At first glance, it looks like Africa’s creative industries and the professionals that populate it are joining fintech, agriculture and other growing sectors on the continent in finally getting the respect they deserve. It’s true, sure, but it’s not the whole story. For the most part, the answers to where this shift came from and where it can take us are missing from the headlines.
You’ve seen them — statements about the continent’s creative renaissance, Africa rising, and our ‘time in the sun’ arriving. What you may not have seen is the reality of how this shift was propelled by the work and inner lives of artists, musicians, designers and more. That’s the inside look that the We Are Culture experience provides. It’s the first ever multidisciplinary experience at the Standard Bank Gallery, featuring a select but comprehensive slate of exciting work from a new wave of voices in fashion, music, sculpture, performance art and more.
Plurality is the silent common thread tying this dynamic selection of 13 African artists together, each one with a multidimensional offering: More than one medium at work, more than one story to tell, more than one experience lived. Healing and brokenness coexisting, questioning identity while embodying and celebrating it. It’s the familiar tension of the human experience, constantly present in our daily lives, brought to life in their art.
That’s where the headlines are wrong — they imply that this is a phase, when it has all the markers of something much more permanent. Just look at Muofhe Manavhela’s social commentary on contemporary Black women living, working, and thriving in societies that continue to underestimate them. Or the delicate work of Wezile Harmans, mirroring the often delicate and precarious nature of memory, of feelings of displacement, and of perceived reality, layering a softness over life’s harder truths.
There is play in Natalie Paneng’s alternate-self-portraits, all at once costumed and deeply vulnerable. Fikile Sokhulu is dressing African women in traditional softness for an imagined future. Rebecca Moolman’s embroidery makes the intimate public, and the material nature of land comes face to face with the intangible nature of the stories it holds in the work of Setlamorago Mashilo.
These long-standing juxtapositions do not just define our time or our space. They reflect life as we’ve always known it, anywhere and everywhere. The difference? African artists now get to display them in our stories, as willing subjects, worthy participants and expert facilitators. That’s what’s new: agency. It brings an ease and joy to the experience of witnessing this work, whether the subject matter is loaded or light-hearted.
It would seem the world has accepted what African artists have long since earned and fought for: Their right to be, outside the boundaries set by others. To be more than what the world expects, to be contemporary and traditional at once, to be while still becoming, all without having to defend or explain or apologise. No more proving, just existing. The same freedom long afforded to too small a privileged set finally feels claimed for all, and this work comes from that new address.
Sit with the creative expressions in the We Are Culture experience for a moment, and that’s what you’ll walk out understanding. There is no going back from this, not after a decade of transformation in contemporary culture, not after previously unprecedented artistic agency has been unlocked. There’s also no putting a lid on the now well-cultivated global hunger for Africa’s proprietary creative capital. We’re here now, and these voices, these works, are catalysing a new creative normal.
Experience credits & details
Curator: Bee Diamondhead
Featured Artists: Kgotlelelo Sekiti (Performance Art) / Lelo Meslani (Music) / Leon John (Music) / Muyeni (Music) / Natalie Paneng (Multidisciplinary Artist) / Philisa Zibi (Jewellery Design) / Setlamorago Mashilo (Sculpture) / Khumo Morojele (Fashion Designer) / Fikile Sokhulu (Fashion Designer) / Lorraine Kalassa (Visual Artist) / Muofhe Manavhela (Multidisciplinary Artist) / Rebecca Moolman (Artist) / Wezile Harmans (Artist)
Dates: 19 September – 08 October 2022; 08:00 -16:30 on weekdays, and 08:00 – 16:00 on weekends. Entrance to the gallery is free.
Location: Standard Bank Gallery, Cnr Simmonds & Frederick, JHB Central.
