Marc Padeu works with the tradition of narrative painting, employing the language and stories of the Old Masters and Christianity to depict contemporary Cameroon and the continuing legacy of colonialism.

This new suite of paintings explores the multiplicity of time and the human tendency to behave as if we have the means to control it. Returning to the communities he knows who live and work on the cocoa plantations, Padeu situates his characters within the cycles and seasons of the natural world. Days follow one another, harvests come round again and yet, despite this ebb and flow of life, his figures are caught outside of time, slipping between past, present and future.

Drawing upon Seneca’s writings and the principles of Stoicism, which emphasise living in the present and in tune with nature and Heidegger’s assertion that man only truly becomes himself when he accepts his mortality, Padeu invites us to consider how we might live more fully. This invitation takes us into a different realm of time; the epic tales of the Bible.

The scenes in these paintings are infused with stories older than the people themselves and often enigmatic in meaning. We see men, women and children gathered around a lamb; the lamb of sacrifice that God provided to Abraham to spare the death of Isaac and that John the Baptist pointed to when proclaiming: ‘Behold the Lamb of God”. In other paintings, a man falls to the ground, another lies in the silence of the forest and a young couple emerge hand in hand into the sunshine. In the largest piece, figures gather around a fragile presence, their eyes converging on an invisible centre. Something is being born.

Each painting is poised between promise and fate, light and shade; the figures existing simultaneously in a spiritual and secular realm, neither saints nor heroes but with a growing awareness that life is a fragile gift. The cocoa plantation, painted in blue and purple hues is a divine stage dissolving into foliage as the forest continues to grow, each harvest a reminder that abundance is temporary, each fruit holding the promise of a future generation, every moment a moment worth living.

Padeu studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, the University of Douala, Nkongsamba and lives and works in Yaoundé, Cameroon. His work was included in When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting curated by the late Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama which travelled from Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa to Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, BOZAR Brussels, Belgium and Liljevalchs, Stockholm, Sweden. His work has been acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada and Space K Museum, South Korea.

Source: Larkin Durey

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Since the seminal exhibition Sculpted Bodies, Adorned Bodies, Masked Bodies (1989), which explored at the Grand Palais in Paris the relationship between ancestrality and tutelary spirits in the arts of Côte d’Ivoire, the bond between aesthetics and spiritualities has remained largely underestimated in projections of this scene. And yet contemporary creation is marked by the insistent presence of the invisible and of sacred geometries, from Christian Lattier and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré to Ouattara Watts and Ernest Dükü. For the latter, the first two stand as totemic figures, visual references without which it is difficult to gain full access to his formal vocabulary. In literature, Dadié, Kourouma and Adiaffi perform the same function: supporting columns for an oeuvre of synthesis.

A painter and architect, Dükü shifts the questioning of matter and volume that preoccupied the artists of the Vohou-vohou movement, which dominated the Beaux-Arts of Abidjan during his years of formation, toward metaphysical territories where substance always exceeds form. Influenced by the revivalist intuitions of the Negro-Caribbean current active along the shores of the Ébrié Lagoon, by the Fwomajé group, by AfriCOBRA, and by major artists such as Wilfredo Lam and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dükü conceives an aesthetic of relation of astonishing plasticity. It draws its source from Pharaonic Egypt and Nubia as revisited by Cheikh Anta Diop in Civilisation or Barbarism (1981), but above all in his masterwork The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (1967).

The Time of the Child’s Dream — Invisible Architectures invites Ernest Dükü to open the gates of our inner City in dialogue with two major artists of trans-African modernities: Wèrèwèrè Liking and Souleymane Keïta. A poet shaped by performance, ritual theatre and the performing arts, the former considers herself a kind of vibratory continuity of her ancestors. She has developed an original body of work that unfolds a mysterious grammar, carried by a vision sensitive to every cosmic order. The selection of Liking will be limited to three paintings from the series The Fantastic Cities.

The latter is affiliated with the first generation of the Dakar School, whose flowering was encouraged by the poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor in order to translate the philosophical conceptions of Négritude into visual form. His economy of light and the repetition of signs characterise a painting that joyfully reconnects with the hermeticism of Sudano-Sahelian initiatory societies. Keïta’s corpus will likewise focus on three works from the series Scarifications and Hunter’s Shirt.

In the Gallery’s Project Space, Invisible Architectures — Dreams in Mirror will bring together, in one display, seven trans-African artists around Ernest Dükü: Assoukrou Ake; Dalila Dalleas Bouzar; François-Xavier Gbrè; Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien; Roméo Mivekannin; Cheikh Ndiaye; and Ouattara Watts.

Through their visual unity, the two spaces give form to the idea of rebirth: the absolute continuity between night and the birth of day beneath the starry vault, which evokes the goddess Nut, personifying the course of light—the fathomless black upon which the stars, her children, navigate. She is mistress of the principle of life and death, and the promise of resurrection. She bears witness to the voyage of Ra (the Sun god) and his companions in a barque… through the twelve gates of the underworld depicted in the Book of Gates, symbolising the reckoning of the hours in the day-night-day cycle. The exhibition architecture seeks to reaffirm the scenographic gesture as a practice that is at once curatorial and artistic.

Source: Galerie Cécile Fakhoury

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Drawing from the museum’s own history as a former barbershop serving Southampton’s Black community, Davis reactivates the space through a series of large-scale mirrored acrylic works, sculptural interventions, and live barbering activations. Referencing the mirrors commonly found within barbershops, the works fracture and interrupt reflection, positioning identity as something continuously shaped through memory, performance, projection, and social interaction.

The exhibition’s title points toward the shared visual language between grooming and cultivation. The sharp geometry of a hairline mirrors the trimmed edge of a hedge; both become gestures of care, discipline, self-fashioning, and aesthetic control. For Davis, these forms also operate politically, reflecting the ways Black communities have historically built spaces of autonomy, intimacy, and cultural production outside dominant institutional structures.

Throughout the exhibition, Black barbers will periodically cut hair within the gallery, foregrounding everyday acts of touch, conversation, and aesthetic labor as forms of cultural knowledge. These activations position the barbershop not as nostalgic reconstruction, but as an ongoing architecture of social exchange where vulnerability, masculinity, queerness, and care remain in active negotiation.

Extending beyond the gallery itself, a portion of the project’s funding will directly support the establishment of The Hamptons Black Arts Council community garden on the SAAM museum grounds.
The garden functions as both a material investment in local community infrastructure and a conceptual extension of the exhibition’s framework. Just as the barbershop cultivates identity and social connection, the garden cultivates nourishment, stewardship, and collective responsibility.

By bringing together sculpture, social practice, performance, and environmental intervention, Hedges and Edges asks how Black life is sustained through daily acts of tending that are often overlooked or undervalued. The exhibition proposes care not as abstraction, but as a lived practice enacted through bodies, gestures, maintenance, and shared space.

About the Artist

Damien Davis is a Newark-based artist, writer, and educator whose work explores cultural representation, identity, and systems of visibility through sculpture, abstraction, installation, and public art. His work has been exhibited at institutions including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Arts and Design.

Source: Superposition Gallery

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For its Eighth edition, Découvertes brings together four artists whose practices offer different ways of looking at the world and inhabiting it. Through painting, photography, collage, installation, and textile-based imagery, Naëtt Mbaye, Chelsea Odufu, Saleh Lô and Raé explore our relationship to visibility, representation, transmission, and transformation.

Some will draw our attention to realities we have learned to overlook. But all invite us to shift our gaze- not to see more, but to see differently. Together, their practices remind us that to exist is also to exist within the gaze of others.

With Naëtt Mbaye, looking becomes transmission. Drawing on family archives, stories passed down through generations, and the figures of the Driankés, her work celebrates the women who hold a central place within West African societies. Her photographs, extended through monumental textile veils embroidered with beads, evoke both intimate history and collective memory. Between heritage and contemporary reinterpretation, the artist invites us to cast a renewed gaze upon those who transmit, preserve, and shape the narratives from which we come from.

This reflection on transmission continues in the work of Chelsea Odufu. A multidisciplinary artist and world- builder, she creates images where African traditions, spiritualities, fashion, and imaginaries coexist freely. Ornaments inspired by Baoulé gold weights, sculptural silhouettes, spectacular adornments, and vibrant colours give rise to figures that seem to belong simultaneously to an ancestral past and to a future yet to be imagined. In her work, looking becomes a projection. It is no longer simply about seeing the world as it is, but imagining what it could become.

With Saleh Lô, looking becomes an imperative. For more than a decade, the artist has devoted a significant part of his practice to the Talibés, children encountered every day in the streets of Senegal whom we no longer truly see. Through deeply moving portraits and a monumental installation in which iconic tomato paste cans become silent witnesses to their condition, Saleh Lô confronts us with a social reality that familiarity has rendered invisible. His work reminds us that looking is also an act of responsibility.

Finally, with Raé, looking turns inward. Her works on handmade plant-based paper and her experimental photographs seek less to represent the world than to transform the way we perceive it. Organic landscapes, subtle plays of light, and sensitive compositions become the setting for a contemplative experience that invites us to slow down, observe differently, and question our certainties. Where the other artists reveal presences, Raé invites us to shift our own perspective.

Thus, “Come closer, have a look”, is more than an invitation extended to the visitor. Behind these words lies a deeper question: How do we look at the world around us? Do we see those whom society has rendered invisible? Do we acknowledge the legacies that have shaped us? Can we imagine the futures that lie before us? Do we recognize the joy, beauty, and complexity of the lives that surround us?

A gaze can reveal, acknowledge, transmit, celebrate, transform, or heal. Découvertes #8 reminds us that sometimes, all it takes is a shift in perspective to reveal what has been there all along, right before our eyes.

Source: LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery

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Upon entering the Réfectoire, the visitor is presented with You Forgot to See Me Coming, a series of equestrian portraits that reimagine formidable figures such as Mary Fields, Amelio Robles, the Adelitas of the Mexican Revolution, and Selika Lazevski, a black equestrian performer who captivated audiences in 19th century France. Working from archival fragments, Jackson inhabits these figures through performative embodiment, staging them with agency in moments of dignity and proud presence.

In new works from the Hidden in Plain Sight (American Simulacrum) series, the artist wears a leather garment tooled with symbology that gathers the convergence of African, European, and Indigenous identities in the Americas. Through this character, she embodies cultural convergences as well as the encoded practices enacted in the open, within the very clearings referenced in the title.

The equestrian motif itself traces a history of circulation. Introduced through Spanish colonization and shaped by earlier exchanges across Al-Andalus, it was transformed in the Americas through Indigenous and African-descendant practices. Jackson mobilizes this lineage to situate the body within a continuum of movement and survival.

In contrast, Intimate Justice in the Stolen Moment turns to quieter registers. Here, imagined Black women appear in states of rest, introspection, and weightlessness: images largely absent from any existing archives, where such lives were systematically reduced to violence, servitude or spectacle. Jackson does not seek to complete this record, but to open it: to bring the past into the present as an intervention, positioning freedom not as something granted in the past, but as an inalienable right long fought for.

Source: Les Rencontres d’Arles

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Source: Artsy

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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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