Black Future

Mostra collettiva.

Comunicato stampa

Artists Auriea Harvey and Jebila Okongwu both explore the theme of Black history through various motifs in their artworks. In this exhibition, they will collaborate and focus on "Black Future" and the strength that stems from Black history and culture.

Harvey begins her sculptural process by making scans from life. These scans mutate as they are combined with others from her extensive library: 3D models based on her own clay sculptures, works of imagination digitally sculpted, and artworks encountered in museums. The works draw heavily from Hellenistic and Baroque art, not only through the appropriation of forms but also using its ethos of syncretism as a way of working.

Okongwu critiques stereotypes of Africa and African identity and repurposes them as counterstrategies, drawing on African history, symbolism and spirituality. One of his preferred materials is banana boxes; their tropicalized graphics articulate an ‘exotic’ provenance, much like the exoticization of African bodies from an ethnocentric perspective. When these boxes are shipped to the West from Africa, the Caribbean and South America, old routes of slavery are retraced, accentuating existing patterns of migration, trade and exploitation.