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Sakhile&Me: Phone:
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www.sakhileandme.com
The group show
Foundations is on view at Haus Kunst Mitte from 11
April to 25 July 2025 and brings together 15 artists
working in painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media, video, and
installation. The exhibition intentionally highlights African-Diasporic
and African-American positions in an effort to provide an inclusive
space for focusing on contextual specificity in content, medium, and
genre and for engaging with diverse perspectives.
Thematically,
Foundations draws on the concept of “building blocks” of life as it is,
as we perceive it, and as we co-create it. The exhibition considers
ideas that are (or are perceived to be) fundamental, foundational, and elemental. As such, a group of works consider the development of social
concepts like human rights or the impact of individual and collective
histories, for example in the way childhood experiences reverberate into
adulthood. Some works put a spotlight on the cross-generational
consequences of colonialism, whereas others highlight the influence of
traditional arts and crafts on contemporary practices. Several works
also focus on the importance of biological, social, and cultural
ecosystems or the butterfly effects in our shared global, cultural,
economic, political, and environmental systems.
Several artists whose work is part
of
Foundations experiment with materials such as steel, wood, textiles,
or self-made bio plastics, transforming these materials while also
investigating historic or philosophical concepts to rebuild or develop
them. Osi Audu’s work, for instance, reimagines traditional West-African
head dresses and carved sculptures. Maintaining a visual language of
geometric shapes and a palette of blacks, whites, greys, as well as
monochromatic contrasting colors, he draws from ancient Yoruba
philosophies. Following the Yoruba concept of Ori Inu ("the inner
head"), his works draw our attention to the head as a “base” or
“signifier” of consciousness and as an object of self and self-knowing.
Similarly, Ato Ribeiro channels traditional knowledge systems in his
work, creating sculptures from discarded wood fragments to reference
traditional West-African Kente textiles and Adinkra symbols while
hinting at historical practices of gerrymandering and gentrification.
Highlighting
environmental issues and questions of sustainability, Nnenna Okore and
Ghizlane Sahli both create abstract textile sculptures paying homage to
weaving and embroidery traditions in Nigeria and Morocco, respectively.
Okore’s fibre installations woven over lightweight wire framing take
inspiration from patterns in nature. Her most recent work experiments
with food waste to create sculptures made of bioplastic. Sahli takes
inspiration from cellular beds, coral reefs, and the microbiological
landscapes of the body to create intricate silk sculptures covering the
tops of used plastic bottles.
A second grouping of artistic work
focuses on representational and abstract painting, with a particular
focus on individual and shared histories and experience. Mario Moore's
work reflects on social contracts pertaining to land and home ownership
within African-American communities, Mario Joyce documents his own
coming of age as a Queer, Black boy in rural America through the lived
experience of his ancestors, Kevin Demery merges collective and
individual history to contextualize contemporary experiences of
African-American youth and Raelis Vasquez captures daily life in the
Dominican Republic while incorporating moments of self-actualization.
Jerry
Helle, Adelaide Damoah, and Sekai Machache focus on the foundational
contributions of emotionality and spirituality to our lived experience.
This manifests in the exploration of sexuality and spirituality in the
performance-based body prints of Adelaide Damoah, the fundamental
archetypes of human experiences represented in Sekai Machache’s Major
Arcana tarot series, or the immediacy and universality of color and
material in the abstract paintings of Jerry Helle. Philip Crawford,
Anike Joyce Sadiq, Lerato Shadi, and Helena Uambembe employ video,
drawing, and installation to tug at the seams of the often hidden parts
that make up our ways of knowing or understanding any whole. Their work
focuses on historically attuned examinations of meaning-making, sensory
experience, language, psychological states, spiritual constellations and
collective memories as they shape and are being shaped by our world
views.
Sakhile Matlhare
and Daniel Hagemeier curated the exhibition in collaboration with Anna
Havemann of Haus Kunst Mitte.