Solo Exhibitions

Tadesse Mesfin: Pillars of Life is still on view at Cromwell Place in London, United Kingdom until November 15, 2020

Tadess Mesfin’s latest work is a continuation of his ongoing series celebrating the women who work as small-holder vendors in markets found across Ethiopian cities. They can be often found crouched down amongst their agricultural produce, as they wait for customers to approach. In Mesfin’s work these women are visually eulogised, their occupations and their personae are front and centre, and the observer is persuaded to appreciate their importance to the communities they serve. The paintings defy the limitations of perspective, as the figures seem to float in their crouched positions, their forms often abstracted through loosely defined brush strokes. Only their regal, statuesque poses and facial expressions are clearly discernible.

Collins Obijiaku: Gindin Mangoro – Under the Mango Tree is still on view at ADA Gallery in Accra, Ghana until November 19, 2020

Debuting ADA’s program of curated exhibitions specializing in the work of emerging artists across Africa and its diaspora, Gindin Mangoro: Under the Mango Tree attests to the gallery’s engagement in supporting fresh talent across a diverse set of mediums, offering early career artists an opportunity to present a comprehensive portfolio of work. On view within the gallery, the exhibition displays a new body of work from Obijiaku’s eponymous portrait series, marking a radical departure from his previous work based on social commentary. A celebration of his own lived experiences, struggles, and those of his friends and acquaintances, the paintings transcend accepted conceptions of portraiture and come to embody the profoundly human inner character of each of the artist’s subjects.

Tonia Nneji: You May Enter is still on view at Rele Gallery in Lagos, Nigeria until November 22, 2020

In You May Enter, Nneji’s brightly coloured canvases subvert traditional notions of pain and trauma as muted, grayed-out melancholic scenes, mirroring her belief that ‘sadness does not have to be in black and white or grey and brown’. She presents her female subjects in varying poses of vulnerability, from figures curled up in foetal positions to figures nestled gently in the arms of another. She explores these positions that the body assumes in its negotiation of pain, and the importance of safe spaces and support systems as catalysts for healing. Her uses of vibrant fabrics draped around the figures both reference her exploration of draperies as a ‘tool of hiding and protection’ as well their socioeconomic and religious peculiarities in contemporary Nigerian society.

Group Exhibitions

Just Pictures is still on view at Barrett Barrera Projects in St. Louis, United States until November 21, 2020

This group show explores a new forefront of genre-bending photographers who work frenetically between the spaces of fine art, fashion photography, and the history of the medium to construct a contemporary experience of self-presentation and a new perspective on documentation in photography: one in which distinctions are blurred and expression is fluid. “I am particularly interested in bringing together young image makers who are working between the commercial and conceptual by creating worlds entirely their own. Photographers who set their gazes on rethinking the possibility of photography by embracing its boundary. Blurring the potential, this allows the images to address desire, beauty and being. The resulting work has an aesthetic all its own and a power that is drawn from the way that the images operate in many different contexts, photographically and culturally,” writes Antwaun Sargent – curator and author of the 2019 book The New Black Vanguard.

Relations: Diaspora and Painting is still on view at PHI Centre in Montréal, Canada until November 29, 2020

This group show explores the complex and multiple meanings of diaspora, its condition, and its experiences as expressed through painting. “The questions and concepts of diaspora are of deep, personal interest to me as a person of colour born in Canada of mixed Asian heritage,” says curator and managing director Cheryl Sim. The wide spectrum of productive interpretations and relations that are generated by experiences of diaspora remain unfixed, providing endless engagement with the notions of kinship and identity in a world of advanced globalization and migration. This show presents a selection of work by artists who address questions of diaspora from diverse perspectives, methodologies and aesthetic languages. The medium of painting, with its deep and complex history, becomes a particularly provocative lens through which to explore the complications and diversities that are analogous to the richness of diasporic experiences.