JOHANNESBURG — Unlike many professional artists who know from an early age that art is their calling, Nandipha Mntambo never thought seriously about it as a future profession.
She grew up in South Africa during apartheid, and her father was a Methodist pastor (he is now a bishop). Though her family is black, they lived in white communities because of her father’s job. That experience has played into much of her art, the concepts of identity and the fluidity of persona. Read more
ATHENS — Spending a day with Elina Kountouri, the director of the nonprofit art organization NEON, provides an insider’s view of this city.
“Through NEON I have revisited the city many times,” said Ms. Kountouri, referring to the way she discovers spaces for the art organization’s exhibitions. “You have to slow down your pace and think about the relevance that your program should have for citizens and visitors, go back to different histories and try and relate them with art.” Read more
ACCRA, Ghana — Nana Oforiatta-Ayim, a Ghanaian writer, art historian and filmmaker, drove around trying to find a place for brunch one recent Monday. Many places were slow to open, and navigating in Accra is an exercise in calm, patience and practice as directions often rely on landmarks instead of street names.
Ms. Oforiatta-Ayim has perfected those qualities, not only in driving around the capital, but also with her Cultural Encyclopedia project, which will map and archive both historical and contemporary arts and culture across Africa. After finally finding an air-conditioned cafe, she explained that although she started the venture three years ago, she had been thinking about it since 2009, when she began her Ph.D. research into African languages and cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
“I would go to the underground library vaults,” Ms. Oforiatta-Ayim said, “and I would find theses that were so brilliant and interesting, and yet no one was looking at it and it is so valuable. I would get completely sidetracked reading about things like the technology of kente cloth. And at the same time I was also thinking that the narrative that is told about Africa is still the backward narrative: no innovation, it’s ahistorical and stuck. Yet with everything I was reading, it was stories of innovation, of knowledge, of technology.”
The encyclopedia will consist of an open-source internet platform for documenting past, present and future African arts and culture (starting with Ghana) and eventually will be published in 54 volumes, one for each country. An ambitious undertaking, the Cultural Encyclopedia aims to change perceptions of the continent and help alleviate the frustration of African cultural producers concerned that their rich histories have been lost or forgotten over the decades because they lack good archives.
LONDON — The phrase “artists collective” conjures a mental picture of people sharing materials and studio space to work on their creative projects, The word “bunny” sounds soft, cute and harmless. Neither image suits Bunny Collective, a rising group of 18 young women artists on two continents who rarely see each other in person, work mostly over the internet and have a fierce feminist agenda. Read more