Effo Munguanzo´s work includes a variety of mediums ranging from painting to working with found objects, mixed media using resin and wood. Hailing from Kinshasa, DR Congo, Munguanzo’s work is informed by the day-to-day challenges he and his people have faced. Fascinated by the devastating effects of human greed and its impact, his work explores alternative forms of life and urban realities. “I wonder about human survival mechanisms in a continent ravaged by social and economic problems.” Munguanzo currently lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. 

Helena Uambembe is a storyteller or, as she describes herself, a keeper of (hi)stories. The 32nd Battalion of the South African Defense Force and her Angolan heritage are predominant themes in her work, exploring narratives surrounding history, place, and time, and interweaving symbolic elements, archival material, and fiction. Her recent work moves towards notions of repair, restitution, and collective healing, emerging from silences and voids. Each piece, whether a video, drawing, or installation, functions as a frame taken from a more comprehensive narrative that confronts the fractures and erasures resulting from unspoken legacies of war that still shadow the present. 

Maritea Dæhlin is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Norway and Mexico. She is interested in human behaviours, emotions, rituals and encounters. Her work spans between devised theater, video performance, performance art and text. Her art comes off as playful, non-linear and sometimes absurd. Being a Nordic artist of Norwegian and Cameroonian heritage, who calls Mexico home and works internationally, has been a recurrent theme in ourconversations. Her offering in this group exhibition will bring some insight into that.

Patrick Bongoy has built a multi-disciplinary practice whose central feature is his industrious and highly textural reuse of rubber from the inner tubes of tyres. Mixing this with other waste products such as hessian sacking, industrial packaging and textiles, he cuts and weaves his materials together to create complex, layered sculptures and three-dimensional reliefs. His painstaking process draws on traditional basket-making skills while referencing the physical labour that defines day-to-day life in the DR Congo.

Rudy Nzongo is a visual artist born in Kinshasa, DR Congo, where he lives and works. He completed a Fine Arts degree at the Academie de Beaux Arts in Kinshasa (2012) where he specialised in sculpture. The leading theme in Nzongo´s work is music, notably congolese rhumba. His recent work is characterised by his versatility in the choice of mediums including twigs and paint. Nzongo is the founder of an artist collective called “ZAYI KIA MVANGULU” (the wisdom of creation).

Rafiki is based in Oslo. Her interdisciplinary artworks find their starting point between photography and bead work, textiles, waste materials, and the use of objects imbued with memorial capacities. With a process-based practice, Rafiki’s artworks are not ‘final’, and hold healing, remembrance, and cultural analysis as central. Artistic strategies in her works often avoid Western, anthropological gazes. Incorporating symbolism, fables, and tools from visual storytelling and oral history in her pictures, she invokes themes such as forced displacement, war, racialized understandings of Blackness and femininity, and burdened colonial traditions to control place and obliterate temporality.

Thania Petersen is a multi-disciplinary artist who uses photography, performance and installation to address the intricacies and complexities of her identity in contemporary South Africa. Petersen’s reference points sit largely in Islam and in creating awareness about its religious, cultural and traditional practices. She attempts to unpack contemporary trends of Islamophobia through her analysis of the continuing impact of colonialism, European andAmerican imperialism, and the increasing influence of right-wing ideologies. Threads in her work include the history of colonialist imperialism in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, as well as the social and cultural impact of westernised consumer culture. Her work is also informed by her Cape Malay heritage, and the practice of Sufi Islamic religious ceremonies.