Mouna Karray

Mouna Karray was born in 1970 in Sfax, Tunisia. She completed her study in cinema and photography at the Institut Supérieur d’Animation Culturelle in Tunis in 1993 and later graduated from Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics and Arts with an MA in Image Media in 2002. Karray merges socio-political themes with personal experience to explore constructions of identity and memory. She captured the disappearing industrial structures in her homeland, but also the intimate moments with her family inside her home. For instance, her series of post-revolution images entitled Nobody Will Talk About Us (2015) present a mysterious figure shrouded in a white sheet photographed against the desolate landscapes of southern Tunisia. Like a ghost, it roams among the residents and rural structures, pointing out their precarious condition. Through the anonymity of her ghostly figure, Karray reveals the true face of politics and the way it impacts actual human lives and the future of a country at large. By staging her photographs, the artist draws our attention to the very real scenario of her fellow compatriots, cast aside and forgotten until further notice.

Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz was born in 1972 in Johannesburg, South Africa. She graduated in Fine Art from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg before moving to Chicago where she studied Art History at the University of Chicago. Then she moved again to New York where holds post-graduate degrees in Art History from the Columbia University. Since 1994, Breitz has produced a substantial body of videos, images, and installations that examine stereotypes and visual conventions in film and popular culture. Her heavily edited videos often incorporate found-film segments. Clipping and reordering them, she produces new dialogue situations that speak of gender-based social and cultural stereotypes. In the Soliloquy Trilogy (2000), Breitz juxtaposed clips of three famous Hollywood actors to make them speak directly to the viewers. The limited evolution of the actors’ roles throughout these edited films transforms the iconic figures into stereotypes of themselves. Breitz also explores how the music of a pop singer or rock group can become an ever-present soundtrack to a fan’s life. In Legend (2005), King (2005), and Queen (2005), she depicts fans performing a song of their pop idol.

Joel Andrianomearisoa

Joel Andrianomearisoa was born in 1977 in Antananarivo, Madagascar. After completing his secondary school, he moved to Paris for his studies and obtained a diploma degree in architecture from the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in 2003. Andrianomearisoa has worked with paper, textile, photo, video, and sculpture in his performances and installations. His work is multidisciplinary and faceted; it explores perceptions of reality and their relation to conceptions of time. His work always expresses a form of fragility as an essential life force. In Sentimental (2013), Andrianomearisoa invites us in a sensorial exploration of an evolving laboratory with encounters and elements in movement. A world unique to the artist, infused with a duality where sweetness and caresses sometimes encounter coldness and fragility. For Andrianomearisoa, paper and textiles are recurrent elements in his work. He creates polyphony from these materials, as they are split, folded, creased and woven. From the start, black has been the cornerstone of his practice, though far from being monochromatic, black represents one and a myriad of colours.

Kudzanai Chiurai

Kudzanai Chiurai was born in 1981 in Harare, Zimbabwe. He left his country in 1999, to study Fine Art at the University of Pretoria, where he was the first black student to graduate. Using art as a form of activism, Chiurai makes work focused on the political, social, and cultural issues of his homeland. He eventually became involved with exile politics and the growing opposition to President Robert Mugabe. In The Cabinet (2009) series, he depicted the fictitious characters of a fictional African government in a parody of media representations of masculinity and political power. Chiurai mostly uses photography, installation, and video to produce works influenced by hip-hop, street art, and graffiti. He explores themes of urban space with the psychological and physical experience of Johannesburg, where exiles, refugees, and asylum-seekers survive. In State of the Nation (2011), glamorous soldiers armed to the teeth pose in the urban jungle. In his video Iyeza (2012), Chiurai reinterprets Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, replacing the painting’s subjects with contemporary African identities.

Tracey Rose

Tracey Rose was born in 1974 in Durban, South Africa. Her family moved to Johannesburg when she was seven. She attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg where she obtained a bachelor degree in Fine Arts in 1996. Primarily a performance artist, Rose combines photography, video, and installation in multimodal works that are neither comfortable nor decorative. She has reflected on questions of femininity, sexuality, and race in interesting, often audacious ways over her career. In Ongetiteld (Untitled) (1998), she shaved her entire body and recorded the act using surveillance cameras. Rose also confronted the politics of identity in her early works through a subversive reinterpretations of masterpieces of the western tradition. For instance, photographs from The Thinker (1996) and The Kiss (2001) show black figures in the pose of Rodin’s sculptures. Rose’s body is usually at the center of her art, which often recalls the work of Cindy Sherman. In Ciao Bella (2001), she combines photographs of herself disguised as various feminine archetypes with a video of similarly feminine characters playing out a chaotic narrative.