Addis Gezehagn, artiste éthiopien, présente une série d’assemblages où collage et peinture acrylique se superposent avec précision. Son processus, minutieux et patient, repose sur la superposition de fragments de magazines retravaillés à la peinture. Avec la série « Floating City », il propose une vision abstraite d’Addis-Abeba, où toits, façades et surfaces vitrées se fragmentent en une mosaïque de formes géométriques, oscillant entre figuration et abstraction. Ces paysages urbains recomposés interrogent la perception des métropoles africaines contemporaines, leur densité, leurs transformations et les tensions qui les traversent.

Abou Traoré, lui, est un sculpteur burkinabè issu d’une lignée de forgerons. Formé dès l’enfance à la technique de la cire perdue, il développe depuis 1983 une œuvre personnelle inspirée des masques animaux de la tradition Bobo. Par une réinterprétation contemporaine de cet héritage, ses sculptures proposent une réflexion sur la coexistence, le respect de l’environnement et la préservation des valeurs collectives dans un monde en mutation.

À cette approche ancrée dans les traditions africaines répond le travail de Thiemoko Claude Diarra, né en 1974 d’un père sculpteur bamana et d’une mère infirmière belge. Cette double origine nourrit une pratique qui explore les frontières entre visible et invisible, mémoire rituelle et image contemporaine à travers l’utilisation du pigment de terre. Son œuvre s’inscrit dans un espace de dialogue où cultures et savoirs se rencontrent, donnant naissance à un langage plastique hybride et sensible.

Enfin, la galerie présente le travail d’Arnold Fokam, né en 1996 à Kumba, au Cameroun. Sa pratique pluridisciplinaire – photographie, peinture, performance – explore la relation entre le corps humain et l’eau. Convoquant la figure de Mami Watta, divinité du fleuve Congo, il tisse un langage poétique et spirituel qui fait de la préservation de l’eau un enjeu à la fois symbolique et profondément contemporain.

Cet ensemble d’oeuvres constitue une introduction cohérente à la ligne de la galerie : un regard attentif aux pratiques qui font dialoguer héritage, sans hiérarchie entre les références ni les géographies. Une première présence à Art Brussels qui reflète l’engagement de Christophe Person auprès d’artistes dont le travail s’inscrit résolument dans le temps présent.

Source: Galerie CHRISTOPHE PERSON

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Entitled The Ephemerals, the exhibition brings together around twenty new works, ranging from large-scale pieces to more intimate formats, created on canvas, cardboard, and paper.

Through this body of work, Simon Buret explores a vision of the living as something that constantly exceeds its own limits. The living may fade or allow itself to be traversed, yet it continuously overflows the contours imposed upon it.

Bodies appear porous, inhabited and shaped by their surroundings. The setting is no longer a backdrop; it breathes with them, flows through their lines, and permeates their silences. The language of line and mark serves as a reminder that we are merely a link — a suspension within an infinite whole.

This line, stretched through ink, acrylic, and oil, connects fragments of a multipolar world, poised between the visible and the invisible. Volume itself becomes a temporary tension in space — a presence, a passage.

Within this shifting material of dream, memory, and spirit, interior and exterior continuously merge. Boundaries dissolve between the material and perceptual worlds. Everything communicates. Everything transforms.

Each being becomes a particle within the living — a drop in an ever-evolving whole.

With The Ephemerals, Simon Buret presents a body of work that is both sensitive and metaphysical, where the fragility of forms reveals the permanence of invisible flows.

Source: Nil Gallery

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Simone Leigh was born in Chicago in 1967 and first began exhibiting her work in the early 2000s. She has had one-person museum exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; the Studio Museum in Harlem; and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles among others. In 2014 she presented “The Free People’s Medical Clinic” in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, a project commissioned by Creative Time. Her work was included in the 2012 and 2019 Biennial exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and she is the first artist to be commissioned for the High Line Plinth; her monumental sculpture Brick House was unveiled in April 2019. In 2022, Leigh represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale with her exhibition, “Simone Leigh: Sovereignty.” Her work was also included in the Biennale’s central exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams,” for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Participant.

Source: Matthew Marks Gallery

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Developed with rigour and clarity, Kouoh’s project sets out a philosophical and curatorial framework shaped through sustained dialogue with artists, writers and collaborators. Her approach will guide every aspect of the exhibition, from its spatial design to its intellectual architecture.

This edition also marks a significant moment for African representation, with 12 national pavilions confirmed. Participating countries include Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Republic of Guinea, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Uganda and Zimbabwe. Four of these nations will present pavilions for the first time, signalling an important shift in the visibility and presence of African perspectives within the Biennale.

Source: La Biennale

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Amadou Sanogo was born in 1977 in Ségou, Mali. His ancestors were noble Sénoufo farmers who founded the village of Zangorola in the Sikasso region, then part of the Kingdom of Kénédougou—the “Land of Light.” Their kings, Tiéba and Babemba Traoré, are remembered and respected as the last leaders to resist the French colonial army during its campaign in Mali. Sanogo often reflects on his origins: “To know where you are going, you must know where you come from.” He sees himself as heir to a land of history, a symbol of resistance with a rich artistic heritage.

Determined to follow his own path, Sanogo diverged from the expectations placed upon him. While he was expected to become an engineer, he chose instead to enroll at the National Institute of Arts (INA). Although, as he notes, “a noble should not engage in the activities of griots,” he trained in the technique of Bogolan—a traditional Malian cloth—before turning to painting. Frustrated by academic instruction, he pursued his own artistic research, developing a unique visual language. His originality led him to collaborate in 2006 with Simon Njami and Pascale Marthine Tayou, and he received support from Abdoulaye Konaté, artist and director of INA.

Rodrigo Armando Mabunda began working at the age of 15, alongside his studies, which he ultimately did not complete. He took on a series of odd jobs, including working as a market vendor and mechanic, to support himself. Self-taught, he first explored drawing on A4 sheets before truly finding his creative fulfillment on cardboard packaging, which would become his preferred medium.
Originally from Mozambique, Rodrigo Armando Mabunda maps, with ballpoint pen, chaotic narratives in which bodies vibrate and twist in hypnotic compositions. His drawings, dense and powerful, serve as reflections on the social and political realities of his country. The artist describes himself as “a dreamer of the streets,” a wandering creative who roams urban spaces to extract stories and visions.

Source: MAGNIN-A

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Following the solo exhibition Théâtre des corps, drame de la matière, presented in May 2025, this body of work marks a shift in the artist’s practice. He develops an evolving visual language in which painting and sculpture intertwine within a clearly defined spatiality. Balancing material grounding and sensory tension, the works adopt a three-dimensional approach where figures unfold simultaneously as motif, surface, and volume.

The exhibition develops a dense reflection on contemporary logics of resource and bodily exploitation, embedding them within broader historical, memorial, and political layers. In Jean David Nkot’s work, Black bodies appear as fundamental presences, long rendered invisible in the construction of global economies as well as material and symbolic infrastructures. This act of making visible goes beyond mere representation: bodies—already central to the artist’s practice—now merge with matter and environment. Inspired by Devenir vivants (2021) by Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux, Nkot sketches an expanded ecology, adopting the term “echology,” conceived as a resonance between beings, environments, and systems of production.

In the paintings, this porosity between body and environment appears in scenes where bluish figures rest on piles of coal and dead wood. Following cotton and cocoa, coal and cobalt extend his exploration of extractive materials. Screen-printed backgrounds, often composed of imagined maps, introduce ideas of territory, appropriation, and the circulation of wealth. Blue, derived from chromatic variations of cobalt, acts as a connecting thread. It condenses multiple meanings: a trace of exploited soils, an index of extractive chains, but also an ambivalent symbol of transformation and transition. In certain traditions, particularly among the Bassa, it refers to widowhood—a liminal time of purification and protection—adding a ritual and symbolic dimension to its material charge. The color thus becomes both scar and threshold.

This dynamic continues in the portrait series created on jute bags, Corps//matière.cm.org. Initiated in 2025 and further developed during a residency in Japan, it marks a shift in the artist’s practice toward modest supports laden with silent histories. By working with materials drawn from cocoa, coffee, or cotton circuits, Nkot does more than inscribe figures onto them: he reactivates their memory. The portrait thus lies at the intersection of material and human experience. It brings individual trajectories into dialogue with the forces of labor, capital, and consumption that traverse and shape the world. Visible seams, tears, and perforations function as bodily marks, evoking scars left by colonial history as well as contemporary working conditions.

In the series Behind a Flag, these same portraits are now deployed on textiles reminiscent of flags. Inspired by strip-weaving traditions from West and Central Africa, these textiles are dyed in colors associated with national flags, without referencing any specific country. The aim is not to represent a flag, but to question what it embodies: a symbol of power, identity, and collective narrative. The screen-printed backgrounds combine archival and contemporary images with fragments of text drawn from the Harkin-Engel Protocol—an agreement by the chocolate industry to comply with the Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO, 1999). Deliberately rendered barely legible, these inscriptions point to the opacity of such international agreements and the persistence of invisible forms of exploitation.

With the ceramic sculptures gathered under the title www//essorage de Gaïa.com, this reflection takes shape through volume and material. Covered in a dense cobalt blue, the figures appear both archaeological and contemporary, as if traversed by an expanded temporality where the memory of the earth overlaps with the history of bodies. The ceramic material, patinated and stratified, evokes both ore and ancient artifact, situating the figures within a geological and historical continuity. Here, cobalt acts as an imprint: it covers, connects, and inscribes. Details of clothing, hairstyles, and jewelry individualize the figures while placing them within a shared regime of display and reconfiguration. The reference to Gaia opens a symbolic reading: that of a nurturing yet strained Earth, placed under pressure by contemporary extractive logics.

By bringing together these three bodies of work—paintings, textile works, and sculptures—the exhibition creates a resonant space in which each medium extends and reconfigures the others. Forms circulate and respond to one another, outlining a conception of matter as a site of memory and tension. Through this “echology” of forms, Jean David Nkot offers an expanded reading of systems of extraction and exploitation, while opening a sensitive space in which human and earthly bodies emerge as sites of passage, tension, and resistance.

Source: AFIKARIS

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Over the course of a career spanning more than forty years, Ouattara Watts has developed his practice across a wide range of media and formats—from his early works on tarpaulins to monumental compositions made of assembled canvases—always embracing a freedom of exploration through materials such as wood, textiles, jute, and found or gifted objects.

Works on paper, which Ouattara Watts has explored since the beginning of his career, offer both a striking and captivating perspective on the worlds he has conveyed—first rendered in pastels, then in gouache and watercolor. For an artist who has consistently interpreted the world through color, music, and symbols, transcending notions of time and place, paper has always provided a unique space of freedom, with its own distinct qualities: a more intimate scale, more agile and sensitive, yet also more demanding and risk-laden. Watercolor, in particular, allows no revisions, giving it a direct and immediate character.

At every stage of his journey, Watts has returned to paper—a more personal medium, akin to a journal for a painter who narrates without speaking, reveals without disclosing, and traces back through time and systems of writing to render them universal.

Within these hand- and eye-scaled formats, the compositions focus on figures and allegories that emerge and function as keys to interpreting the poetic and mysterious world the artist tirelessly constructs.

This exhibition marks Ouattara Watts’s return to the Ivorian art scene since 2018 and reflects a renewed momentum within a singular career that intersects artistic scenes and geographies.

The exhibition is accompanied by the release of a monograph in both French and English, featuring a previously unseen selection of works on canvas and paper from the 1980s to the present day.
This publication situates Ouattara Watts’s work within an international critical perspective, thanks to contributions from art historians of diverse backgrounds: Mara Hoberman, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, and Stéphane Vacquier.

Source: Galerie Cécile Fakhoury

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During his residency in Venice, Abebe will develop a new body of work under the title ጥቁር ሣጥን (BLACKBOX). Conceived as an ongoing research framework, the project approaches the body as a “black box”: an opaque system that records and transmits experience without fully revealing its internal logic. As the artist notes, “The body is like a black box: it is not meant to be opened, but read through traces and fragments.” Through this lens, Abebe explores how memory and identity are accumulated, transformed, and carried across time, inviting viewers to engage as active interpreters of layered and partially inaccessible histories.

The residency is situated within a broader reflection on historical connections between Ethiopia and Venice, drawing on the journeys of Ethiopian monks and pilgrims who contributed to the circulation of knowledge across continents. Venice—long a site of cultural and commercial exchange—becomes a context for dialogue, process, and transmission within the artist’s practice.

The residency will culminate in a solo show: BlackBox by Dawit Abebe: The Residency Outcome, on view from 7 May to 30 June 2026.

Source: AKKA Project

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From Cape Town to Tribeca, Southern Guild enters a new chapter in New York.

In a restored cast iron building on Leonard Street, the gallery brings its deeply collaborative ethos and commitment to material experimentation into a global art capital. Founded by Trevyn and Julian McGowan, Southern Guild has spent nearly two decades cultivating an ecosystem where artists, makers and thinkers work in dialogue.

Following an experimental period in Los Angeles, this new space signals permanence and renewed ambition. The opening programme introduces US solo debuts by Mmangaliso Nzuza and Usha Seejarim, whose practices explore form, memory and the politics of everyday life.

A considered arrival at a cautious moment, this is a story of artistic continuity, exchange and growth.

Read the full article here: VOGUE

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For the first time in Anatsui’s metal practice, the constructive logic of the bottle-cap works is fully reciprocal: conceived and displayed as double-sided, the sculptures offer no privileged face. The caps’ reverse resolves into shimmering, monochromatic planes of modulated silver, set in counterpoint to the earthy chromatic register of browns, blacks, ochres and oxidised reds that distinguish the opposite branded surfaces. Suspended freely in space or attached loosely to the wall, this bilateral condition unsettles any fixed orientation, drawing attention to the mode of construction itself: innumerable bottle caps cut, flattened, folded and sutured into accretive sections with copper wire, their exposed joinery bringing thickness, porosity and seam into view.

The formal propositions advanced by the metal works emerge from a longer trajectory in which Anatsui’s engagement with sculpture has, from the outset, been shaped by a sustained and exacting attention to material conditions and the possibilities they afford. Born in 1944 in the former Gold Coast, Anatsui was educated at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, where his training was structured within a predominantly British colonial academic framework orientated towards Western modernist models. In 1975, he moved to Nigeria to take up a teaching position at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka – an institution that had by then emerged as a vital site for post-independence debates around artistic form, material practice and cultural identity. There, Anatsui entered an intellectually charged and interdisciplinary milieu of artists, writers and thinkers engaged in a collective reassessment of inherited conventions, animated by the search for alternative models of artmaking adequate to post-independence realities.

The circular wood plaques from the early 1970s, prior to his move to Nigeria, marked Anatsui’s first decisive departure from academic convention. Repurposing the utilitarian trays found in Ghanaian markets, Anatsui relocated sculptural attention from volume to surface, carving linear signs, informed by the graphic grammar of Adinkra – an Akan symbolic system through which proverbs and philosophical concepts are given visual form – into the planar wooden supports. Soon after, Anatsui turned to clay, a shift that opened new formal possibilities and enabled a more radical rethinking of sculptural objecthood than the plaques could sustain.

In the terracotta works of the late 1970s, including the pivotal ‘Broken Pots’ series, Anatsui worked through processes of fracture and reassembly, producing vessels from assorted fragments of clay, roughly patched and joined so that their seams remained exposed. The resulting forms, whose integrity is never fully secured, refuse the logic of restoration to an original state. What emerges instead is a mode of making in which breakage and reconstitution are treated as productive operations – an approach that registers the pressures of the post-independence moment within which Anatsui was working. As he later observed, ‘the idea of breaking is an opportunity for reformation. Breaking is not destruction but a necessity for rebirth.’1 Such an understanding finds its counterpart in the Akan principle of Sankofa – ‘to go back and retrieve’ – a concept that threads through Anatsui’s practice and speaks to a wider postcolonial conviction that the past remains a vital resource for building anew. In the metal works, this inherited sensibility is neither literalised nor resolved, but rescaled: fragmentation operates as an organising principle, with seams, joins and accretive units structuring expansive surfaces that suspend closure and remain contingent on site, orientation and display.

This commitment to form as structurally open – so fully articulated in the metal works and constituting a key tenet in Anatsui’s sculptural thinking – has clear antecedents in the wood reliefs that he developed through the 1980s and 1990s, and with which he has recently reengaged. Returning to wood, Anatsui worked with salvaged hardwood planks, cutting, burning, carving into their surfaces with power tools whose blunt force and graphic imprint became integral to the works’ visual and structural language. Like the ‘Broken Pots’, and in ways that anticipate the metal works, these reliefs refute the idea of a unified sculptural mass in favour of construction through parts: discrete wooden elements set side by side, their surfaces differentiated by incision, scorch, pigment and grain. Crucially, the reliefs were conceived as mutable assemblies, their constituent planks capable of being reordered so that each presentation generated a distinct articulation. While the rigidity of wood necessarily constrained this variability, the reliefs nonetheless established a principle that is granted even greater latitude in the metal works, where form is determined anew through orientation, drape, gravity and environment, allowing aspects such as contour, scale and spatial disposition to remain perpetually in play.

What becomes newly insistent in the works unfolding across Hong Kong and Seoul is not simply their now-familiar alchemy of discarded matter nor metamorphosis as an end in itself, but the clarity with which the conditions that enable transformation are brought into view. Where Anatsui’s earliest metal works Man’s Cloth and Woman’s Cloth (1999–2002) – conceived after he discovered a sack of discarded liquor bottle caps while out walking – marked the threshold at which his metal practice came into being, and later monumental installations such as Logoligi Logarithm (2019) tested the expansive, environmental reach of that proposition, the sculptures presented here recalibrate this enquiry around singular, upright forms that can appear to hover autonomously in space. Though they present as flat and self-contained, their surfaces are punctuated by small apertures, circular voids and irregular interruptions – points at which wire, absence or raw structure briefly assert themselves.

This being their first presentation, the sculptures are nonetheless conceived with the expectation that they will continue to shapeshift, assume new configurations, and register differently over time. In Chika Okeke-Agulu and Okwui Enwezor’s comprehensive study of Anatsui’s practice, The Reinvention of Sculpture (2022), these successive iterations are recognised as ‘new shapes’, each constituting ‘distinct markers in the evolving life of an entity that theoretically has the potentiality to live forever’.2 In Hong Kong, the presentation appears under the title ‘MivEvi’, a reworking of the Ewe word for fragrance. Paired with the translation of Hong Kong as ‘fragrant harbour’, a name rooted in its history as a trading hub for incense and other aromatics, the title conceptually entwines the exhibition site with the animating principle that runs through the works. Operating within a cyclical conception of time, in which each installation marks a moment of return rather than finality, Anatsui’s practice gives form to an understanding long affirmed in West African philosophy: that no condition is permanent.

Source: White Cube

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