Born in 1985 in Dahmani, Tunisia, Nidhal Chamekh graduated from the School of Fine Arts in Tunis and the University of Sorbonne in Paris. He continues to work and live between the two cities. Nidhal’s creations reflect on the times we inhabit. His artwork is situated at the intersections of the biographic and the political, the lived and the historical, the event and the archive. From drawing to installations, and from photography to videos, Nidhal Chamekh’s oeuvres dissect the constitution of our contemporary identity.

His artwork has been exhibited at the Venice Biennial, the Aïchi Triennale, the Yinchuan Biennial, the Dakar Biennial and has been shown in Tunis at Politics Collective exhibitions, in Kunsthaus Hamburg, in France at the Museum of contemporary art MAC Lyon, during the 12th edition of Bamako Encounters, in Italy at FM Contemporary Art Center, in London at Drawing Room, in CCA Lagos in Nigeria and Kadist in Paris, in Sao Paulo for Videobrasil Art Biennial and the Skissernas Museum in Sweden.

Angelica Pesarini is Professor of Sociology at New York University in Florence where she teaches “Black Italia”, a course dedicated to the analysis of the intersections of race, gender and citizenship in Italy. She holds a Ph.d. in Sociology and Gender Studies in England and worked as a professor of Gender, Race and Sexuality at Lancaster University before returning to Italy in 2017. Pesarini’s research focuses on the performativity of race in colonial and post-colonial Italy and the racialisation of contemporary Italian political discourse. Pesarini has previously investigated the relationships between gender identity and economic activities in some Roma communities living in Rome, analyzing risk strategies, survival and opportunity in the context of male child prostitution in Rome. She has published several academic essays and participated in various collective publications.

Black History Month Florence was founded in 2016 is a cross institutional network for Black cultural production that celebrates Afro-descendent Cultures in the context of Italy. The initiative is engaged in programming, advising and co-promoting over 50 events annually within the month of February, through a network formed and supported by the Comune, foundations, institutions, cultural associations, museums, schools and venues dedicated to art and to music. BHMF as a curatorial team is headed by Justin Randolph Thompson and Janine Gaelle Dieudji.

Janine Gaëlle Dieudji is a bi-national French and Cameroonian graduate of Culture and International Relations from Lyon 3 University in France. She also holds a Master Degree in Political Science from Paris 2 Panthéon Assas University.

She’s been living in Florence, Italy, for the past six years, a city she has since fallen in love with. This is how Florence became home to her and the place where she started to build her career as an art professional. She considers herself as a ‘multi­local’ by believing that we belong to all the places we have lived in. Home is where the mind can create and feel rested at the same time. This is what the life journey is made for, exploring to become the person we decide to be.

Justin Randolph Thompson is a new media artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Living between Italy and the US since 1999, Thompson is Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence, a multi-faceted exploration of African and African Diasporic cultures in the context of Italy founded in 2016.
Thompson is a recipient of a Louise Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin, two Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants, A Jerome Fellowship from Franconia Sculpture Park and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and hierarchical organization by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity.

Luanda-Angola, 1979, Kiluanji Kia Henda is an autodidact which a profound springboard into this realm comes from growing up in a household of photography enthusiasts. His conceptual edge was sharpened by immersing himself into music, avant-garde theater and collaborating with a collective of emerging artists in Luanda ́s art scene. Kia Henda participated in several residency programs in cities such as Venice, Cape Town, Paris, Amman and Sharjah, New York and Arles.

Kia Henda´s selected solo exhibitions includes Something Happen on the Way to Heaven, at Museo di Arte di Nuoro (2020), The Isle of Venus at Museum of Leuven in Leuven (2020),  A City Called Mirage at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York (2017), In the Days of a Dark Safari at Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon and Goodman Gallery in Cape Town (2017) and Self-Portrait As A White Man at Galleria Fonti in Naples (2010).

Kia Henda has participated in group exhibitions at numerous institutions, amongst which Barbican Art Center in Lonodon (2020), Migros Museum in Zurich (2020), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2020), Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town (2019), Tate Modern in London (2019), MAAT in Lisbon (2018), the National Museum of African Art – Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. (2015) and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2015).

His work was shown at the Gwangju Biennale (2018), Bergen Assembly (2013), São Paulo Biennale (2010), Venice Biennale (2007) and the Luanda Triennale (2007). In 2017, Kia Henda received the Frieze Artist Award. He presented his work The Fortress in the Somerset House courtyard (London) in 2019. The artist won Angola’s National Culture and Arts Award in 2012. His work can be found in public collections, including Tate Modern (London), the Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Centre George Pompidou (Paris), Pérez Art Museum (Miami) and Coleção de Arte Moderna Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon).

Victor Fotso Nyie was born in 1990 in Douala, Cameroon and lives and works in Faenza. In 2018 he attended the Biennium of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He attended the Istituito Tecnico Superiore Tonito Emiliani / Diploma of Superior Technician for the design and prototyping of ceramic products, Faenza, IT in 2015. His artistic research leads him to explore human variety and beauty, without forgetting a spiritual dimension. He creates works that recall his homeland, Africa, which merge with others that metaphorically describe the globalized world in which we live. He has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions including The Armory show, New York city 2020, Stand P420 gallery,(2020), III Biennale d’Arte don Franco Patruno, curated by Gianni Ceroli, Museo MAGI ‘900, Pieve di Cento (BO) (2020).To be going to, curated by Francesca Bertazzoni & Davide Ferri, P420, (2019) In 2020 he participated in the project Research Residency for BHMF, OCAD University, (Florence). Winner of various awards including the Roberto Daolio Prize, 2018 the III Art Biennale Don Franco Patruno, Museo MAGI ‘900, Pieve di Cento (BO), (2019). His next exhibitions include Museo MAGI ‘900, Pieve di Cento (BO), IT (only) (2020) and the Biennale del Mediterraneo, Republic of San Marino (2020).

Francis Offman (b. 1987, Butare) lives and works in Bologna.
In 2021, Offman took part in a workshop project for Valentino’s Autumn/Winter Haute Couture Show 2021-22.
2022 group shows include: Expressions. The Epilogue, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Italy; YGI-Group show, United States; The 3 ecologies, MACTE, Italy; The Tending of the Otherwise, Italy as well as the second iteration of Throw the Stone and Hide your Hand at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, France. In 2021, Offman had solo exhibitions at P420 Gallery, Italy; Baleno International, Italy; Herald St | Museum St, United Kingdom and MA*GA Museum, Italy. He also had a two-person show with Christian Offman at The Garage Lab, Italy. Previous group exhibitions include The Geological Viens, Palazzo D’Accursio, Italy; Painting in Person, Castello di Rivoli Museum, Italy; Italy at Frieze, Italian Embassy, United Kingdom; MEDITERRANEA 19 Young Artists Biennale: School of Waters, Republic of San Marino; Painting Stone, Villa Lontana, Italy; Throw the Stone and Hide your Hand, Murate Art District, Italy (2021); Premio Combat Prize 2020, Giovanni Fattori Civic Museum, Italy; Premio Zucchelli 2019, Zucchelli Foundation, Italy (2020); Open Tour 2019, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy; Rundgang 2019, Art Academy, Germany, Art White Night, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy (2019); Decoration between history, nature and poetry, Zucchelli Foundation, Italy; Open Tour, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy; Rambling rides, distractions from a destination, P420, Italy; Art white Night, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy; Scrap-Collective, Monumental Complex of Baraccano, Italy; Monsters-phenomena, Monumental Complex of Baraccano, Italy (2018).
Awards received include: Agitu Ideo Gudeta Fellowship – Performance Act Award (2021); Emilia-Romagna Region Award in support and dissemination of Contemporary Art; 9th edition of the Francesco Fabbri Award for Contemporary Arts (finalist); Premio Combat Prize (honourable mention) (2020); Eighth edition of the Francesco Fabbri Award for Contemporary Arts; Zucchelli Prize Scholarship; Tree Time workshop with Massimo Bartolini; Contemporary Minds Prize (finalist) (2019); ArtUp Collectibles Award; Switch The Rules, curated by the Elica and the Ermanno Casoli Foundation (finalist) (2018).

Emmanuel Yoro is an Italian visual artist of Ivorian origin working between Vicenza and Milan. Adopting an artistic practice that embraces collage, design, fashion, graphics and photography, he breaks down into images the questions of the multiple facets of his cultural identity and different nuances of queerness.

An Afro-diasporic sensibility and a raw and monochromatic aesthetic characterize his research and recent artistic production, always in the attempt of a wider redefinition of the self that dwells in the symposium between past and present, between memory and imagination.

Raziel Perin was born in 1992 in the Dominican Republic. He received a BFA in Visual Arts at Naba Milano. Drawing upon his personal experience, mental associations and cultural references, Raziel Perin creates mysterious, unexpected and direct works of art that recall precise moments of clarity and dense memories that evoke the complexity of the process of reconciliation of the diasporic identity freed from Western stereotypes. Perin was born in the hinterland of the Dominican Republic, where he lived until the age of four. In 1996 he moved to Northern Italy with his mother. His artistic production takes shape between two very distant realities, rooted in the need to be accepted as “the Other” and at the same time feeling the duty to suppress the sensitive part of his personal history, which constantly re-emerges. The introspection and reconnection with the echoes of those ancestral bonds that seemed to have been severed in this process of ‘whitening’ are the result and are channeled into drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations that unite and synthesize a series of recurring elements. His body of work conveys a compelling visual metaphor of the layers of personal memory and cultural history that inform and intensify his experience of the present.

Binta Diaw born in1995 is a Senegalese-Italian visual artist based in Milan, Italy. 

Her research is aimed at the creation of installations of various dimensions and works commenting social phenomena like migration and immigration, anthropology as well as her body in relationship with nature and notions of identity. Defying the Western gaze through a subverted reality, her practice questions perceptions of Italianness and Africanness in relation to her own cultural heritage and upbringing.

Embracing visual art with a strongly intersectional, afro-diasporic and feminist methodology based on a physical, personal experience, she is ultimately able to explore the multiple layers of her blackness, her self as a social body and her position as a black woman in a Western context. She studied Fine Arts at the Academy of fine arts of Brera in Milan and obtained a MA at ESAD Grenoble-Valence, in France. In 2018 she moved to Germany for an internship at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin. In 2020 she debuted with her first solo show at Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio in Milan.

Simao Amista is an anthropologist and doctor of Italian-Afro-Brazilian descent. A scholar of African and Afro-descendent religions and spiritual philosophies, he has been working for years in the field of hospitality and education.

Patrick Joël Tatcheda Yonkeu was born in Cameroon in 1985, lives and works in Bologna. He moved to Italy in 2009 where he obtained a scholarship for the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and obtained a Master’s degree in Visual Arts in 2016 with a research project on the theme of Zen in the arts. His interest in metaphysics remains the basis of his practice, which concerns the relationship between human beings and nature and our place in the universe, and he searches for forms of spirituality more suitable for our times. His research is based on the idea of existence as a harmonious flow whose balance must be preserved and often refers to themes of life and death, the visible and the invisible and energy in its infinite forms. He deepens this research through numerous collaborations between Africa and Italy and by creating seminars on intercultural painting with schools and associations in Emilia-Romagna.

Born and raised in Kingston Jamaica, Jordan Anderson is a fashion and culture journalist & creative director who is currently based in Milan. His work often magnifies & explores political themes in and outside the fashion industry including race, gender, sexuality, identity & cultural ethics. He contributes to a variety of publications including Document Journal, Teen Vogue, Vogue Italia, The Face and is currently online editor & editor-at-large for Twin Magazine and nss magazine respectively.

Jessica Sartiani is a Florentine coffee trainer and coffee expert. With an Italian father and a mother who is half Filipino and half African-American, it is from her origins that her journey as a woman of coffee starts. As someone trained, operative and attentive to the recent sub-cultures of coffee, she started her work in one of the pioneer coffee shops of this selected product, Ditta Artigianale, ten years ago, studying and discovering all the work that precedes the service in the coffee shop, giving importance to the producing countries. Her experience evolved with the opening of the first Speciality coffee in Italy, dealing with the training of baristas and customers. She has participated in various competitions such as the Brewers cup, to improve her contact with the public and enrich her background, and has been part of training projects in Honduras, Lithuania and several local coffee start-ups.

Alexis Peskine’s signature works are large-scale mixed media ‘portraits’ of the African diaspora, which are rendered by hammering nails of different gauge, with pin-point accuracy, into wood stained with coffee and mud. By applying gold leaf to the nails he creates breathtaking composite images. He depicts figures that portray strength and perseverance, with energy reminiscent of the spiritually charged Minkisi ‘power figures’ of the Congo Basin. He also produces striking photography and video works.

After a 2016 showing at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, London, Peskine had his first solo exhibition at October Gallery in 2017, with major exposure at international art fairs with the Gallery in the following years. Alongside this in 2016, Institut Francais, Dakar, Senegal held Raft of Medusa: Le retour de la vague, a solo exhibition of Peskine’s works. In 2018, his works were featured in the exhibition In Their Own Form at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and Africa House’s Second Generation exhibition in New York. He has been the recipient of many prestigious prizes including a Fulbright scholarship and Hennessy Black Masters Art Competition award. In the past decade, Peskine has worked with inner-city youth in France, Senegal and Brazil to create a number of monumental pieces, the largest of which was produced in France in 2012. Major museums and collectors including Peggy Cooper Cafritz; Laurence Graff OBE; the New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, USA; The Harvard Art Fogg Museum, Cambridge, USA; Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, USA; and Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago, USA, have collected Peskine’s works.

Adji Dieye is an ItaloSenegalese photographer born in Milan in 1991. She graduated in New Technologies for Art at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan. Over the past years she has been traveling between Milan and Dakar, focusing her research on the influence of advertisement in the African visual culture. Her work explores different facets of West African societies; the influence of advertising in the construction of a national identity and the syncretic spirituality that remains central to African communities.

Adji Dieye’s artistic practice pushes the boundaries of photography in an attempt to investigate the archetypes that constitute African visual cultures. In her research, the continent is never considered an end in itself; instead, it represents a bridge towards further investigations into broader social and geopolitical realities.

Born in 1975, Akka, Morocco, he lives and works in Tahanaout next to Marrakech where he teaches art. Using painting, sculpture, drawing or even video, M’barek Bouhchichi develops his work through a tentative language grounded on the exploration of the limits between our internal discourse and its extension towards the outer world, the actual, the other. He places his works at the crossroad between the aesthetic and the social, exploring associated fields as possibilities for self-definition.

Recently, his work has been exhibited as a solo show Les mains noires (Kulte, Rabat, Morocco, 2016), as collective exhibition Documents bilingues (MUCEM, Marseille, France, 2017), as well as Le Maroc contemporain (Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France, 2014), Between walls (Le 18, Marrakech, Morocco, 2017).

Sasha Huber (CH/FI) is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage, born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1975. She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Huber’s work is primarily concerned with the politics of memory and belonging, particularly in relation to colonial residue left in the environment. Sensitive to the subtle threads connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based interventions, video, photography, and collaborations. Huber is also claiming the compressed-air staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon, while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics. She is known for her artistic research contribution to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign, aiming at dismantling the glaciologist’s lesser-known but contentious racist heritage. This long-term project (since 2008) has been concerned with unearthing and redressing the little-known history and cultural legacies of the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), an influential proponent of “scientific” racism who advocated for segregation and “racial hygiene”. Huber has had solo exhibitions such as at the Hasselblad Foundation (Project Room) in Gothenburg and participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 56th la Biennale di Venezia in 2015 (collateral exhibition: Frontier Reimagined), the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014, and in the 29th Biennial of São Paulo in 2010.

Delio Jasse was born in 1980 in Luanda, Angola and lives and works in Milan. In his photographic work, he often interweaves found images with clues from past lives (found passport photos, family albums) to draw links between photography – in particular the concept of the ‘latent image’ – and memory.

Jasse is also known for experimenting with analogue photographic printing processes, including cyanotype, platinum and early printing processes such as ‘Van Dyke Brown’, as well as developing his own printing techniques.

Recent exhibitions include: MAXXI, Rome (2018); Villa Romana, Florence (2018); Biennale dell’immagine, Lugano (solo, 2017); Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm (2017); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2017); Bamako Encounters, Bamako (2017); Lagos Biennial, Lagos (2017); Tiwani Contemporary, London (solo, 2016); Walther Collection Project Space, NY (2016); Dak’art Biennale international exhibition (2016); and the Angolan Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale (2015). He was one of three finalists in the BES Photo Prize (2014) and won the Iwalewa Art Award in 2015.

Amelia Umuhire, born 1991 in Kigali Rwanda, lives as an artist and filmmaker in Berlin. In 2015 she wrote and filmed her first web series, Polyglot, in which she follows young deracinated London- and Berlin-based Rwandese artists with her camera. The series has been shown at numerous festivals, including the Festival D’Angers, the Tribeca Film Festival and the Geneva International Film Festival, where it was named Best International Web Series in 2015. Her short film Mugabo is an experimental short film set in Kigali. It explores the question of how to return to one´s homeland and how to deal with the past. In 2017 it was awarded Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival and is currently touring festivals in North America and amongst others screened at MOCA Los Angeles, the MCA Chicago, the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Smithsonian African American Film Festival. In 2018 Amelia Umuhire produced the radio feature Vaterland for the German radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. It tells the story of her father Innocent Seminega as a young student, teacher, husband and father until his death at the hands of the Hutu extremists. In February this year Umuhire had her first solo exhibition at Decad Berlin.

Nari Ward (nato nel 1963 a St. Andrew, Giamaica; vive e lavora a New York) è noto per le sue installazioni scultoree composte da materiale di scarto trovato e raccolto nel suo quartiere. Ha riutilizzato oggetti come passeggini, carrelli della spesa, bottiglie, porte, televisori, registratori di cassa e lacci delle scarpe.

Ward ricontestualizza questi oggetti trovati in giustapposizioni stimolanti che creano significati metaforici complessi per affrontare questioni sociali e politiche che circondano la razza, la povertà e la cultura del consumo. Lascia intenzionalmente aperto il significato del suo lavoro, consentendo allo spettatore di fornire la propria interpretazione.

Mostre personali del suo lavoro sono state organizzate presso l’Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017); SocratesSculpture Park, New York (2017); The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2016); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2015); Savannah College of Art e Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2015); Museo d’arte della Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA (2014); The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2011); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2011); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2002); e Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2001, 2000).

Dudù Kouate – percussionista, musicista e mediatore culturale – nasce in Senegal da famiglia di Griot, cantori incaricati di portare avanti le storie del loro popolo, conservatori della tradizione culturale e musicale africana. Musicista polistrumentista, interpreta la tradizione in chiave moderna e multiculturale. Vive a Bergamo dove insegna percussioni africane; tiene seminari sulla storia degli strumenti tradizionali africani cercando di tracciare i confini territoriali delle popolazioni; incontra le scuole con interventi di divulgazione della tradizione culturale africana attraverso racconti di fiabe musicate ed esperienze musicali trasversali. Musicista versatile ed eclettico, conduce una ricerca costante sul suono (sound of elements) per esperienze sempre nuove nel mondo della musica.

Olivier is known for large-scale installations which provoke a disruption of public and private spaces. Familiar forms, altered in function and medium, create uncanny meditations on stagnancy, division and the weight of materiality. Her installations explore the poetics of space and the role of the viewers in shaping their own experience and engagement.

Lucio Ruvidotti, is a young author active in the world of self-productions and on the page of the weekly Pagina99, his recent book portrays “The Prince of Darkness” in a biographical novel full of rhythms, colors and experimentation that gives natural evolution to an icon of the BD Rock necklace.

Alessandra Ferrini is a London-based artist, researcher and educator. Her practice is rooted in lens-based media, postcolonial theory, memory and critical whiteness studies, historiographical and archival practices. Experimenting with the expansion and hybridization of the documentary film, she interrogates the enduring legacies of colonialism and Fascism with a specific interest in the past and present network of relations between Italy, the Mediterranean region and the African continent. She has exhibited internationally, including at: Casablanca Biennal (2021); Manifesta 13 Paralléles du Sud Marseille (2020); Villa Romana (solo show 2019); Depo Istanbul Biennal Collaterale (2019); Lagos Biennal (2019); Sharjah Foundation Film Platform (2019); Manifesta 12 Film Programme (2018).

www.alessandraferrini.info

Michele Dantini è uno storico dell’arte contemporanea, critico e saggista, insegna all’Università del Piemonte orientale ed è visiting professor presso università nazionali e internazionali. Laureatosi e perfezionatosi (Ph.D.) in storia della filosofia e storia dell’arte presso la Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa; Eberhard Karls Universität, Tubinga; The Courtauld Institute, Londra; Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, collabora con i principali musei di arte contemporanea italiani ed è responsabile del Master MAED al Castello di Rivoli. Scrive di arte contemporanea, politiche culturali e dell’innovazione, tecnologia, Rete e digitale. Tra le pubblicazioni recenti Geopolitiche dell’arte italiana. Arte e critica d’arte nel contesto internazionale (Milano 2012); Arte contemporanea, ecologia e sfera pubblica (Roma 2012); Humanities e innovazione sociale (Milano 2012); Apple cosmica. Come le narrazioni fantascientifiche modellano il design e il marketing della Mela (Milano 2012); Horses and other herbivores (Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem 2010). Coautore dei manifesti TQ “università e ricerca” e “patrimonio storico-artistico e ambientale”, è interessato ai temi della diversità culturale e del cosmopolitismo postcoloniale. Il suo Diario Namibiano (e/o, Milano 2003), inchiesta sulle trasformazioni delle abilità tradizionali in Africa australe all’ingresso nel mercato globale condotta in collaborazione con la National Gallery di Windhoek, è stato finalista del premio Paola Biocca|Società Italo Calvino nel 2002. Suoi reportage e fieldworks sono stati presentati alla Fondazione Merz, Torino; CCCS Strozzina, Firenze; Centro di arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato; Centre de la Photographie, Ginevra; MAO, Torino. Collabora a L’Huffington, Alfabeta2, Doppiozero, ROARS, Il giornale dell’arte, il manifesto. Lista degli istituzioni/archivi: Agenzia Italiana per la Cooperazione allo Sviluppo, Archivio Enrico Romero, Archivio Leonard Bundu/ David Weiss, Archivio Storico Fratelli Alinari, Biblioteca Marucelliana, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, British Institute of Florence/ Harold Acton Library, Cineteca di Firenze, Collezione Palli, Fondazione La Pira, Fondazione Santa Maria Nuova, Gli Uffizi, Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, Le Murate Progetti Arte Contemporanea/ MUS.E, New York University Florence/ Villa La Pietra Poste Italiane, SACI/ Worthington Library, Sahara Desert, Syracuse University Florence/ Syracuse Florence Library

Lerato Shadi lives and works in Berlin. She earned a M.A. (Space Strategies) from Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee in 2018 and she received a B.A. (Visual Art) from University of Johannesburg in 2006. From 2010 to 2012 Shadi was a member of the ‘Bag Factory artist studios’ in Johannesburg. Her work was featured at the Dak’art Biennale and in the III Moscow International Biennale in 2012. She is a fellow of Sommerakademie 2013 (Zentrum Paul Klee). Shadi was awarded with the mart stam studio grant, Berlin in 2014 and received the Alumni Dignitas Award of the University of Johannesburg in 2016. She presented her solo show Noka Ya Bokamoso at the South African National Arts Festival in Grahamstown in 2016. Shadi participated in The Parliament of Bodies, the Public Programs of documenta 14 and was awarded with the AFRICA’SOUT! residency program (Brooklyn, NY) in 2017. Shadi is fellow of the German Villa Romana Prize in Florence (Italy) for 2018.

Kevin Jerome Everson (born 1965) is an artist working in film, painting, sculpture, and photography. He was born in Mansfield, Ohio and currently resides in Virginia. He holds an MFA from Ohio University, and a BFA from the University of Akron, and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

Everson’s films frequently depict people working and living in working-class communities. Many of his works focus on the migration of African American communities and individuals from the American South northward in search of work.[1] “Everson rejects the role of cultural explainer in his work, opting instead to place the burden of understanding on the audience and its own labor. In this way, he has carved a place for himself outside both the typical expectations of documentary and the conventions of representational fiction, attempting to work from the materials of the worlds he encounters to create something else.”[2]

Everson frequently employs hand-held camerawork and uses 16mm to create many of his films. His work has been the subject of retrospective screenings at Media City Film Festival (2011), Tate Modern (2017), online at Mubi (2018), and Cinéma du Réel at the Centre Pompidou (2019)

Everson has directed nearly a dozen feature-length films and over 100 short films.

Exhibitions

Everson’s films have been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at the Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, Korea (February 2017); Viennale (2014); Visions du Reel, Nyon, Switzerland (2012), The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY and Media City Film Festival (2011) and Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2009. His work has been featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials, the 2010, 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Media City Film Festivals, and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial.

Barthélémy Toguo è nato in Camerun nel 1967 e ha studiato Belle Arti ad Abidjan, in Costa d’Avorio. Si è trasferito in Europa nel 1993 e ha iniziato a esibirsi e fare performance mentre terminava i suoi studi a Grenoble (Francia), poi a Dusseldorf (Germania).
La geografia politica e i confini personali sono stati un argomento implicito nel suo lavoro in studio e esplicito nelle sue performance. Da un lato, i suoi acquerelli forniscono un forte impatto visivo, utilizzando un repertorio limitato di immagini e colori per rappresentare un mondo onirico di metamorfosi umane, animali e vegetali. D’altra parte, la realizzazione delle sue installazioni su larga scala è generalmente approssimativa e rapida e sottolinea i conflitti, i paradossi e l’estremismo dell’uomo. Le sue installazioni possono essere visti come un’inversione metaforica dello storico saccheggio dell’Africa subita durante il periodo coloniale.
Toguo ha recentemente tenuto una mostra personale, “The Sick Opera”, al Palais de Tokyo di Parigi. La mostra ha incluso il suo lavoro dal 1999 al 2004. Ha esposto in molti altri prestigiosi musei, gallerie e Biennali a livello internazionale come il Bass Museum of Art di Miami, il Centre George Pompidou di Parigi, lo Houston Museum of Art, il Guangdong Museum of Art , Il Museo Migros di Zurigo e il Palazzo Strozzi di Firenze da quattro anni. Test di prova per mostre personali e collettive selezionate.

Born in 1975, Nirveda Alleck is a multidisciplinary artist living and practicing in Mauritius. She undertook her studies at Michaelis School of Fine Art in South Africa (BAFA 1997), and did her MFA at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland in 2001. Formerly a lecturer in Art Education in Mauritius, Alleck worked as an Art Consultant at the Aapravasi Ghat World Heritage Site in Mauritius, and is currently lecturing part time for the Master of Visual Arts course at the University of Mauritius.

Bikoro is a conceptual artist from the region of Woleu-Ntem in North Gabon and is presently based in Berlin. A 10 year long battle with Leukaemia Cancer during their youth transposed her into different environments and languages in the Netherlands, France, UK, Brazil and Germany inevitably challenging her political positions, citizenship and feeding into her transdisciplinary practice as a visual activist, writer and teacher. The artist merges archeology, sonic radio, writing, textiles, sculpture, live art performances, film & archives for immersive installations. The work analyses processes of power & science fictions in historical archives critically engaging in migrational struggles and colonial memory. The artist creates environments for alternative narratives and future speculations of colonial resistance movements led by African women of the German, British and French diaspora and indigenous communities. Sedimented in narratives of testimonial Black queer experiences of sonic nature archives, revolt, queering ecologies and postcolonial feminist experiences towards new monuments which reacts to the different tones of societies shared between delusions & ritual. The work offers complex non-binary readings pushing  new investigations about the architectures of racisms in cities, the archeologies of urban spaces & economies of traditional systems by exposing the limitations of technologies as functional memory records.

Rehema Chachage is a visual artist whose practice can be viewed as a performative archive which untraditionally collects stories, rituals and other oral traditions in different media (performance, photography, video, text as well as physical installations); which traces hi/stories directly tied to women in the Swahili region; and, which employs written texts, oral and aural stories, melodies, and relics from several re-enacted/performed rituals as source of research.

She holds a BA in Fine Art (2009) from Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town; and an MA Contemporary Art Theory (2018) from Goldsmiths, University of London. Currently she is pursuing her PhD in Practice from the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna where her research focus is on the archive and its methodologies, specifically observing ways of doing the archive differently through one’s practice as an artist.

Wanja Kimani is a visual artist and writer based in Cambridgeshire, UK. Through film, textiles and installation, her work explores memory, trauma and the fluidity within social structures that are designed to care and protect, but mutate into coercive forces within society. She imposes elements of her own life into public spaces, creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character. Her work has been exhibited internationally. In 2018, her performance, ‘Expectations’ was included in the Laboratoire Agit’Art presentation during Dak’Art Biennale of Contemporary African Art. In 2019, she presented her work at Art Dubai and as part of a group show, ‘Yesterday is Today’s Memory’ at Espace Commines, Paris, France.

Michèle Magema, born in Kinshasa in 1977, is a Congolese-French video, performance, and photography artist. She was born in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo in 1977. She emigrated to Paris, France in 1984, and currently resides in Nevers.

Fatima Mazmouz Nata il 2 maggio 1974 a Casablanca, in Marocco, è un fotografo, artista visivo, concettuale. La sua produzione artistica, LES VENTRES DU SILENCE, Pouvoirs et contre Powers, si occupa principalmente delle varie lotte di potere implicite e invisibili radicate nelle nostre società giudaico-cristiane e arabo-musulmane. Il suo lavoro traduce così la storia dell’emancipazione attraverso un profondo impegno per le libertà individuali. Con il progetto Super Oum e The Broken Body, l’artista si inserisce in una lotta femminista in un contesto post-coloniale per una lotta alla discriminazione razziale e per i diritti delle donne (Diritto all’aborto per tutti).

Myriam Mihindou grew up in Gabon with a French mother and a Gabonese father, before going into exile in France in the late 1980s. After a degree in architecture, she joined the school of fine arts in Bordeaux. Suffering from aphasia, a disorder of spoken and written language, she was at the time looking for a means of expression. Working initially on sculpture and forging, Joseph Beuys and Ana Mendieta encouraged her to direct her plastic exploration in nature through ritualized actions with organic materials (earth, water, sun, paraffin, kaolin and tea). She graduated in 1993, developing a multidisciplinary plastic language, working as well in photography as in performance, video, drawing and sculpture. Her experience of travelling many countries including from Gabon to Reunion Island, from Egypt to Morocco, her works was nourished by these geographical and cultural encounters. Highly autobiographical, her creative processes probes memory, identity, the social, political and sexual body themes.

Rezaire defines as “Franco-Guyano-Danish”. She grew up in Paris and studied there, as well as in Copenhagen and London, where she did a master’s degree at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She then lived in Paris, Mozambique and Johannesburg from 2014. In 2017, she was welcomed in residence by MeetFactory in Prague, where she began working on sound.

Born in 1970 in Lomé, Togo. He lives and works in both Aubervilliers and Lomé.

Clay Apenouvon participated in painting, graphic arts and screen-printing workshops in Togo before moving to Paris where he continued his initiation with the artists Claude Viallat and Mounir Fatmi.
After exploring cardboard as a material, he developed the concept ‘Plastic Attack’ to raise public awareness of the harmfulness of plastic. More recently with the Film noir de Lampedusa (2015), he denounced the indifference of Europe faced with the tragedy of illegal immigration. He used black stretch film to create an exceptionally powerful and evocative in situ installation.

Clay Apenouvon exhibited his work at the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London (2015) and in the collective work Visibles / Invisibles, l’Afrique urbaine et ses marges at the Fondation Blachère, France (2015). For The Day That Comes, he will create an original work in situ.