Listening to Echoes of the South Atlantic

The artist Cássio Bomfim devises a fictional cosmology by exploring the nuances and similarities between the codes, rituals, and archetypes of the Brazilian religion Umbanda. In the colonial era, the kingdoms of Portugal and Spain forbid all religious practices deviating from the Catholic Church. It was in this context that religious syncretism developed, which involved translating spiritual rituals, gods, and ritualistic acts of indigenous and African origin into Catholic codes, so as to ensure their continued existence. This phenomenon shaped the convoluted relations between Catholic saints and the Orishas, the Yoruban gods, and other African cosmological beliefs. Each Orisha became associated with a saint, or even several saints. The Exu, on the other hand, are messengers in the Candomblé religious tradition, who are called on to mediate between the material and immaterial worlds, establishing communication between the two sides. In Umbanda, the Exu plays a pivotal role on streets, at cemeteries, and in road crossings. Throughout his work Cássio Bomfim also integrates references to the Motoboy figure, the contemporary protagonist of transport and communication in Brazil, basically an Exu in a new form. Bomfims work includes a series of photos, videos, live narratives, and a fashion collection, typically presented on the streets, and accompanied by religious and contemporary funk carioca music.

Jeannette Ehlers is a Caribbean diaspora visual artist born and based in Denmark. Ehlers studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark in 2006. Through digitally manipulated photographs and videos, she engages with coloniality, decoloniality, blackness and black identity, among them Denmark’s role as a slave nation - part of Danish cultural heritage, which often gets overlooked in the general historiography. For years, she has created cinematic universes that delve into ethnicity and identity inspired by her own Danish/West Indian background and challenges the film medium's ability to communicate in a visually fascinating and engaging language. She has exhibited her work internationally, for instance in Denmark, Germany, Korea, The Netherlands, The United Kingdom and The United States.

Ehlers grapples with the history of Denmark’s involvement in colonialism and slavery, and their afterlife in the present. Until recently, this violent chapter of national history has received only scant attention in Danish public discourses. She recently gained international recognition for her public sculpture I Am Queen Mary, commemorating the resistance against Danish colonial rule, co-created by Ehlers and La Vaughn Belle. The sculpture is situated at Larsens plass in Copenhagen, and was recently designated as a permanent monument.

Anita Ekman is a visual and performance artist, illustrator and researcher of Amerindian and Afro-Brazilian arts. As a specialist in Indigenous art, she worked on the formation of the collection Great Masters of Popular Art in Ibero-America(Banamex Cultural Fund). She organised, illustrated and edited a collection of books about the Indigenous history of the Americas for the publisher Hedra (Indigenous World Collection) and AJS (Citizen of Educational Books Collection). 

As an artist and curator she presented the Women of Samba – 100 Years of Samba Exhibition in Magnet Gallery (Australia). Currently she is developing the project DescolonizARTE and carries out workshops and performances using Pre-Columbian ceramic body stamps, presenting these workshops in Australia, Argentina (Ethnographic Museum of Buenos Aires) and Brazil (UNESP). She is the director of the video artwork ‘Tupi Valongo Cemetery of the New Blacks and Old Indians’ about the African diaspora in Rio de Janeiro and Ochre – In body of Art, about Rock Art in Serra da Capivara (Piaui, Brasil).

Satch Hoyt, born in London of British and African-Jamaican ancestry, currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. He makes sculptures and installations accompanied with sound, as well as paintings and drawings. His work reflects on the shared experiences of the African Diaspora. Hoyt’s sculptures addresses’ the facts of black experience, while his drawings tap into a spirit of fantasy, refuge, and transcendence - they are vehicles for an imaginative journey beyond the obduracy and oppressiveness of history. 

With regards to his musical accomplishments Satch Hoyt has composed a number of songs with Grace Jones; noteworthy, is 7 Day Weekend which is on the triple platinum soundtrack album of the Eddie Murphy movie Boomerang. Hoyt also worked with master percussionist composer Stomu Yamashta, played flute on Louise Bourgeois’ OTTE, and is flautist - percussionist in Burt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber since 2001.

Born in 1955 in Johannesburg, William Kentridge attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg from 1973 to 1976 and the Johannesburg Art Foundation from 1976 to 1978. Kentridge originally trained in painting and drawing, but he also studied mime and theater at the L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris from 1981 to 1982. When he returned to South Africa in 1985, he worked as a props assistant on a television series. In 1985 he made his first animated film, Vetkoek/Fete Galante. He developed a method of filmmaking that he dubbed “poor-man’s animation,” in which he photographed charcoal drawings and collages as he gradually adjusted them, as in the early films Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City After Paris (1989) and Monument (1990).

Kentridge has exhibited widely since 1981. He has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1999), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (2001), New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York (2001), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2002), Castello di Rivoli in Italy (2004), Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2004), Deutche Guggenheim in Berlin (2005), Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2007), and Philadelphia Museum of Art (2008), among other venues. A major survey of Kentridge’s work was organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2008 and traveled to the Norton Museum of Art (2008) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010). He has also participated in many group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1993 and 2005), Istanbul Biennial (1995), Sydney Biennial (1996), Documenta, Kassel, Germany (1997 and 2002), São Paulo Biennial (1998), Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (1999), Shanghai Biennial (2000), and Auckland Triennial (2004). In addition, he has appeared in many international film festivals, among them the New Zealand Film Festival and the Internationales Trickfilm Festival Stuttgart (both 2000). He has received many awards for his work, including the Blue Ribbon Award at the American Film Festival in New York (1985), the Carnegie Prize at the Carnegie International (2000), the Sharjah Biennial Prize (2003), and the Kaiserring prize from the Mönchehaus-Museum für Moderne Kunst in Goslar, Germany (2003). Kentridge was also short-listed for the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He lives and works in Johannesburg.

Neo Muyanga is a composer, musician and librettist. Born in Soweto, he studied madrigal singing in Trieste, Italy. In 1996 he co-founded (with Masauko Chipembere) the acoustic pop duo, Blk Sonshine, and in 2008, co-founded (with Ntone Edjabe) the Pan African Space Station, a platform that hosts cutting-edge Pan African music and sound art on the internet. His recorded albums include: Blk Sonshine (1999), the Listening Room (2003), Fire, Famine Plague and Earthquake (2007), Good Life (2009), Dipalo (2011), Toro tse Sekete (2015) and Second-hand reading (2016). His other published works include the music plays, Memory of how it feels (2010), the Flower of Shembe (2012) and the opera, Heart of Redness (2015). An alumnus of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD (2016), he was also Composer-in-residence of the Johannesburg International Mozart Festival (2017) and the National Arts Festival of South Africa (2017). He tours widely both as a solo performer, bandleader, choir conductor. Neo Muyanga is a research affiliate at the University of Cape Town’s Drama School and the Centre for African Studies.

Camille Norment was born in Silver Spring, USA. She lives and works in Oslo. Norment’s recent performances have taken place at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, 2017; Montréal Biennial, 2016; The Armory Show, NY, 2016; Lisboa Soa Festival, 2016 and Ultima Contemporary Music Festival, Oslo, 2015. Previous solo exhibitions have taken place at Lydgalleriet, Bergen, 2016; September Gallery, Berlin, 2009 and the Round Gallery, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, 2007. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions in Norway and internationally, amongst others at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India, 2016; Montréal Biennial, 2016; Marso Gallery, Mexico City, 2016; the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, 2014 and 2012; the Museum of Modern Art, NY, 2013; Luleå Konsthal, 2013; Stenersenmuseet, Oslo, 2010 and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, 2009. In 2017 Norment presented a solo exhibition at Oslo Kunstforening, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and participated in the group show «Soundtracks» at SFMOMA as well as the Lyon Biennial in France. In 2015 Camille Norment represented Norway at the Nordic pavilion at the 56th edition of La Biennale di Venezia, and in 2016 she participated in the Murzi Kochi Biennial.

Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist born in Eritrea and based in New York City. Working with installation, photography, research and extensive travels, his practice centers on a critical rereading of the relationship between African histories and European modernism. In recent projects, he has employed abstraction as an act of translation to push against naturalized ways of understanding form, color and subjectivity. By drawing upon forms rooted in diverse histories, Petros' artistic language enables a metaphorically rich articulation of the fluidity of contemporary transnational experiences and attendant issues of displacement, place-making and cultural negotiation.

Recent exhibitions include: The 13th Havana Biennial: Intermittent Rivers, Matanzas, Cuba (2019), Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (2018), Bamako Biennale (2017), New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans (2017), Walther Collection Project Space, New York (2016); Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2016); Kansas City Art Institute (2016); 56th Venice Biennale international exhibition (2015), Tiwani Contemporary, London (2016) the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2014), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2014), the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC (2013), and the Lianzhou International Photo Festival, China (2011). He was awarded an Independent Study Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012. His work was also presented in Recent Histories: Contemporary African Photography and Video Art at The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany.

Nyugen E. Smith is a first generation Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in Jersey City, NJ. Responding to the legacy of European colonial rule in the African diaspora, his work considers imperialist practices of oppression, violence, and intergenerational trauma. He is interested in ritual and sacred practice rooted in African spiritual systems and how they are employed as coping mechanisms and tools for collective empowerment. He holds a BA from Seton Hall University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has conducted public programs, visiting artist lectures, and panel discussions at institutions including the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA. Awards: 2016 Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund, 2018 Franklin Furnace Fund, 2018 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Most recent exhibitions include The Sea is History; Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, and The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, currently on view at the Perez Art Museum, Miami.