
The paths of our struggling breaths
That I welcome and draw
Signs and trees
Into the notebook of our intimate geographies.”

These “struggling breaths” belong to our time. Yet Hervé Yamguen’s work never gives way to disenchantment. On the contrary, it affirms the power of imagination as a space of resistance and transformation. It reminds us that each of us carries within ourselves the ability to cultivate another relationship with the world.

Nos géographies intimes thus becomes a space of resonance, where the works offer not only forms to contemplate, but experiences to inhabit. They invite each person to recognise the territories that shape them, to embrace their complexity, and perhaps, in the artist’s own words, to “hold one’s heart’s beauty in one’s hands”, so that “kindness may make its star shine amidst the furious waves of fleeting time.”

Source: AFIKARIS

The post AFIKARIS gallery presents “Nos géographies intimes (Our Intimate Geographies)” by Hervé Yamguen appeared first on waau art.

Zana Masombuka exhibits significant photographic works from different series which explore stories about identity, culture, modernity and ritual from the perspective of a 21st-century Ndebele Woman. This dynamic presentation features selected works from Nges’rhodlweni: A Portal for Black Joy, Ubonani: What Do You See?, Time: Gadesi S’khathi, Proudly South African, Namba S’khambe and her recent series, Akhulumile Amabhudango: Scenes from Dreams – ‘Journeys with Kosabo’.

Highlights include works from Nges’rhodlweni: A Portal for Black Joy, which are inspired by the sacred gathering space within the Ndebele household where generations come together through art, storytelling and shared experience. This communal site fosters a connection to the Enas (spirit), nurturing joy, knowledge and cultural continuity. Also exhibited are works from Ubonani: What Do You See?, Time: Gadesi S’khathi, Proudly South African, and Namba S’khambe. Set within the rocky landscapes of KwaNdebele, Ubonani explores the symbolic power of red through natural earth pigments and dramatic lighting. In Masombuka’s series, Time: Gadesi S’khathi, lemons, become metaphors for the passage of time and the transmission of generational knowledge. Her works from Proudly South African examine youth identity through national symbols, while Namba S’khambe critiques institutional power, capitalism and inequity.

In her recent series, Akhulumile Amabhudango: Scenes from Dreams – ‘Journeys with Kosabo’, Masombuka’s ever evolving practice combines the mediums of photography and sculpture to create fascinating photographs surrounded by an intricate beaded frame. ‘Journeys with Kosabo’ pays homage to Masombuka’s late grandfather– as the artist journeys with him through her dreams, she reflects on themes of kingship, ascension and ancestral guidance. Layered onto the photographs, the beadwork honours the enduring significance of Ndebele beading, a centuries-old visual language historically used for communication, while reimagining its role within a contemporary artistic practice. The exhibition brings together a powerful body of work that examines perception, memory, spirituality and the enduring relationship between land and ancestral knowledge.

Benji Reid considers himself a Choreo-Photolist; a term he coined to encapsulate his unique practice where theatricality, choreography and photography meet in the image. In July 2023, he premiered Find Your Eyes, a highly acclaimed performance that brought dancers and photography into the fold to create images in real time in front of his audience. The successful show was presented at the 60th edition of Venice Biennale in 2024, then continued on tour around the world, including performances at Sadlers Wells, London in 2025.

Reid’s breathtaking photographs, composed primarily of self-portraits in incredible, anti-gravitational poses with a medley of props, draw the audience into a different dimension. In the hyper-realities he presents the subject as liberated by acts of the artist’s imagination. Whether exploring life as an outsider, issues surrounding mental health, or complexities of fatherhood, Reid makes the audience part of the discussion. These sublime and sensitive images draw from his well of life experiences, explore vulnerability, tragedy and triumph through the photographer’s lens.

Exploring inner and outer landscapes, the two exhibitions richly layered imagery investigate realms brimming with imagination and emotion.

Source: October Gallery

The post October Gallery presents “ZANA MASOMBUKA / SPOTLIGHT: BENJI REID” appeared first on waau art.

An outcome of sustained and ongoing engagement with artists and artwork, the Broad collection is distinctive in its exceptional dedication to the full arc of artists’ careers. The Broad has highlighted this depth through expansive presentations in the third floor galleries, featuring Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol along with works by many others.

Source: The Broad

The post The Broad presents “Expansive Presentation of Jean-Michel Basquiat” appeared first on waau art.