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 […]
Why the Wrapper Remains West Africa’s Undecolonized Garment
The wrapper predates colonial borders and outlives fashion cycles. It is one of the continent’s most enduring systems, and one of the few
Authored From Within: MoMA’s Ideas of Africa
MoMA’s exhibition Ideas of Africa: Portraiture and Political Imagination revisits the golden age of African studio photography—roughly the 1950s through 1970s—through work shaped by the questions raised in V. Y. Mudimbe’s The Idea of Africa. Where Mudimbe exposed “Africa” as a Western epistemological construction built to maintain colonial power, the photographers here offered something radically […]
How Colonial Morality Still Polices African Fashion
How Colonial Morality Still Polices African Fashion Akamba Warrior (Kenya): Image No. 10768. Courtesy of Penn Museum Archives. Before colonial rule, most communities wore practical, hand-made garments: woven cotton wrappers in West Africa; smocks and robes for traders and farmers; leather and beadwork in parts of the Sahel and southern Africa; wool and barkcloth where […]
Data Oruwari Channels Ancestral Wisdom Through Art and Sound
In a world seduced by speed, surface, and spectacle, Data Oruwari moves like an ancestral drumbeat — steady, sacred, and impossible to ignore. Known as The Ancestors’ Scribe, she is not merely a visual artist, but a sound alchemist, a spiritual technologist, and a living archive of African ancestral cosmology. Through glyphs etched in ink […]
Africa Day 2025: The Legacy and Future of African Unity
Every May 25th, the African continent unites to commemorate Africa Day—a celebration of independence and a long and complex journey toward unity and sovereignty. At its heart lies the African Union (AU), a continental body born from the vision of a self-determined Africa, free from colonial dominance, economic subjugation, and foreign political interference. Understanding the […]