Across the continent and in the diaspora, practitioners have been increasingly engaged in retelling and remaking narratives that frame our histories, realities, cosmologies & mythologies. Often articulating untold joys and knowledge systems, their practices become a site of intervention. In the context of this third iteration of The BMW Art Generation we explore the new forms of images and imaginations that emerge in these practices and construct a tropology between image and imagination that proposes plural epistemologies to reframe the African identity.
Applying this tropology into a framework of thinking where symbolism, gesture, and form are used not simply to reclaim the past, but to construct speculative visions of the future. We navigate articulations of histories, discourses, and imaginaries, engaging with practices that do not merely describe our realties but shape new languages for retelling it. These languages unfold through practices that exist in tension with and in service of imagination – simultaneously dismantling and building tropologies for reclamation.
We reflect on the shifting, expanding terrain in which African contemporary art now moves; a space where boundaries blur between public and private, fiction and reality, local specificity and global resonance.
Asserting the image and imagination of contemporary African practitioners as not only contributors to but definers of global discourse. We look to resist the flattening gaze of the realities from the continent instead, demanding a recognition of our own conceptual terms around representation and presence. Rather than reinforcing tropes, we seek out tropologies – figures of thought that move beyond an established centre and margin.
Through this framework a proposition is set up: allowing us new ways of seeing and imagining our own self authored futures.
Leaning on giants we look to showcase the leaders of African practice in art & culture who have taken the continent’s talent to the world. Adding to the discourse of black excellence we will profile and work with leading cultural practitioners.
— conceptualised by Kim Kandan