Working across different mediums, African female artists are pushing limits and exploring new perspectives on problems of race, gender, and identity. In this photo essay, we highlight five works by African female artists living and working in the diaspora. Featuring art by some of the artists whose work has had an impression on us over the years, there are also commentaries on the selected works from their most current body of work.
Courtesy of Galerie Eva Presenhuber.
“With casual inclusions of details such as windows and hardwood floors in Baton Rouge (2023), Self justifies the typically private domestic interior as a transitory zone. Reflecting on how relationships to the domestic space as a strictly personal site have changed in recent years, Self suspends not only her characters’ subjectivity but also the idea of the home as an absolute safety.”
Courtesy of Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
“Prompted by an increase in media depictions of the plight of domestic workers in Kenya, Mathenge conceived of this body of work as a socially engaged project aimed at shifting the narrative around a workforce of over two million people across the country. Mathenge has formerly explored themes of relocation and displacement in her Ascendants series (2020-2021), which interrogated the language of global migration. In A Day of Rest, she returns to the issue, this time taking a closer look at domestic migration within Kenya, and in particular the narratives of women who leave rural communities for the city, in search of work.”
Courtesy of the artist.
“In this body of work entitled Tradition & Transmission, specifically created for Atlanta, Audrey interrogates the tension between conserving culture and ensuring its evolution through fluid interaction with global influences. While centered on a contemporary backdrop, Audrey’s art also emerges very much from a place of nostalgia. It celebrates the ancient living cultures so evident in cities across the African Diaspora such as Dakar, Senegal.”
Courtesy of White Cube.
“Occupying White Cube Bermondsey’s South Gallery II, the artist’s series of ‘classic’ paintings employ her distinctive process of digitally obscuring the original source images, rearticulating them through hyperactive layers of halftone dots, aeriform hazes of bright yellow or green and convulsive black marks that echo the symphonic dissonance of the original photographs. Locating the paintings in source material of geopolitical violence and the fraught preservations of nationhood, Mehretu’s compositions abrade these images through layers of process. In turn, the blunt influence of the original material recedes into a dismantled and centrifugal entropy, as though partially schematising the embodied impact and impulsive response of the event’s aftermath.”
Courtesy of Frieze.
“For ‘the sun eats her children’, Precious Okoyomon has created a gloriously alive yet decaying micro, tropical ecosystem in a deconsecrated, ninth-century church… Flitting amongst this prolific and messy cross-section of tropical habitat are tens of gorgeous, large, Latin American butterflies of different species – all with black morphology – the most stunning of which have wings tinged in iridescent blue. These butterflies are the reason for the intoxicating humidity, which is vital to their survival. They are born, will reproduce and die inside the church, their lives averaging around two weeks or possibly longer in this butterfly paradise teeming with food and free from predators.”
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.
