In a typical African home, family photographs adorn the wall of the living room. These family portraits depict close family members and autobiographical accounts. It is a representation of the relationship between the current and past occupants of the home. From celebrating family members to preserving shared memories, documenting our lived experiences transcends sentimentality.
Family, as a social unit, has been depicted using different mediums and styles, from paintings, sculpting, photography, and mixed media. Arthur Timothy, Lebohang Kganye, and Cornelius Annor, are some of the artists that have explored the family archives in African art through a plethora of themes.
Focused on familial scenes in intimate and domestic settings, Ghanaian artist Cornelius Annor captures Ghanaian life in states of gathering, repose, and leisure. The scenes in his figurative and portrait paintings are drawn from his childhood memories and family archives. Annor, in his work, illustrates special milestones like birthdays, weddings, baptisms, and coronation ceremonies as well as the everydayness of familial life, nuclear and extended. Incorporating the traditional Ghanaian textiles in his paintings evokes the domesticity and texturedness of family. Sourced from women in his family, these fabrics adds another dimension of intimacy to his works.
Known for his large-scale oil portraits, Ghanaian-born artist Arthur Timothy’s works celebrates close family members and autobiographical events, specifically in Accra, from times past and across different generations. His portraits are rooted in personal and political memories. His earliest oil paintings were inspired by an archive of photographs found amongst his father’s papers. Timothy has begun to reimagine historical moments in his works in recent years. As he references the Renaissance and Black history, he revisits and reinvents these moments with Black subjects in mind.
Collecting stories from her family archive, South African artist Lebohang Kganye is known for her experimental installations that creates a space between memory and fantasy. Rewriting her family histories into theatrical scripts, she sculptures and brings silhouettes, cut-outs, puppets, shadows and ghosts, fashioned from images in photo albums as well as her own compositions to life. Her composition touches on notions of home as heritage and identity, as well as physical and mental spaces. Through photographic montages, installations and film animation, Kganye’s projects cross personal and collective histories.
Iyanuoluwa Adenle is a Nigerian art writer, essayist, and poet based in Lagos. She is currently the head writer at Omenai. Adenle has contributed to a number of art publications, including Tender Photo, Art News Africa, Pavillon 54, and Omenai.
