Africa 53
Africa 53 was a landmark exhibition I curated in Barnsley, bringing together internationally recognised contemporary artists from across the African continent and its diaspora. Shown across The Cooper Gallery and The Gallery at The Civic, the exhibition set out to challenge the tired, colonial image of “African art” as tribal masks, drums and voodoo dolls, and instead reveal the breadth, vibrancy and complexity of present‑day African creative practice.
Taking its title from the 53 African states, the exhibition foregrounded the scale and diversity of Africa – many cultures, languages, histories and aesthetics, not a single, flattened story. Works included sculpture, photography, painting, installation, film, and digital practices by artists such as Mansour Ciss Kanakassy, Bright Eke, and others whose practices engage with identity, migration, environment, water, politics, and everyday life.
Curated in collaboration with IFAA (International Festival of Arts, Arnhem) and the Famjadi Foundation, Africa 53 deliberately steered away from Western clichés of suffering, famine and “primitive” craft. Instead, the artists used postmodern strategies, conceptual thinking and experimental materials to “talk back” to the colonial gaze and to articulate Africa on its own terms.
Alongside the exhibition, I led public conversations and open forums, inviting audiences to question how Africa has been represented in British galleries and to encounter these works as contemporary, global art rather than ethnographic objects. Africa 53 became an important moment in my own practice as an artist‑curator, extending my ongoing work to decolonise visual culture and reposition Black and African artists within the centre of the conversation.
Proven results that speak for themselves.
As it is: statements of intent
As it is: Statements of Intent was part of a four‑part exhibition series in Dubai presenting contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora in the Middle East for the first time. Shown at The Mojo Gallery, the series set out to break with the tired, colonial script of “African art” as primitive, tribal or ethnographic, and instead foreground a generation of artists working with installation, sculpture, painting, photography and film in rigorously contemporary ways.
Curated by Annabelle Wanjiku Azu, As it is invited over 20 artists from across the continent and diaspora—Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Cameroon, Senegal, Ethiopia, South Africa and the UK—to speak in their own voices. The focus was on the artists’ narratives and lived experiences rather than on a single, fixed idea of “African identity.” The exhibition text described these works as “statements of experiences, statements of purpose and statements on life,” asking audiences to suspend cliché and enter the space ready to feel, question and rethink what African art can be.
My contribution to As it is: Statements of Intent – A Generation Provoked grew directly from my practice as a British‑Jamaican, diasporic artist. The large, expressive ceramic busts I create work as visual diaries—griots—holding stories of identity, displacement, racism, and the decolonisation of the mind in the UK. In this context they stood alongside the work of continental African artists exploring migration, forced labour, dictatorship, poverty, faith and everyday life through installation, assemblage and conceptual strategies. Together, the works refused the “primitive box” into which African art is so often placed and insisted on a future‑facing, postmodern African visual culture.
The series was framed by a curatorial and critical conversation that included voices such as Wole Soyinka, who described As it is as a “bridge” between African and Arab worlds—a creative dialogue capable of undoing the ignorance and fractured histories left by colonialism. For me, participating in As it is extended the same commitment that runs through projects like Africa 53 and my public artworks: challenging Eurocentric framings, insisting on Black and African authorship, and making sure our work is encountered as contemporary art, not as someone else’s anthropology.
