A Côte d'Ivoire-based artist, known as Kadarick, draws on the fantastical powers of The Hulk, Spiderman and Wonder Woman to articulate today's fears.
In a new pop-art series of 23 paintings titled Joker, the self-taught painter explores pop culture, politics, mass media and capitalism. The series was recently on display at the LouiSimone Guirandou Gallery in Abidjan.
It started as an experiment: what happens when you equip a vibrant youth community with the resources to express themselves through hip hop and electronic music? Last summer I traveled to Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo to find out and the results were more beautiful than I could have imagined.
Photographer Thapelo Motsumi is one of many young South Africans who has worked with the Umuzi Photo Club to develop his artistic skills and engage his community. Now this “drop out” has had two exhibitions in London and has been entrusted with Mandela’s football jersey. By GREG NICOLSON.
Thousands of people protested in Ghana’s capital Accra on Wednesday against the expansion of its defence cooperation with the United States, in a rare public display of opposition to the growing foreign military presence in West Africa.
Demonstrators blowing vuvuzelas and beating drums filled Accra’s business district, holding placards criticising a new deal with Washington that they say threatens Ghana’s sovereignty.
“I want to show the people how bad the troubles were," says artist Muhiyidin Sharif Ibrahim of Mogadishu, Somalia. "That’s the message we’re going to send to people.”
(Robyn Dixon, Los Angeles Times)
On April 15 in northern Nigeria, 200 school girls aged 15-18 were kidnapped by an extremist Muslim group called Boko Haram, whose name in the Hausa language means “Western education is a sin.” In hopes of viral pressure on Nigerian authorities to try to recover the girls, campaigns have started on the White House website, on Change.org and on Facebook to demand: “Bring Back Our Girls.” The campaigns quickly gained global attention, with Michelle Obama,
The “Perceiving Freedom” glasses sculpture on Cape Town’s Sea Point promenade looking towards Robben Island, commemorates late President Nelson Mandela and the values of freedom and equality.
JAMES GUBB was finishing off the knuckles when the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) shut him down. Trading single shares between two accounts, Mr Gubb had managed to “draw” the image of a fist with an upright middle finger onto the share-price chart for Oakbay Resources and Energy Limited, a company controlled by the Gupta brothers, cronies of President Jacob Zuma, that is at the centre of allegations of “state capture” in South Africa.
Driving along an ordinary dirt road, it's hard to miss the Goma Cultural Centre with its bright blue gate, emblazoned with the Congolese flag. "As you can see, we are proud to be Congolese around here," said Belamy Paluku, a volunteer manager at the youth centre.
The term “Afrofuturism” was coined in the 1990s by the cultural critic Mark Dery, who recognized a preoccupation with the future in the work of a number of black artists. Ever since, it has remained a term that is retrospectively applied to seemingly disparate artists, from Missy Elliot to Toni Morrison. What unites the movement is a shared fascination with the black experience, particularly in America.
The veteran Malian master puppeteer Yaya Coulibali, born in 1959 in the village of Koula, around 100 kilometres north-east of Bamako, has more than half a century of experience in puppetry and has toured the world to perform his art.
A beauty contest for landmine victims challenges normal concepts of beauty. The search for beauty takes many forms. The traditional beauty pageant might be thought to be one of the less acceptable, concentrating as it does on conventional ideas of female perfection. Miss Landmine is a challenge to normal concepts of beauty. It is a beauty pageant held in Angola, a country ravaged by war and its aftermath, for women who have lost limbs from landmines.
Joseline de Lima was wandering the dusty alleys of her working-class neighborhood in the capital of Togo one day last year, when a disturbing thought crossed her mind: Who would take care of her two boys if her depression worsened and she were no longer around to look after them?
The Yes Men join Reclaim the City in their fight against unjust housing policy. On September 30, 2019, a horde of zombies attended a "#natsneverdie rally" at the Cape Town Civic Centre in order to celebrate Mayor Dan Plato and the Mayoral Committee and to support their policies, which are increasingly similar to those of the National Party under Apartheid.
In Cape Town, South Africa the design firms Design Indaba Trust and Thinking have teamed up with artist Faith47 to help raise funds to bring more light to their urban city. Their goal is to raise funds to light up 700 meters of Manwabisi Park, which will ultimately reduce the crime rate in the area through more light. In order to get the community involved in the project, they have combined street art with community engagement.
The work of South African artist Mary Sibande tells the tale of her alter-ego Sophie, a domestic worker who finds refuge in dreams where she emancipates herself from the ghoulish realism of an ordinary existence, cleaning other people's homes.
Exploring the construction of identity within post-apartheid South Africa, Sibande's work probes the stereotypical contextualisation of the black female body.
In 1978, while studying print-making in Hamburg, Gavin Jantjes was deemed a persona non grata by South Africa. His crime? Creating a series of prints that documented the violence and discrimination in the apartheid state, which he gathered together under the tongue-in-cheek name of a "colouring book".
Dressed head to toe in plastic, Modou Fall is a familiar sight in Dakar. But however playful his costume, his goal couldn’t be more serious: ridding the capital of the scourge of plastic bags.
In 2004, the United Nations called the LRA crisis in northern Uganda the “most forgotten, neglected humanitarian emergency in the world.” Invisible Children was founded to change that and to fight against the false notion that our responsibility to each other stops at our own nations’ borders.
Not far from the Burkina Faso capital of Ouagadougou, approximately 30 kilometers, lies Operndorf Afrika, a village that’s governed by art and a global exchange of culture.
Zanele Muholi, the self-proclaimed visual activist and photographer, investigates the fraught relationship between post-apartheid South Africa and its queer community, who, despite being constitutionally protected since 1996, remain a constant target of abuse and discrimination.
WACENA, was established in the year 2008 by a number of concerned mothers together with women students from Makerere University Kampala with a purpose of addressing and alleviating the acute and long-term consequences of violence against the women and children of Uganda.
Richard Turere, 13, has devised an innovative system to protect his family's livestock from the wild beasts. He created "Lion Lights," which keeps the predators away from the family's enclosure. The Kenyan boy will speak about his invention at the TED 2013 conference.
Africa has had a devastating history of blood diamond wars. Blood diamond refers to a diamond mined in a war zone and then sold to finance an invading army's war efforts, usually in Africa where more than two-thirds of the worlds diamonds are extracted.
This site specific social / political word play was painted on the exterior wall of Johannesburg's largest diamond trader Jewel City.