Using a palette of seven recurring visual elements, amanze creates an expansive world that pushes against the idea of narrative. With no hierarchy, the seven include: architecture, birds, ada, bike, swimming pool and audre, with the final element being the paper itself. For this series, positioned as a choreographer of sorts, amanze experiments with placing these elements into pairings. amanze’s practice pulls inspiration from the spatial negotiations found in design and the three-dimensional practices of dance and architecture.

As part of an ongoing exploration, the malleability of space remains the primary antagonist. A nameless, chimeric universe is simultaneously positioned between nowhere and everywhere. Each “duet” of two elements is suspended in an infinite space with no gravitational axis as part of the artist’s attempt to push the boundaries of depth and scale. Incorporating materials from graphite, to ink, to photo transfers, amanze slices and cuts imagery to create spaces and shapes where the elements meet.

Why pairings? “In my studio practice, I frequently and arbitrarily create restrictions for myself to work with. It is a numbers game, a puzzle of sorts, making drawings through a process of parts to a whole or a whole into parts” - amanze. In earlier work, the sudo-human figures of ada and audre featured as main characters. This series explores what it means to place the two selected elements on a level playing field and to reject a hierarchy between them.

El Anatsui is one of the most significant living contemporary artists. Anatsui is respected for his contributions to African modernism. Within his practice, he explores geometry and form through materiality. A key contributor to the Nsukka art school and various artistic movements that ensued in West Africa, Anatsui has found interesting ways to negotiate the complexities of what it means to create as an artist from the continent. Sovereignty uses a combination of biotic, non-linear and ordered lines chaotically tangled to reflect the violently established laws that organise the flow of humans through restrictions, while also drawing attention to natural pathways and channels. 

We Live in Silence, forms the third and final installment in a three-part series that began with Revelations (2011) and continued with Genesis [Je n’isi isi] (2016). Taken as a whole, this ambitious body of work disrupts what the artist refers to as ‘colonial futures’, creating ‘counter-memories’ within his images to contest dominant colonial narratives.

Taking Mauritian filmmaker Med Hondo’s critically-acclaimed 1967 drama Soleil Ô as its starting point, responding, in particular, to the colonial mindset that forms as a result of white-washing and cultural erasure, the film responds to the colonial mindset that African migrants to Europe are to think, speak and understand language like their colonisers. Chiurai dissects the film through similitude, recreating scenes intercut with visual references from popular culture, religion and art historical sources to stage alternative colonial histories and futures.

The single-channel film from which this photographic essays derives also re-positioned the female role in recent struggle histories - recasting the lead character as a woman in the black liberation narrative to challenge the gender-bias inherent to such narratives.

For various years, Garaicoa has been working on a series of black and white mural photographs of different buildings in Havana integrated with thread drawings. In a new turn of this series we find the work Untitled (Cayuelo) (2018) where he moves the eye to the relation of the trees and garden with the city, making an statement about the tension between urbanism and nature. This develops the interest that the artist has had for years in gardens and non-natural processes inside the city.

Location in the sky captures guarded buildings in the centre of Johannesburg where migrant workers lived. The buildings reflect the legacies of segregationist policies of the apartheid government which controlled the flow of Black people in and out of cities. Through this series, Goldblatt captures place as well as the spirit of the people who inhabit the place, he noted; “To me, there is a seamless relationship between people and their places.

People are marked by the places in which they have their being, and there are few places unmarked by the passing, the hand, the presence of people….There is a casual intimacy in this mutual relationship that inevitably permeates much photography. I don’t need people in a photograph to know that people are there.” — David Goldblatt, Photographers References, 2014. 

Working with various found objects and materials — leather, rubber, bronze, ribbons, copper and brass —Nicholas Hlobo considers his artistic practice to be a kind of autobiography through which he articulates a sense of self. Through an obscured grammar within a language of abstraction, Hlobo explores his psychological, emotional and spiritual journey.

“My work is about my journey, how I relate to myself and to the outside world. I’m very curious about the invisible, intangible and incomprehensible aspects of that journey and there is always a slipperiness to the process of figuring it out”, says Hlobo. Hlobo uses materials that have resonance to his personal memories, he explains; “Materials are found and used as a way to add more layers to the narrative. And how they are intervened with forms part of becoming a language that tells the story. Found objects have their own stories with various patinas depending on where they come from.”

Other People Think is a homage by Jaar to John Cage, created in 2012 on the occasion of Cage’s Centennial. Written in 1927, “Other People Think” is one of Cage’s earliest writings, delivered by him at the Hollywood Bowl where, then a student at Los Angeles High School, he won the Southern California Oratorical Contest. Although Cage was only 15 years old at the time, his essay frames a bold critique and portentous analysis of North and South American relations and continues to have incredible resonance and relevance to contemporary culture and politics. As a Chilean artist living in the United States 85 years later, Jaar still works with the imbalances of this historically stagnant relationship. Reintroducing this acute text to today’s audience, Jaar hopes to bring Cage’s teachings back to light.

Antelope recreates a 1914 photograph discovered by Samson Kambalu of Baptist preacher and pan-Africanist John Chilembwe and European missionary John Chorley. Chilembwe led an uprising in 1915 against British colonial rule in then Nyasaland, now Malawi triggered by the mistreatment of refugees from Mozambique and the conscription to fight German troops during WWI. He was killed shortly after, and his church destroyed by the colonial police.

Antelope depicts Chilembwe at almost twice the size of Chorley, elevating his story to realign history and bring to the fore an untold and underrepresented narrative of resistance against colonial rule. The hat Chilembwe wears marks an act of defiance against colonial rule, as it was forbidden for Africans to wear hats in front of white people. The title of the work also references Chilembwe’s hat, placed high on the preacher’s head creating two peaks, like antelope horns. A large scale version was commisioned for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth in London and was unveiled in September 2022.

Cursive is the third in a series of William Kentridge’s Lexicon bronzes — an accumulation of elemental symbols within his broader practice. This series of bronze sculptures functions as a form of visual dictionary. The sculptures are symbols and ‘glyphs’, a repertoire of everyday objects or suggested words and icons, many of which have been used repeatedly across previous projects. The glyphs can be arranged to construct sculptural sentences and rearranged to deny meaning. “The glyphs started as a collection of ink drawings and paper cut-outs, each on a single page from a dictionary.

Previously I had taken a drawing or silhouette and given it just enough body to stand on its own feet - paper, added to cardboard and put on a stand. With the glyphs, I wanted a silhouette with the weight that the shape suggested. A shape not just balancing in space, but filling space. Something to hold in your hand, with both shape and heft.” 

William Kentridge’s Book of Slights was drawn in conjunction with the making of Kentridge’s flip book film, Soft Dictionary. Flip book films are characterised by drawings in ink and charcoal and text, which dance across the pages of found books. Brought to life once opened by the artist’s hand, the pages of these books turn by themselves, presenting fragmented anti-narratives of text and images.

Soft Dictionary is a visual record of a series of thoughts emerging and disappearing – lists of drawings made and never made, historical figures, personal references. The film tries to document fragments of the non-sequiturs lodged in our heads, all of which are props in our efforts to understand the world: the very randomness of thoughts providing some of the richness of understanding. In its attempt to follow multiple streams of consciousness, it travels the boundary between incoherence, in the arbitrariness of images and references; and our constant need to make connections between images and references.

Shirin Neshat’s work explores issues such as gender politics, self definition and religious authority. Primarily using female imagery, she examines political and societal change in Iran. For the artist, Iranian women embody this political transformation, so that “by studying a woman, you can read the structure and the ideology of the country”. Neshat occupies an influential and highly respected position in the international contemporary art world, not only for her formidable artistic talent but also for her long history as a writer and cultural worker.

Her socially-based practice uncovers hidden histories and engages with marginalised lived experiences; constructing expanding visual archives which claim legitimate, visible spaces for her subjects. By proposing these different modes and perspectives of representation, Neshat’s works serve as prime examples of the nexus of art and social activism.

As a descendant of labourers who were transported to the former British colony of Natal as part of a larger system of Indian indenture, Pillay’s work is closely informed by legacies of colonialism, and their reverberations in the present. Pillay uses painting and drawing as a material means through which to explore how colonial legacies have found form in personal and collective memory, the natural world, and in the idea of haunting.

Pillay’s borrowed archive of her grandmother’s photo albums provides a foundation to the subject matter of her paintings and into understanding her family’s history within a larger narrative: the displacement of indentured migrants, the still-present spectres of Apartheid, and of place and belonging. As Pillay writes, “I started to think more about life-making inside of these systems, how lives were made ‘in spite of’ and ‘in defiance’.”