Making Freedom – Black Cultural Archives Brixton, London, United Kingdom

Making Freedom celebrates the 1838 Emancipation of nearly a million Africans in the Caribbean.  It tells the stories of how liberty was won on the 1st August and how African women re-united the African family disbanded by enslavers in the previous 200 years.

Emancipation was the beginning of a long and laborious road towards freedom.  This exhibition celebrates the acts of courage and resistance which laid the freedom many of us enjoy today.  It is the first time that collections from the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), the National Archives, Anti-Slavery International, and the National Portrait Gallery have been brought together to tell inspiring Emancipation stories.

Info: 9 December until 20 December 2014 @Black Cultural Heritage Centre Brixton, London United Kingdom 

Link: http://bcaheritage.org.uk/programme/exhibitions/makingfreedom/

David Hammons – White Cube Gallery Mason’s Yard, London, United Kingdom 

David Hammons is an African-American artist best known for his work in New York and Los Angeles in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Over the course of his career, Hammons has carved out a singular position. He first came to prominence in the 1970s – when issues of politics, race and sexuality were coming to the fore in the art world – with a series of prints made using his own body. He went on to make performances (selling snowballs on the street), sculptures (rock heads covered with hair clippings from Harlem barbershops), and installations (a darkened gallery where visitors were given tiny flashlights). His work draws on an eclectic range of tactics and techniques and reveals affinities and influences as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, jazz and improvisation, Bruce Nauman, the Watts Tower, Ed Kienholz, and street culture. Yet he discreetly injects sociological content into the tropes of conceptual art, offering mordant commentary on the position of African-Americans within the dominant culture – as well as his own status as a maverick black artist within an elite art system. His strategies for engaging with this system, as well as his incursions into the market, have rendered him a legendary figure whose impact is all the greater for his apparent elusiveness. Hammons is a provocateur par excellence, the fox in the henhouse of conceptual art.

Info: 3 October until 3 January 2015 @White Cube, London, United Kingdom

Link: http://whitecube.com/exhibitions/david_hammons_masons_yard_2014/

Call and Response – Glenn Ligon

Camden Arts Centre, London, United Kingdom

Artist Glenn Ligon takes a look at issues of language and race with this exhibition, his first in a U.K. public gallery. This exhibition features large scale paintings inspired by Come Out, a taped-speech work by Steve Reich of the testimonies of six young black men arrested for murder during the Harlem Race Riot of ’64. These paintings and silk-screens are paired with video footage from a 1982 stand up act by African-American comedian Richard Pryor, Live on Sunset Strip, edited to emphasize Pryor’s body language, movement and expression.

Info: 10 October until 11 January 2015 @Camden Arts Centre, London, United Kingdom

Link: http://www.camdenartscentre.org/whats-on/view/ligon

Anyway, the Wind Blows – Group Exhibition

Brundyn Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa

The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally, a ceaseless flowing out, a hemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence.
-Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)

Anyway, the Wind Blows is a group exhibition conceptually framed around the notion of myths. With amongst others:

Mohau Modisakeng who looks at the idea of a post-1994, “new” South Africa as myth, focusing on the pervasive existence of oppressive (often violent) structures from the past that continue to have bearing on the present.

Sethembile Msezane who looks at the politics of memorialisation within the context of public holidays (specifically Youth Day, Heritage Day and Freedom Day) by documenting a series of site-specific performances in which the artist assumes the role of various characters who engage with the mythologising of specific historical events into the demarcated leisure of public holidays.

Jeannette Ehlers who reflects on the significance of the Haitian Revolution (the first successful slave insurrection in history).

Info: 4 December until 24 January 2015 @Brundyn Gallery, Cape Town South Africa

Link: http://www.brundyn.com/exhibitions/2014/anyway-the-wind-blows/

Wir Sind Alle Berliner: 1884 - 2014 

SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, Germany 

An Exhibition curated by Simon Njami. 

This exhibition is dedicated to Thabiso Sekgala (1981-2014).

November 2014 marks the 130th anniversary of the Berlin Congo Conference and the official partitioning of Africa by Western (European, North American and Ottoman) colonial forces – in absence of African representatives. It is against this backdrop that the exhibition WIR SIND ALLE BERLINER: 1884-2014 reminisces this determining moment in world and its severe and ongoing repercussions and history and reflects upon Berlin’s historical and contemporary bond to Africa.

Participating artists: Kader Attia, Sammy Baloji, Bili Bidjocka, Filipa César, Mansour Ciss, Theo Eshetu, Satch Hoyt, Cyrill Lachauer, Nadia Kaabi Linke, Henrike Nauman, Thabiso Sekgala, Katarina Zdjelar 

Info: 15 November 2014 - 26 February 2015 @SAVVY Contemporary

Link: http://savvy-contemporary.com 

Represent: 200 Years of African American Art – Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia, PA, United States

Represent: 200 Years of African American Art highlights selections from the Museum’s exceptional holdings of African American art and celebrates the publication of a catalogue examining the breadth of these noteworthy collections. With work by renowned artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner, Horace Pippin, Jacob Lawrence, and Carrie Mae Weems, the exhibition showcases a range of subjects, styles, mediums, and traditions. Since the Museum’s acquisition of Tanner’s painting The Annunciation in 1899, its collections of African American art have grown significantly, especially during the last three decades.

Info: 10 January until 5 April 2015 @Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, United States.

Link: http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/815.html

Official Launch Party Kiss the Concrete Festival 

Amsterdam, the Netherlands 

Calling all fashion, music and film lovers.... Join us for the official launch of Kiss the Concrete, a multi-disciplinary music, film, arts and fashion festival slated to take place in July 2015. To celebrate this we'll be organizing a series of bi-monthly spin off events to help bring the spirit of the festival to life. Our first installment takes place on Saturday January 17th at the Tolhuistuin in Amsterdam where our primary focus will be on fashion and influence from South Africa.  Our programme starts with a screening of Soweto Rising, a short film on Soweto street fashion by South African film makers Noxolo Mafu and Lilian Magari.  To provide more insight and inspiration on the topic we're bringing out Africa's finest knitwear designer Laduma Ngxokolo to have a conversation with us about the undercurrent that inspires his work, the future of (African) fashion and the introduction of new aesthetics in an old world.  The afterparty courtesy of Amplified Africa will keep the best Afrohouse, Kuduro and Afrobeat anthems pumping through the speakers till 3 am with dj's Auspre and Bamba Nazar.  We're looking forward to having you with us in celebration of what promises to be a festival of epic proportions. Info: 17 January 2015 @Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam, the Netherlands 

Link: https://www.facebook.com/events/347003152090934/?fref=ts