Botânica, 2014
Vasco Araújo works in a variety of media, including video, installation and photography, to explore ideas of community and marginality. Gestures of seduction, cultural stereotypes, political characteristics as well as sexual identities have all been the focus of his work. It has been described as Baroque in its literary, historical and art historical references and he draws the viewer into looking at society, providing both honest as well as artificial reflections.
Self-Portrait series, 2007-2013
Makhubu has established herself as one of the new generation of lens based artists to explore issues of identity, culture, land, rights, economy and religion. Her acclaimed series, Self-Portrait Project alludes to the continued alienation and estrangement in an era where the focus is inclined toward self and individual identity as opposed to collective and communal life. One of the canonical meanings that Achille Mbembe (2002: 241) argues can be attributed to slavery and colonialism (as well as Apartheid) is dispossession, a process in which juridical and economic procedures have led to material expropriation. Makhubu’s latest series The Flood has received deserved critical acclaim. It marks a departure from her previous work, shifting from the personal to the public.
The Last Supper, 2012
The Last Supper, 2012 – TAPESTRY
The art of Abdu’Allah and his contemporaries in the early 1980s can be evaluated in a manner that fills an important void within available scholarship on the subject of contemporary art in relation to Afro-British culture. What began as an artistic gesture in the 1980s more fully materialised in the early twenty-first century as a complete conceptual approach that questioned issues of race and identity in relation to issues of cultural diversity and multiculturalism. Abdu’Allah’s work broke away from the British artistic establishment and the rules of institutional representation, particularly insofar as he began selecting his subjects from émigré utopia, Afro-British social consciousness, Muslim identity, and working-class life. He also integrated other views of London, portraying it as a city of dislocated communities that were powerless in the existing world of art.
Found, not taken, 2013
Edson Chagas was born in Luanda in 1977. He completed his studies in photojournalism at the London College of Communication (LCC) in 2007 and subsequently attended the documentary photography course at the University of Wales, Newport, until 2008. Chagas’s work has since developed a more introspective focus beyond the standards of photojournalism. Chagas documents the everyday with a conceptual eye, elaborating on issues such as consumerism, capitalism, tradition and so on.
Banhista, 2006
No tanque de epô, imerso a deriva de memórias:banha-se / Líquido livre e deslizante sem dominante.Escapa, escorrega corpo, invade… / Dentro do tanque do sensível / Lava-me alma / O mar de epô abre em seu movimento / Atlântica fluidez / Mergulho em estado de graça
Artista visual e curador, doutorando em Comunicação e Semiótica pela Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, SP. Professor do curso de Artes Visuais do Centro de Artes Humanidades e Letras da Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB). Suas obras transitam pela instalação, performance, fotografia e audiovisual, lidam com freqüência com elementos da cultura afro-brasileira e já foram vistas em individuais na Bahia, mostras, festivais e Bienais internacionais. Nos trabalhos de Heráclito encontramos dendê, a vida no Brasil-Colônia, charque, açúcar, peixe, esperma e sangue, corpo, dor, arrebatamentos, apartheids e sonhos de liberdade.
Contemporary Photography Index 