WHATIFTHEWORLD present Dear Europa … a group exhibition featuring artists Karo Akpokiere, Julia Rosa Clark, Dan Halter, Kenyatta A.C Hinkle, Simphiwe Ndzube, Athi-Patra Ruga, Rowan Smith, Moffat Takadiwa, Smangaliso Khumalo and a collaborative work by Pierre Fouché, Ashraf Jamal, and Werner Ungerer

Dear Europa … is in part a response to a work by Nigerian artist Karo Akpokiere. Akpokiere’s painting titled Dear Africa imagines Europe and Africa as two anthropomorphised entities. The painting takes the form of a letter written in a familiar yet condescending tone, and is barbed with irony alluding to the unequal systems of exchange between the two.

Dear Europa … proposes a response. The exhibition is imagined as a dialogue, not bound by the specificity of Akpokiere’s letter but as a general rebuttal realised through writing, transcribing, creating and performativity in relation to this perceived and dominant other.

We who live in the former colonies simultaneously inhabit a space that is for some a satellite of an ancestral home and conquered home territory for others, one that is still very much in the process of being fully reclaimed. We have yet to define ourselves as independent entities and not in relation to existing European paradigms. Given the prevalence of discourse around coloniality and decoloniality, an acknowledgment and engagement – with what artist Kenyatta A.C Hinkle terms the Historical Present – is at the core of this exhibition.

Full catalogue of works to be made available on the 31st of August 2016.

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