What’chu Looking at? Who you Speaking with? A Gazing all Round.

The continent known as Africa is a complex, intricate and unfathomable entity. There has always been this futile quest, particularly in the west, to totalize Africa. We are adequately informed, especially through the work of the multitude of creatives that operate from Africa and her Diaspora, that it is impossible to do so. So, in what ways are contemporary African artists expressing their many lived realities across a continent made up of fifty-four Protected content in this current experience?

With what materials, media, techniques and technologies are their ideas being wrought into objects, situations and complex aesthetic propositions? What, in terms of globality, constitutes our collective becomingness and imagination in the recent experience of the world? This exhibition proposes an investigation of some of the possible responses to the above-stated questions in a variety of novel and audacious forms. The first part of the title: “What’chu Looking at? Who you Speaking with?” bears a similar sense of audacity and daring. Even though it sounds accusatory, it is not. What is intended is a provocation towards reflexivity. The second part, A Gazing all round suggests that the erstwhile othering gaze is now shared all around, such that there is neither any subject nor object. What we have now is a common sphere of looking back and forth. What this two-way, or indeed, poly-reciprocal gaze yields cannot be pinpointed. It is something that is immanent. We all live to learn …