Solo Exhibitions

Igshaan Adams: skarrelbaan is still on view at blank gallery in Cape Town, South Africa until March 19, 2022

An Afrikaans colloquialism in the Kaaps (Cape) dialect, the exhibition title is a phrase that refuses translation. It refers to a particular way of moving through the world with a wary desperation to improve one’s circumstances. To be on the skarrelbaan is to be on the lookout for good fortune, hustling for jobs, money, or food. Comprising a series of new large-scale weavings and installation, the exhibition expands on the artist’s investigations of desire lines, those paths walked into the landscape that circumvent or resist spatial planning. In Cape Town, this resistance to the confines of organised space holds a special poignancy; one of the enduring evils of Apartheid is the physical segregation and economic exclusion of people of colour by means of boundaries, highways and veld (open ground). The paths that traverse these spaces describe the journeys of people, led by intuition or necessity, in search of work and community.

Iris Kensmil: Some of My Souls is still on view at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam, Netherlands until March 20, 2022

Raised in Suriname during her early childhood, Iris Kensmil was born in Amsterdam, where she currently lives and works. Her solo exhibition at Kunstinstituut Melly consists of a new body of work about the Netherlands. This will be set in dialogue with a selection of paintings and drawings from 2007 to date regarding the artist’s longstanding interest in music—especially protest songs, from Blues to Soul and that inspired by African American emancipation struggles. In creating her work, Kensmil not only traces or captures personal and historic transnational experiences. She also portrays communities, events, and aesthetic forms that manifest what the scholar Paul Gilroy identifies as an “embattled cultural sensibility, which has also operated as a political and philosophical resource.”

Group Exhibitions

I AM & … Nothing Else will be on view at Affinity Art Gallery in Lagos, Nigeria from March 20 to April 16, 2022

In celebration of International Women’s month, Affinity Art Gallery presents “I AM & … Nothing Else”, featuring five visionary female artists from Nigeria and South Africa. The exhibition draws inspiration from the book “Women who Run with the Wolves: Myths and stories of the Wild Woman Archetype” by psychoanalyst, author, and poet Clarissa Pinkola Estes. The works in the exhibition engages with themes of healing, identity, community, wholeness, femininity, and what it takes to exist in today’s world as an African woman while paying homage to past generations. Through the medium of materials such as lace, fabric, gold leaf, and embroidery, the works lend texture and nuance which reveals that African women can simultaneously embody softness, fortitude, delicacy, and resiliency. The artists draw connections across time and space to the emergence of the African woman as a wholesome being.

Life Between Islands is still on view at the Tate Britain in London, United Kingdom until April 3, 2022

Opened at Tate Britain last December, Life Between Islands is a landmark exhibition exploring the extraordinary breadth of Caribbean-British art over four generations. It is the first time a major national museum has told this story in such depth, showcasing 70 years of culture, experiences and ideas expressed through art, from visionary paintings to documentary photography. The exhibition is featuring over 40 artists, including those of Caribbean heritage as well as those inspired by the Caribbean, such as Ronald Moody, Frank Bowling, Sonia Boyce, Claudette Johnson, Peter Doig, Hew Locke, Steve McQueen, Grace Wales Bonner and Alberta Whittle, working across film, photography, painting, sculpture and fashion.               

Conferences

Global Ghana Conference will take place at the Africa Institute in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates from March 8-10, 2022

The first part of the two-part scholarly conference, Global Ghana: Sites of Departure/Sites of Return, will examine the ways in which Ghana has emerged over the last century as a focal point of diasporic engagement beginning with early 20th-century Back to Africa movements, followed by Pan-Africanism, anticolonial liberation movements, and more recently, with heritage tourism. One of the focal points of the conference will be Ghana’s efforts to cultivate and curate diasporic engagement among African-descended people in the diaspora and Ghanaians living abroad through the recent Year of Return and Beyond the Return campaigns.