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Rama Thiaw: Documenting the Senegalese Revolution
By Hadrien Diez Rama Thiaw knows what fighting means, she even made a film about it. Boul Fallé, la voie de la lutte, a documentary shot in 2009 in the streets of Dakar, Sénégal, portrays a rejected youth combating the lack of perspective by delving into a traditional wrestling style that gives sense, coherence and ...
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Xiaobeilu: Africans in China
In the late 1980s the lives of many Africans were revolutionized by a new household item: the plastic container. On one of his many travels in Africa Polish journalist and author, Ryszard Kapuscinski, notes how this relatively inexpensive plastic jar improved the lives of many. ...
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Rwanda’s Art Palace
By Anna Kućma Walking into the National Art Gallery in Nyanza on the opening day of the second International Art Exhibition, the first thing that drew my attention was a line of busts, some tall, some short, and all made of wood and clay. These heads, each long face somewhat resembling the next, ...
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A New Perspective: Introducing Côte d’Ivoire to the Venice Biennale
The 2013 Venice Biennale introduces ten new participants never before featured in the Exhibition. Amongst these new nations is the Ivory Coast, or Côte d’Ivoire, with a pavilion curated by Yacouba Konaté, a curator, art critic and professor of Philosophy at the Université de Cocody in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He has written extensively about ...
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POP UP ADDIS
A new energetic curator-duo has popped up in Addis Ababa. Photographer Zacharias Elias Abubeker and film-producer Sara Eklund recently organized the first ever pop up exhibition in the Ethiopian capital, giving a much needed creative injection to the Ethiopian art scene. Until recently the concept of the pop-up exhibitions was a relatively unknown phenomenon ...
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PAUL ONDITI: Notes from a curious mind
Mystical, translucent and seductive. The works of Kenyan artist Paul Onditi are mesmerizing and intriguing. He is one of Kenya’s bright and upcoming contemporary artists who found his own style and voice a long time ago. Mixing and matching genres, materials, techniques and media is Onditi’s thing. Filmstrips, prints, layers of layers of ...
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GÉNÉRATION ELILI: Changing the image of the Congo
By Hadrien Diez They are young. They are skilled. They are fed up with the dark narrative international media keep reporting on their region. “Génération Elili”, the generation of the image in Lingala language, is a photographer collective born a few years ago in Brazzaville with the desire to see Congolese taking part in ...
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”Ethiopia didn’t need me” – Vincent Moon on Ethiopia
“Ethiopia is an island,” Vincent Moon explains. The French filmmaker has been on the road for four years now travelling and filming music and spiritual rituals across the globe and releasing them through his Petites Planètes label. 2012 saw him spending three months in Ethiopia exploring and recording Easter in Gonder and the sounds of Merkato ...
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Utopia in Ethiopia: A rendez-vous with artist Wanja Kimani
Kenyan born Wanja Kimani (b. 1986) is a young visual and performance artist living in Addis Ababa. With a BA in Fine Art from the University of the Creative Arts in Canterbury and an MA in Human Rights from the University of Essex, Wanja interlaces, social, emotional, artistic and personal aspects in her visual stories ...
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Best of Addis 2012
The task of identifying the best artistic and cultural experiences in Addis in the past year turned out to be much more challenging than expected. Not because there were not a plethora of events to cherry pick from. There were, and many of them were as such interesting but also fairly safe. Only ...