Art & Design

Born in 1968 in Bignona, Senegal 
Lives and works in Dakar, Senegal

A painter of urban vibration, Amadou Camara Gueye stands today as one of the leading figures of contemporary Senegalese art. Graduating top of his class from the École des Beaux-Arts in Dakar in 1997 and brought to prominence at the Dakar Biennale in 2000, he has since extended his practice far beyond national borders, exhibiting across Europe, the United States, and China, notably with the Fondation Blachère and the Art Institute of Shenzhen.

Deeply rooted in Pikine, a working-class district of Dakar, he captures its intensity with unflinching clarity. Camara approaches the city as a body under pressure. His canvases, constructed through layered planes, unfold as social kaleidoscopes: fractured architectures, compressed crowds, and stark linear perspectives evoke rapid urban expansion, rural exodus, and the tectonic shifts of a territory in flux.

Yet within this charged density, incandescent color breaks through. It carries hope, tenderness, and the persistence of human connection, man and woman as origin and promise. He often speaks of his desire “to illuminate all that is dark.” A storyteller of the streets and a poet of the real, Amadou Camara transforms collective memory into a vibrant painterly language—at once lucid and profoundly human.

Born in 1974 in Abidjan, Ivory Coast 
Lives and works in Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Born in 1974 and based in Abidjan, Joana Choumali has developed a practice at the intersection of documentary inquiry and material experimentation. Trained in graphic arts in Casablanca and initially working as an art director, she has transformed photography into a site of hybridity, where the image becomes a surface to inhabit, alter, and reimagine.

Her work investigates African cultures through faces, adornment, gesture, and the urban landscape. From her series on scarification and hairstyles to the haunting images produced in the aftermath of the 2016 Grand-Bassam attack, and her contemplative dawn photographs, Choumali captures both the intimate and the collective. She often intervenes directly onto her prints (embroidering, stitching, assembling) : slow, meditative gestures that shift reportage into the realm of the oneiric. Her works hover between waking and dream, weaving together reality and imagination.

In 2019, she became the first African laureate of the Prix Pictet for Ça va aller. She has exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale (Ivory Coast Pavilion, 2017) and Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, and her work is held in major collections such as the V&A, the MET, the High Museum of Art, and MACAAL. An essential voice in contemporary global art.

Born in 1957 in Dakar, Senegal 
Lives and works between Berlin, Germany and Dakar, Senegal

Mansour Ciss Kanakassy studied at the National Institute of Arts in Senegal from 1973 to 1977. Early in his career, he gained recognition for his large-scale cubist wooden sculptures, several of which entered the collection of President Léopold Sédar Senghor.

After relocating to Berlin in 1993, his practice took on a more overtly political dimension, engaging critically with the legacy of the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) and the colonial partition of Africa. In 2000, he co-founded the Laboratoire de Déberlinisation with Baruch Gottlieb, later joined by Christian Hanussek, a conceptual platform dedicated to rethinking colonial history and reframing its narratives. In 2019, the laboratory is relocated to the Ifitry residency in Morocco, where the research and artistic dialogue continue in collaboration with artist Mostapha Romli.

Ciss also conceived the Afro, a symbolic currency created as an artistic gesture to question sovereignty, economic dependency, and global power dynamics, while further developing the visionary project United States of Africa.

Recipient of the Grand Prix Léopold Sédar Senghor at Dak’Art in 2008, Ciss has exhibited widely across Africa, Asia, the United States, and Europe. His works are held in major public collections, including the Museum der Weltkulturen (Frankfurt), the National Heritage Collection of Senegal, the BCEAO, and the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar.

Born in 1979 in Déou, Burkina Faso 
Lives and works in Paris, France

A Peul artist working across painting, photography, video, and installation, Saïdou Dicko anchors his practice in a foundational memory: that of a young shepherd who, at the age of five, traced the shadows of his sheep onto the Sahelian ground. From this formative gesture emerges an aesthetic of imprint and light. Since turning to photography in 2005, Dicko has embraced the medium as a site of revelation, where shadow, far from signifying absence, becomes a charged symbolic presence.

In Dakar, Ouagadougou, and Déou, he captures shifting silhouettes poised between realism and dream. Across photographs, paintings, textiles, and immersive installations, Dicko explores contrast, gesture, and form to evoke love, equality, and reverence for the living world. A luminous lyricism runs through his work, conjuring inner landscapes shaped by hope. Yet when confronted with social injustice, such as children forced into begging, his language sharpens, adopting a more unflinching, political tone.

Recipient of the Prix Blachère (2006), the Francophonie Prize (2007), and the European Union Off Prize, and exhibited internationally with galleries including AFIKARIS, ARTCO, and Jackson Fine Art, Saïdou Dicko has established himself as a singular and vital voice on the global contemporary stage.

Born in 1977 in East Orange, New Jersey, USA 
Lives and works between Brooklyn, USA, and Johannesburg, South Africa

Trained as a sociologist, Ayana V. Jackson has developed an uncompromising practice at the intersection of photography, performance, and visual research. Her work interrogates the historical construction of Black identity, particularly the Black female body, through the lens of colonial and ethnographic image regimes. Moving between the Americas, Ghana, and South Africa, she examines the layered histories of the African diaspora, exposing the violence embedded within historical representations.

In meticulously staged photographic tableaux, Jackson positions herself within the frame to reclaim and subvert inherited visual codes. She summons obscured or mythologized figures, dismantles entrenched stereotypes, and lays bare the mechanisms of racial and gendered domination with striking visual and conceptual rigor.

Jackson’s work is held in major international collections, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Princeton University Art Museum (USA), and the National Gallery of Victoria, Southbank (Australia). Her 2019 exhibition From the Deep at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. (USA), marked a pivotal moment in the global recognition of her practice. In 2022, she founded Still Art, a residency dedicated to supporting emerging artists from Southern Africa.

Born in 1977 in Kinshasa, DRC 
Lives and works in Courcouronnes, France

A French-Congolese artist trained at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Cergy, Michèle Magema explores the tensions between North and South, the intimate and the political, memory and history. Working across video, photography, drawing, and installation, she interrogates the construction of female identities and inherited narratives, staging her own body as a site of metamorphosis and critical reflection.

Revealed internationally at the Dakar Biennale in 2004, where she was awarded the President’s Prize, Magema quickly established a global career. From Africa Remix at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, to exhibitions at the National Art Gallery in Johannesburg and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, her work circulates across Europe, Africa, and the United States.

Magema inhabits a critical space between worlds, probing systems of domination, migration, and extractive violence. Her recent research engages colonial archives through a decolonial lens, liberating “captive images” through drawing and performance. Represented in major collections, including the AfricaMuseum in Brussels and the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, she stands as a vital voice in contemporary visual thought.

Born in 1964 in Libreville, Gabon 
Lives and works in Paris, France

A French-Gabonese artist, Myriam Mihindou has developed a practice in which art becomes an act of care and a ritual of repair, shaped by a life marked by movement. Born in Libreville, she has lived in Egypt, Morocco, Réunion, and Haiti before settling in Paris. Across sculpture, installation, drawing, writing, photography, ceramics, video, and performance, each medium functions as a sensitive instrument, engaging the body, language, and memory.

Her work navigates questions of identity, spirituality, womanhood, and ecology through an approach that is at once intimate and political. Deeply attentive to the places and people she encounters, Mihindou works in physical and emotional empathy with specific contexts, seeking to mend individual and collective wounds inherited from histories of domination. She reflects on displacement and exile while reaffirming ancestral memories and healing rituals gathered through her journeys.

Internationally recognized, she has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, La Verrière in Brussels, CAAM in Las Palmas, and is featured in the 2024 editions of the Lyon and Gwangju Biennales. Her profoundly humanist practice articulates a poetics of care of rare intensity.

Born in 1975 in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe 
Lives and works between the Netherlands and Africa

Emerging from a nation profoundly marked by colonial erasure, Sithabile Mlotshwa situates her practice within a sustained resistance to the rewriting of history and the dominance of hegemonic narratives. Her transdisciplinary work—spanning installation, drawing, collage, sound, writing, and site-specific interventions—examines normalized systems of oppression and the mechanisms of power that persist and reproduce themselves across time.

Drawing on archival documents, photography, and oral histories, she constructs immersive environments in which past and present confront one another. In Castle Zypendaal #2, devoted to the obscured traces of slavery in the Netherlands, she juxtaposes historical records with contemporary imagery, exposing the continuity between historical injustice and present-day realities. Her work restores voice to marginalized histories while inviting collective accountability for colonial legacies.

Curator of several biennials, founder of the Thamgidi Foundation and Artistic Director of the IFAA Art Platform, Mlotshwa seamlessly bridges artistic practice and activism. Exhibited internationally and represented in major collections, including the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, she stands as a leading figure in a reparative aesthetic at the intersection of memory, justice, and speculative futures.

Born in 1968 in Kinshasa, DRC 
Lives and works in Kinshasa, DRC and Brussels, Belgium

A leading figure in contemporary African art, Aimé Mpane Enkobo has developed a powerful body of work at the crossroads of Kinshasa and Brussels. Heir to an ancestral savoir-faire (carving wood with a traditional adze), Mpane fuses the raw force of so-called “primitive” forms with a forward-looking conceptual vision. His practice dismantles colonial memory in order to reconstruct it critically, in dialogue with the present.

The first Congolese artist to exhibit at the Royal Museums of Belgium, Mpane situates his work within a productive tension between Africa and Europe. Nested images, hybrid dispositifs, and passages “through the looking glass” characterize an oeuvre that interrogates representation, stereotypes, and dominant historical narratives.

Navigating between Congo and Belgium, he envisions, for both nations and for the world at large, a genuine fraternity. Committed, poetic, and deeply humanist, Mpane positions art as a space of possible reconciliation. Exhibited internationally, his work stands as an essential voice in the dialogue between cultures and the reimagining of shared histories.

Born in 1975 in Nairobi, Kenya, and in 1964 in Ludwigshafen, Germany 
Live and work in Germany

Born in Nairobi in 1975, Ingrid Mwangi has developed a practice at the intersection of photography, video, sculpture, and performance. Relocating to Germany in her adolescence and trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Saarbrücken, she probes the tensions between African and European inheritances, interrogating the social constructions of race, gender, and identity.

With the seminal series Neger Don’t Call Me (2000), in which she transforms her face into a mask of hair and dreadlocks, Mwangi asserts her own body as a political site. In 2005, she merged her name and biography with that of Robert Hutter to form the unified artistic entity IngridMwangiRobertHutter, a radical gesture that challenges fixed identity categories and affirms the interdependence of narratives.

Exhibited internationally at institutions including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, their work confronts visible and invisible borders, systemic violence, and collective complicity. Through a powerful visual language, IngridMwangiRobertHutter stands as a major voice on the global contemporary stage, articulating a practice both critically incisive and profoundly humanist.

Born in 1992 in Bujumbura, Burundi 
Lives and works in Kigali, Rwanda

Bruce Niyonkuru, known as “Canda,” has emerged as one of the most promising figures of his generation. After his family settled in Kigali in the aftermath of the 1994 genocide, he began his artistic journey at Ivuka Arts Studio in 2011 and committed fully to his practice in 2013, developing an interdisciplinary approach that brings together painting, sculpture, and creative direction.

Populated by humanoid figures, his work probes the dual nature of humanity—at once creator and destroyer, living archive and agent of history. Moving fluidly between utopia and dystopia, imagination and social reality, Canda conceives art as a transformative force and a space of freedom. His intensely expressive visual language offers a lucid meditation on contemporary fractures.

A committed advocate for the decolonization of cultural institutions, he co-founded Kuuru Art Space and the Milele Museum in Kigali, born from his confrontation with looted African artifacts in European museums. Exhibited both in Rwanda and internationally, notably in Germany, Bruce Niyonkuru embodies the dynamic renewal of a bold and forward-looking Rwandan art scene.

Born in 1967 in Mbalmayo, Cameroon 
Lives and works between Paris, France, and Bandjoun Station, Cameroon

A major figure on the international contemporary art scene, Barthélémy Toguo has, for over three decades, developed a multifaceted practice spanning watercolor, sculpture, installation, performance, and ceramics. His work engages the urgent issues of our time—migration, social justice, ecology, and the circulation of bodies and knowledge—through a language that is at once formally powerful and politically resonant.

Toguo combines poetic intensity with sharp critical insight, often inflected with humor. In 2022, his monumental installation The Pillar of the Missing Migrants beneath the pyramid of the Musée du Louvre in Paris marked a defining moment in his global recognition.

Invited to the Venice Biennale and the Sydney Biennale, and exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Parrish Art Museum in New York, and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, his work is held in major public collections, including the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, Tate Modern in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami.

With Bandjoun Station, founded in Cameroon, Toguo has created a vital crossroads between African art and the global scene. His profoundly humanist practice positions art as a space for consciousness, dialogue, and repair.

Born in 1952 in Tours, France 
Lives and works between Paris, Benin, Togo, and Haiti

An artist-traveler, William Adjété Wilson has, since the 1970s, developed a body of work at the crossroads of continents, cultures, and temporalities. Navigating between Africa and the West, tradition and modernity, he interrogates dominant narratives, stereotypes, and hybrid identities, defining himself first and foremost as a citizen of the world.

Working primarily in soft pastel on paper, alongside printmaking, collage, assemblage sculpture, and ceramics, Wilson’s visual language is marked by remarkable formal freedom, weaving together intimate memory and collective history. Shaped by extensive stays in Europe, West Africa, and the United States, he has cultivated long-standing collaborations with artists and artisans, notably in Benin and Haiti, embedding his practice within a dynamic of exchange and shared knowledge.

Recipient of the Prix Médicis Villa Hors les Murs in 1986, and widely exhibited across Europe, Africa, and the United States, he has also realized major international projects, including L’Océan noir (The Black Ocean), a monumental series of appliqué textile works produced in Abomey. A singular and widely respected figure, William Adjété Wilson embodies a profoundly humanist and expansive vision of métissage in contemporary art.

Born in 1969 in Cotonou, Benin 
Lives and works in Cotonou, Benin

Marked by rare freedom of expression and relentless inventiveness, Dominique Zinkpé’s work has, over the decades, emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary African art. Self-taught and defiantly unclassifiable, he constructs a prolific universe—spanning drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and video—deeply rooted in the Vodun traditions of southern Benin while engaging the urgencies of the present.

His visual language fuses satire, spirituality, and social critique. Hybrid figures, raw materials, and ritual references converge in works that probe identity, power, the sacred, and the contradictions of modern African societies with striking immediacy. His trajectory has been punctuated by major accolades, from the Young African Talent Prize at the Grapholies in Abidjan in 1993 to the UEMOA Prize at the Dakar Biennale in 2002 for Malgré tout!.

Exhibited in leading institutions—from Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town to Museu Afro Brasil in São Paulo and MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt—Zinkpé’s practice moves across continents while remaining firmly anchored in Cotonou. As founder of artist residencies and creative spaces, he bridges international recognition with local commitment, shaping new horizons for emerging generations.