Marriage Was Always the Plan for These African Men. Until It Wasn’t
The average African man is often assumed to want marriage, or at least that is the expectation many grow up with. For centuries, marriage has been positioned as one of adulthood’s defining milestones, a marker of success and fulfillment against which many men are quietly measured. In many communities, that expectation begins early. Almost as […]
Inside the Most Compelling African Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale
For a long time, Africa’s presence at the Venice Biennale has felt slightly out of place. Even as African artists helped shape contemporary art globally, the continent itself often seemed pushed to the margins, present but not always fully seen, its stories and forms framed through a Western lens or treated as something separate from […]
What the Closure of Tiwani Contemporary Reveals About the African Art Market
Tiwani Contemporary has closed after fifteen years operating between London and Lagos, marking the loss of one of the most influential mid-sized galleries working between Africa and the global art market. Founded in 2011 by Maria Varnava under the mentorship of the late Nigerian curator Bisi Silva, who proposed the name — loosely translating to […]
The Machine Can See You. It Still Can’t Pay You.
Somewhere in a court-approved spreadsheet, nearly half a million books have become line items. Whatever a book once was in the making of it, the years of revision and abandonment and recovery before it ever reached a reader, it now exists in that file as an eligible work with a claim status, a payout estimate, […]
The Woman History Could Not Contain
More than a decade in the making, conceived by Ivor Ichikowitz and directed by the late Mandy Jacobson, a Netflix docuseries produced by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s granddaughters, Princess Swati Mandela-Dlamini and Princess Zaziwe Dlamini-Manaway, returns her story to the family that knew her first.
If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie → Andile Dyalvane
If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie → Andile Dyalvane Two potters, fifty years and two continents apart, both treating the surface of the vessel as something to be marked rather than smoothed. IF YOU LIKE LUCIE RIE Vienna-born, London-based. Rie threw alone from a small mews studio for nearly sixty years, raking sgraffito […]
Nine
Bruin Feskens is a self-taught photographer working out of Cape Town. His mother, a photographer herself, started him on commercial sets at fifteen, and the family’s move from the Netherlands to South Africa opened up the landscapes — beaches, greenlands, deserts — that would later anchor his frames. The series Nine began with a cover […]
Africa’s Largest World Cup, Mostly Watched From Home
Ghanaian fans in the stands at AFCON 2023. Photography by Nana Asomani. The visa regime that will keep most African fans out of the stadiums of the 2026 World Cup is the same one that keeps African artists out of biennials, designers out of Paris fashion weeks, and scholars out of the conferences where their […]
Who Trains the Machines That See Africa?
The Sovereign Stack
As AI becomes the infrastructure beneath culture, African creators can no longer
Joanna Masiyiwa Has Only Photographs. Amayi Is the Rest.
Fashion became how she moved through spaces where she was already visibly different, though