Okwui Enwezor described the ephemera of Africa that arrived in European docks as “strange cargo”: as it was unloaded from ship to warehouse by longshoremen, as it was bid on, sold, and displayed in wealthy homes, lost and rediscovered, each object shaped European visions of Africa. ‘Africa’ as we imagine it now, was shaped by […]
It’s starting to get sticky in Washington DC and that means it’s time for music to migrate from the nightclub to the street. To bring people together in the name of celebrating African music and dance from across the continent and the Diaspora, Beshou Gedamu, organizer of DC’s Sonic Diaspora music parties, devised the Africana […]
Blitz the Ambassador is throwing a block party in Brooklyn this Saturday. Les Nubians are singing, Rimarkable and myself are DJing, and Restless City is screening. MoCADA is the host and co-sponsor.
Even though Nigeria didn’t get much love at this year’s FESPACO film festival, some Parisian organizers believe that the francophone world has been ready for Naija cinema. Nollywood, the world’s second largest film industry, produces over 2000 films annually, and now, seven of its best will be screened at France’s first ever NollywoodWeek Paris (and […]
‘The Fountain of Love’, a painting by Honoré Fragonard, offers a vision of a moment in history when the aristocratic taste for luxury reflects the imminence of revolution. The rococo masterpiece is part of a collection of European art and artefacts collected by Richard Conway-Seymour, the 4th Marquess of Hertford, who spent his inherited fortune – […]
Director Dehanza Rogers’s latest short film, “Sweet, Sweet Country” is the winner of the Audience Award at the 2013 Atlanta Film Festival. The film stars Danielle Deadwyler as the 20-year old refugee Ndizeye, whose struggles to care for herself and the family she left behind in Kenya become even more pressing when they literally show […]
Swedish photographer and visual artist Jens Assur has spent ten months producing an exhibition of 40 enormous-size, large-format photographs chronicling structural patterns in the everyday life of twelve of Africa’s rapidly-changing urban centers, currently showing at the Liljevalchs konsthall in Stockholm. And by some coincidence, he’s gone for a title of similar intent as this blog’s: the […]
The International Center for Photography (ICP) is located in the heart of Manhattan, at the corner of West 43rd Street and the Avenue of the Americas. Nearby, Times Square’s mirages—brilliant expanses of neon fantasies, some spanning the length of several stories and the breadth of entire city blocks—summon passers-by with images of athletes, models, slick […]
Welcome to the inaugural post of our new feature profiling African foods and drinks (plus other gastronomical related subjects); and the people on the continent and in the diaspora that are defining and reshaping our ideas and tastes of these. We’ll call it “Africa is a Kitchen”. To kick off the series, we will be […]
“In Africa today, musicians keep in touch with global pop culture via the Internet and program locally flavoured music of explosive creativity, which in turn often finds its way back into the western world: powerful, urban and contemporary club music.” This sentence captured my attention while I was reading the Ten Cities brochure. Ten Cities […]
