Exhibitions

El Anatsui: Freedom is still on view at Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa until May 14, 2022

El Anatsui is best known for his ability to meticulously transform simple materials into complex assemblages that create distinctive visual impact. Bringing together a new body of work, Freedom reflects Anatsui’s focus on scale, continuing his method of using materials ubiquitous and relevant to his environment. The exhibition title is a nod to Anatsui’s monumental tapestry of the same. Through this exhibition, ideas of play that form the foundation of his practice are revealed in how he approaches cumbersome materials with weightlessness and his ability to consider the socio-political while transforming them into personal meaning. The exhibition speaks to transience, contingencies and possibilities that impact notions of freedom.

Stan Douglas: Revealing Narratives is still on view at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montréal, Canada until May 22, 2022

For over thirty years, Stan Douglas has devoted his work to the investigation of the image; the technologies of their making, their aesthetic languages and their dynamics of power. This exhibition will present his most recent photo series Penn Station’s Half Century (2021) and Disco Angola (2012) for the first time in Québec. In the first series, Douglas worked with a researcher who rifled through thousands of newspapers and periodicals to select nine historic moments that took place in New York’s original Pennsylvania Station between 1914 and 1957, before it was demolished to make way for Madison Square Garden. With the second series, Douglas takes on the persona of a fictional photojournalist living in New York City in the 1970s, who is a regular in the emerging disco scene and travels back and forth to Angola to cover the civil war.

Memories in Motion: Contemporary art from Mauritania is still on view at Casa Arabe in Madrid, Spain until May 15, 2022

This exhibition explores the ways in which memories – whether personal, collective or cultural – are manifested through various creative processes within the contemporary art movement in Mauritania. The paintings, photographs, installations and sculptures in the exhibition provide us with the opportunity to reflect upon the connections between memory and imagination, an issue examined within Mauritania’s current art scene. This provides us a closer look at different personal and collective stories intermixed with symbolic elements, and underlying references to folk traditions such as poetry, African oral tradition, Arabic, Chinese and Tifinagh calligraphy, traditional Tuareg crafts, or everyday objects and life. Similarly, the artists show their concern for current issues shared with other places around the planet, including the environment, migration, the status of women in society, cultural mixing and the recent pandemic.

Art Fairs

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair will open at Harlem Parish in New York, United States from May 19-22, 2022

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the leading international art fair dedicated to contemporary art from Africa and the African diaspora, announces its in-person return to New York after two years. 1-54 New York will move to a new location at Harlem Parish, a grand yet intimate venue located in Central Harlem. The fair will be accompanied by a series of events throughout Harlem. 1-54 New York will be accompanied by 1-54 Forum, the fair’s acclaimed program of talks, performances, and screenings that explore the work and practice of artists from Africa and its diaspora. Novella Ford, Associate Director for Public Programs and Exhibitions at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has been selected as Curator. Now in its third consecutive year, 1-54’s continued partnership with Christie’s signals the fair’s strong and dynamic relationship with the global auction house.

Auctions

Africa + Modern and Contemporary Art will open at Piasa in Paris, France on May 11, 2022

Since 2016, PIASA auction house has been successfully specializing in contemporary African creation, highlighting the broad panorama of the continent's artistic scene. This month, Piasa will present an exceptional sale in Paris, dedicated to Africa and the scenes linked to it. Among the lots presented, a major work by Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Man on Earth (1983) is to be retained. It is indeed the most important and oldest work by the artist ever presented at auction, at the very moment when the Ivorian master is benefiting from an exceptional monographic exhibition at the MoMA in New York, which continues until August. A work similar to the one presented here, and produced a few days apart, is presented in the exhibition at MoMA.