Devan Shimoyama, Firelei Baéz And Mickalene Thomas, When We See Us: A Century Of Black Figuration In Painting : Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa

 

With a focus on painting, the exhibition celebrates how artists from Africa and its diaspora have imagined, positioned, memorialised and asserted African and African-descent experiences. It contributes to critical discourse on African and Black liberation, intellectual and philosophical movements. The title of the exhibition is inspired by Ava DuVernay’s When They See Us, the 2019 miniseries. Flipping ‘they’ to ‘we’ allows for a dialectical shift that centres the conversation in a differential perspective of self-writing as theorised by Cameroonian political scientist Professor Achille Mbembe. 

 

The exhibition, designed by Wolff Architects, features more than 200 works of art from 74 institutional and private lenders located in 26 countries. When We See Us celebrates the resilience, essence, and political charge of Black joy. The exhibition is organised around six themes: The Everyday, Joy and Revelry, Repose, Sensuality, Spirituality, and Triumph and Emancipation. Figurative painting by Black artists has risen to a new prominence over the last decade and this exhibition connects these practices, revealing deeper historic contexts and networks of a complex and underrepresented genealogy, stemming from African and Black modernities. The exhibition highlights relationships between artists and artworks across geographic, generational and conceptual contexts, and foregrounds what lead curator Koyo Kouoh refers to as ‘parallel aesthetics'.