This month’s featured exhibitions come from the Blaffer Art Museum (University of Houston), Black Cultural Archives, Brooklyn Museum, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, David Krut Projects, Somerset House, Omenka Gallery, Cecile Fakhoury, Victoria Miro Gallery, STEVENSON Gallery, Sulger-Buel Lovell Gallery, Goodman Gallery, Tiwani Contemporary, Galerie Mikael Andersen, Gasworks, Tyburn Gallery and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
1. Portraits and Other Likenesses from SFMOMA
Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco
May 8 – Oct 11, 2015
Organized in partnership with SFMOMA, this exhibition explores how portraiture has evolved from a form of personal identification to a genre as invested in fiction, subversion, stereotype, and fantasy as it is in the description of physical traits. The exhibition demonstrates how artists interested in issues of identity have negotiated a vast array of European, African, and American visual-cultural forms to redefine what it means to make a portrait.
2. Unsettled: One Hundred Years War of Resistance by Xhosa Against Boer and British
David Krut Projects, New York
Sep 10 – Oct 24, 2015
Exhibiting work by South African photographer Cedric Nunn, this exhibition deals with the nine wars that Xhosa people were subjected to between 1779 and 1879 in their fight against Afrikaner and British colonial settler forces. This exhibition is in collaboration with Wheaton College, Beard and Weil Galleries and Rhode Island School of Design, Benson Hall.
3. Hurvin Anderson: Backdrop
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
Sep 11, 2015 – Dec 27, 2015
British artist Hurvin Anderson is best known for evocative paintings that engage with charged social histories and shifting notions of cultural identity. His depictions of lush Caribbean landscapes and urban barbershops explore themes of memory, place, and the indelible connection between the two. In this most comprehensive survey of Anderson’s work to yet, Backdrop examines the artist’s practice in depth, presenting recent paintings alongside previously unseen sculpture and photography.
4. Broken English
Tyburn Gallery, London
Sep 18 – Oct 28, 2015
The exhibition investigates the categorisation of cultural identities in an increasingly globalised world. Most of the artists exhibited live between multiple cities as wide ranging as Antananarivo, Cape Town, Harare, Johannesburg, Lisbon, London, New York, Paris, São Paulo and Tamale; their cross-cultural experiences call into question the relevance of traditional ideas of nationality within the contemporary climate. The exploration into constructions of identity, misinterpretation, alter-egos, myth and story-telling characterises several of the works on view.
5. Kemang Wa Lehulere: Sincerely yours,
Gasworks, London, UK
Sep 24, 2015 – Nov 8, 2015
Unravelling the relationships between personal and collective histories, amnesia and the archive, Wa Lehulere’s practice explores how South Africa’s past continues to haunt the present.
5. Mustafa Maluka – Disembedded
Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Sep 25 – Oct 31, 2015
Mustafa Maluka’s intense, large-scale portraits reflects on the relationship between identity and cultural positioning mechanisms in modern society. The works show anonymous figures and focus on how identity is localised and how subjects are constructed in relation to the Other.
6. Theo Eshetu: Constellations
Tiwani Contemporary, London
Sep 25 – Oct 31, 2015
Theo Eshetu combines the formal components of film with anthropological ideas to examine the notion of culture itself. His manipulation of time and light leads to work that draws on themes, images and symbols from the artist’s dual European and African background.
7. Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?
Blaffer Art Museum, University of Houston
Sep 26, 2015 – Dec 19, 2015
Showcasing new works by British-Nigerian artist and filmmaker Zina Saro-Wiwa, the exhibition uses folklore, masquerade traditions, religious practices, food and Nigerian popular aesthetics to test art’s capacity to transform and to envision new concepts of environment and environmentalism.
8. Young, Gifted and Black
Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg
Sep 26 – Nov 11, 2015
Taking inspiration from Nina Simone’s iconic song To Be Young, Gifted, and Black (1969), To Be Young, Gifted, and Black is about our moment, looking back at those of our Black ancestors. What lies between their Civil Rights and our #BlackLivesMatter? All over the world we cry out ever more fervently that our lives matter, even as evidence mounts supposedly to the contrary. This exhibition is curated by Hank Willis Thomas.
9. Portraits, by Victor Ekpuk
Sulger-Buel Lovell, London
Sep 29 – Oct 24, 2015
Portraits, a series of paintings and fine drawings rooted in African philosophies and aesthetics, is borne from Ekpuk’s interest and continuous exploration of consciousness and the enigmatic nature of the human condition.Through meditative mark making, a visual language that developed from his re-imagining of Nsibidi ideographic and pictographic script, Ekpuk’s abstract portraiture explores the notion of the essence of self.
10. E is for Exhibition
STEVENSON, Johannesburg
Oct 1 – Nov 13, 2015
E is for Exhibition takes us deep into Kannemeyer’s thought processes and studio practice, bringing together his range of working methods that include comics, sketches, text-based works and large-scale paintings. Partly autobiographical and resolutely observational, Kannemeyer continues to draw attention to our perceptions of difference, the power of the image and the insidious potential of language.
11. Kara Walker: Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First
Victoria Miro Gallery, London
Oct 1 – Nov 7, 2015
Often provocative and humorous, Kara Walker’s work explores the tensions and power plays of racial and gender relations. This exhibition extends her exploration of the brutalising histories of colonialism and slavery, and the political and psychological consequences that accompanies identity formation in contexts of oppression and violence.
12. De Punta a Punta
Cecile Fakhoury, Abidjan
Oct 2, 2015 – Dec 12, 2015
De Punta a Punta invites us to look at what is continuously evolving from point to point, the creativity, the relationship between the artist and his material within the subjects that he considers. The visual artist and painter, Vincent Michéa, depicts stories that he has appropriated on paper and canvas.
13. My World
David Krut Projects, Johannesburg
Oct 3, 2015 – Oct 31, 2015
My World is Shabangu’s fourth exhibition with David Krut Projects and is comprised of drawings linocuts and unique works on paper that focuses on Shabangu’s journey of critical self-exploration. Themes tackled in the work include negotiation of control, the creative process and the ability to create and sustain – both from a practical and creative perspective.
14. Magic
Omenka Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria
Oct 3 – Oct 24, 2015
Magic is a joint exhibition of new drawings on paper and collaborative drawing performance by artists ruby amanze and Wura-Natasha Ogunji. What unifies them in this exhibition is their critical outlook towards the condition of being in transit. With a degree of radical nihilism and self-irony, they scrutinize the politics of representation, travel, migration, homelessness, and dislocation.
15. Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence
Brooklyn Museum, New York
May 1, 2015 – Nov 1, 2015
Zanele Muholi: Isibonelo/Evidence is the most comprehensive museum presentation to date of Muholi’s works and features several of the artist’s ongoing projects about lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) communities, both in her home country and abroad.The exhibition presents eighty-seven works created between 2007 and 2014, including Muholi’s Faces and Phases portrait series, which uses firsthand accounts to speak to the experience of living in a country that constitutionally protects the rights of LGBTI people but often fails to defend them from targeted violence.
16. 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair
Somerset House, London
Oct 15 – 18, 2015
Following a successful New York debut earlier this year, 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair will return to London this October to present its most substantial showcase yet. Taking place once again at Somerset House, the fair will feature 38 exhibitors representing more than 150 contemporary artists from Africa and the African diaspora.
17. Matthew Hindley: The Five Magic Pebbles
David Krut Projects Montebello gallery, Cape Town | Oct 17, 2015 – Nov 28, 2015
In The Five Magic Pebbles, Mattera tells the story of an ancient African village called Kambira, whose people live in fear of the Evil One, an ugly and powerful creature who curses the village, killing its people and decimating its crops. Tarruwah, ‘The Chosen One’, embarks on a courageous but extremely treacherous journey deep into the forest, where she must fight off evil and lead her village to freedom.
Love art? Follow us on Instagram for daily visual updates!
The post 17 International Art Exhibitions To See This October appeared first on AADAT Art.