AfricaIs aCountry

"… new trends in Africa and the Diaspora"

Africa Is a Country Podcast
African Five-a-Side Podcast

"… new trends in Africa and the Diaspora"

By
Tom Devriendt

At the margins of this year’s Art Basel (15-19 June) and curated by Christine Eyene, FOCUS11 presents a group of African artists in the city of Basel, Switzerland this weekend. The selected artists (“reflecting new trends in Africa and the Diaspora”) are Nirveda Alleck (above is “Suspended Thought,” a 2006 photocollage by Alleck), Natalie Mba Bikoro, Graeme Williams, Ato Malinda, Mohau Modisakeng, Jan-Henri Booyens, Steve Bandoma, Rowan Pybus, Ntando Cele, Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo, Fabrice Wamba and Youssef Tabti (who is distributing this postcard all over the city these days). With the exception of two, all of the artists seem to reside in South Africa or Europe.

Further Reading

The people want to breathe

In Tunisia’s coastal city of Gabès, residents live in the shadow of the phosphate industry. As pollution deepens and repression returns, a new generation revives the struggle for life itself.

After Paul Biya

Cameroon’s president has ruled for over four decades by silence and survival. Now, with dynastic succession looming and no clear exit strategy, the country teeters between inertia and implosion.

Leapfrogging literacy?

In outsourcing the act of writing to machines trained on Western language and thought, we risk reinforcing the very hierarchies that decolonization sought to undo.

Repoliticizing a generation

Thirty-eight years after Thomas Sankara’s assassination, the struggle for justice and self-determination endures—from stalled archives and unfulfilled verdicts to new calls for pan-African renewal and a 21st-century anti-imperialist front.

The king of Kinshasa

Across five decades, Chéri Samba has chronicled the politics and poetry of everyday Congolese life, insisting that art belongs to the people who live it.

Drip is temporary

The apparel brand Drip was meant to prove that South Africa’s townships could inspire global style. Instead, it revealed how easily black success stories are consumed and undone by the contradictions of neoliberal aspiration.