Conceptualised by Kim Kandan
Focused on celebrating and convening around culture The BMW Art Generation Vol. IV looks to continue the work of opening The BMW Young Collectors Co. programme to the public through a vibrant meeting place for collectors, artists, curators, academics and institutions from across the world. Using From Whose Waters Do We Drink? as a point of departure, members will have the opportunity to engage with questions of research, production, and presentation, and consider through exhibition ideas around Indigenous knowledge & speculative futures.
The conceptual note
Ugandan sociologist, Sylvia Tamale notes that, “until knowledge is dislodged from its colonial roots and rerouted into African communities, excavating the wealth of African histories and experiences, the continent will never step out of the grim trap of neocolonialism.”
In 2025 at a conference reassessing the state of the arts in Africa, Raphael Chikukwa urged that we similarly consider the sapidity of the waters from where we drink, influencing the title of this inquiry. Receiving this as impetus for reconfiguring historical knowledge toward those dynamic systems that allows us to repossess agency and become as Freire’s describes our own “dialogical co-investigator”, we begin an inquiry into knowledge, survival, and belonging that works against linearity and extractive modes of looking.
From Whose Waters Do We Drink? unfolds a living system; porous, cyclical, and contingent – mirroring Indigenous knowledge system and cosmovisions in which what we know is sensed, performed, and shared rather than possessed. Through this understanding we view artistic practices that operates as a modes of listening: to land, to bodies, to ancestral frequencies, and to speculative futures still in formation, and telling to those wishing to hear.
Rather than offering answers, we invite attunement that allows us to emerge with opportunities beckoning a bright and radiant future on the continent. We are asked to introspect & reassess the oral histories, traditions, values and thinking’s that lie within communities. At the heart of the exhibition is this invocation of Indigenous Knowledge Systems as dynamic sources countering latent epistemic violence.
To drink from these waters is to acknowledge ourselves, communities and thoughts. It is to recognise that knowledge is always situated, always flowing, and always shared. The question, then, is not only from whose waters do we drink, but how do we drink while replenishing the source?