Urban Findings

July 21, 2022 - August 27, 2022

Booth 26 Turbine Art Fair 2022

Urban Findings is taken from the concept of gathering fragments of an urban setting. This exhibition will be gathering interdisciplinary perceptions of the black experience from the changing face of a post-colonial African city; amidst its history and emerging identity.

As Asisisebenze Art Atelier's first public launch pad, this exhibition will explore the works by six artists in residency; who's works deal with an array of subject matters, namely: belonging, womanhood, interculturalism, process and material value.

The Asisebenze Art Atelier is a multi-ethnic community, as such the thematics in these artists' works do not carry a harmonious subject matter or plight. They don't contend with forming part of the widely expected activism that contemporary African art has become synonymous with. Instead, the common denominator is in the depiction of black people; blackness and an introspective questioning on how one decides to depict the black body. Moreso, during this period in history, where it has become a circular and economically lucrative/viable form of visual expression.

The lens through which the artists in this iteration of Urban Findings depict the black body takes a documentative approach; it is reflective. They express longing, admiration, ambitions, an imagined reality and a belief in finding the silver lining. Perhaps this lens inevitably makes the works activist in a media-led society bent on highlighting despair without a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel. This exhibition gathers contemporary collective thinking from the pulse of a bustling city, where everything is in flow and in the midst of chaos, there is opportunity, from the premise that spaces evolve and new platforms form for new narratives and voices to be heard. Everything is in flow.