Mearg Negusse: The title of the ex­hi­bition is A World in Common. Can you tell me how you decided on it and why?

Osei Bonsu: The exhibition is dedicated to the landscape of contemporary African photography, and it uses the theoretical framework of Achille Mbembe’s writings as a point of departure to explore the idea of what it means to “think the world from Africa.” The title came about as an interrogation of this idea but more specifically as an attempt to bring together postcolonial theories on contemporary African life through the lens of photography and how artists engage with their immediate conditions.

So the idea of A World in Common has two meanings. One was addressing the question of climate and what it meant to take responsibility for our world through our interconnected relationship to the environment, and that can be read as a response to the ecological crisis. The other was thinking about the tradition of radical thought that came to fruition during the struggle for independence, and how thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and more recently Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Felwine Sarr, and others were thinking through these ideas of what it means to conceive history from an African perspective, one that is not necessarily rooted in a Western foundation of how history is read and understood.

Photography provides an important context for that because it’s through photography that we gain an under­standing of our own historical re­p­resentation. So, this idea to think A World in Common was also about thinking of a common history or a common archive.

A World in Common . Contemporary African Photography, Installation view at C/O Berlin, 2025 © C/O Berlin Foundation. Photo: David von Becker.

MN: What was the starting point for curating the exhibition, and how did you select the artists?

OB: The starting point of curating the exhibition was thinking about the conditions of contemporary African photography as an expanded field of cultural production. I was interested in documentary photography as much as I was in conceptual photography, fine art photography, and photography as an expanded form of media—for example, photography that uses textile or sculpture as opposed to traditional print photography that we are accustomed to seeing in exhibition spaces. When institutions prepare exhibitions on contemporary African photography, the primary focus is either on studio photography as a preeminent form of creative expression or documentary photography that addresses social or political reality. I was interested in combining those while also thinking about how artists in this moment have freedom to work across disciplines. They are not seeing their work as merely belonging to a history of photography but to a visual culture in which archives, art-historical images, and historical narratives that have never been visualized are brought into view. That was the impetus for bringing these artists together.

Having said that, it would be impossible to represent all aspects of contemporary African photography in one exhibition. So, what we tried to do with the curation of the exhibition is to ensure that the practices were exemplary and reflective of key ideas that are being explored by artists across the continent.

For more than ten years, Tate has had a dedicated committee for African art—the Africa Acquisitions Committee (AAC), which was founded in 2011, through which some of the most significant works have entered Tate’s collection, including works by Zanele Muholi, Samuel Fosso, Santu Mofokeng, and David Goldblatt. But many of those artists are established names that are familiar to most people within the art world, so I felt it was important to introduce a different generation of photographers who are less visible but deserve institutional rec­ognition and whose work is worthy of deeper critical engagement.

A World in Common . Contemporary African Photography, Installation view at C/O Berlin, 2025 © C/O Berlin Foundation. Photo: David von Becker.

MN: The exhibition is divided into three major themes. Can you say something about the curatorial process and the decision as to why these themes were developed, what they talk about, and how they relate to each other?

OB: The first section, Identity and Tradition, is an exploration of the duality of what it means to confront identity and tradition as a way of grounding the project in a certain historical reality. The first room opens with George Osodi’s Nigerian Monarchs, a series of portraits of sitting Nigerian monarchs across the country who come from diverse ethnic groups and geographic backgrounds. They represent the idea of being cultural custodians who are carrying certain cultural traditions and rituals into the present. It was important for the show to begin with this idea that traditional photography, which we often associate with studio photography or with ethnographic photography—at least within an African context—so often the depicted subjects—African rulers—appear as passive individuals without the agency and dignity that would be granted to their European counterparts. I was interested in what it meant to open an exhibition with this notion that Africa still has traditional customs and forms of knowledge that have outlived the colonial encounter. It was important because photography exhibitions often begin with the idea of the postcolonial, but how to engage with photography that developed in very complex and nuanced ways during the colonial period?

George Osodi, Nigerian Monarchs, 2012–2022. A World in Common . Contemporary African Photography, Installation view at C/O Berlin, 2025 © C/O Berlin Foundation. Photo: David von Becker.

There is also a section dedicated to masquerade and the notion of masks and masquerades so often associated with colonial artifacts or ethnographic objects that became synonymous with African art in the early twentieth century. But what could it mean for artists now to be reclaiming the image of masks or the cultural practice of masquerade as a central part of spiritual life on the continent, especially in West Africa?

The next section, Counter Histories, is about the afterlife of colonial archives, bringing together works by artists such as Délio Jasse and Samson Kambalu, all of whom extract images from the archive and reposition them within a contemporary framework. Kambalu’s cutout soldiers represent an interrogation of Africa’s military histories, specifically the histories that connect African soldiers who fought during World War I and II on behalf of European nations, and the imagined idea of nationhood that informs many experiences of decolonization, and what it means to belong to a nation. Meanwhile, Jasse, who is exploring the direct relationship between Portugal and Mozambique during a very important moment in their colonial history—the majority of the subjects represented in the archival family photographs are white Portuguese settlers. It’s quite unsettling to see that a colonial family archive can look like this, particularly given that this archive exists in a moment in time but also reflects a broader social and political history.

Délio Jasse, The Lost Chapter. Nampula, 1963, 2016. A World in Common . Contemporary African Photography, Installation view at C/O Berlin, 2025 © C/O Berlin Foundation. Photo: David von Becker.

The final section, Imagined Futures, was an attempt to bring together these complicated notions of futurity as well as the deep traditions of spirituality in which many traditional African cultures are rooted. In Water Life, Aida Muluneh is thinking about the relationship between women, water, and water scarcity in Ethiopia. Water Life was a body of work initially commissioned for Water Aid Charity that took on a life of its own. The series looks at the role of women in the water crisis as it relates to issues of education, sanitization, and healthcare in impossibly futuristic landscapes that appear ancient and modern at the same time.

This idea of futurity is so often seen from the perspective of a Western fiction of what Africa is—be it Afro­futurism or notions of Africa existing in the future tense. I was interested in how in many African cultures this idea of overlapping time is present in everyday life, especially due to the relationship to ancestral knowledge. It exists in myriad ways and can also be explored from an urban perspective in which artists use diverse historical and visual frameworks to imagine alternative kinds of futures.

MN: When we think of photography, we think of its inherent quality of documentation. How do the photographers in the exhibition interrupt or disrupt what we think of or see as visual heritage?

OB: I think this is a really good point, because I would argue there’s something about the way the internet and digital archive is present in the exhibition, which I don’t think has been picked up on. We take the infinite accessibility of archives for granted nowadays, where we can google a particular style of image or a particular artist and, all of a sudden, we get a stream of search results. I think that there is a relationship between the postcolonial condition and the way that the archive is being used by artists. For example, in the exhibition we have Kudzanai Chiurai’s We Live in Silence, which is a project looking at the relationship between an early Christianization of southern African states and the resistance from local communities to those forms of colonial exploitation. In that particular series he focuses on the role of women during the precolonial uprisings in Zimbabwe. Chiurai’s interpretation of these scenes evoke Nollywood aesthetics, Christian iconography, and music videos to imagine scenes of resistance for which there are no historical representations. However, it is possible for artists in the present to imagine how those encounters might have looked from an artistic perspective. I think this reimagining happens within the show where the digital archive—or you could say the postcolonial archive—is being used to reinscribe histories that were either forgotten or deliberately erased.

Kudzanai Chiurai, We Live in Silence, 2017. A World in Common . Contemporary African Photography, Installation view at C/O Berlin, 2025 © C/O Berlin Foundation. Photo: David von Becker.

Another thing that’s very present in the exhibition is this notion of the document. A document could be anything from a postcard to a poster to cardboard cutouts. We are all dealing with this ephemera, with this data that invades our lives at all times. For example, in her series Ke Lefa Laka: Her Story, the artist Lebohang Kganye is imagining an impossible dialogue between herself and her mother. Through this experience of having lost her mother, photography becomes a space for reunion, and the photomontage becomes a tool to bring herself and her mother closer together. It challenges the view that African photography must always address historical events within African history or global history; it can also be used for a personal investigation of one’s own archive. So, the show is trying to explore the duality of that: that the photographic archive can offer something of a rupture within a historical timeline, but it can also be about a deeply personal appropriation of historical or archival documents.

Lebohang Knagye, Ke Lefa Laka, 2013. A World in Common . Contemporary African Photography, Installation view at C/O Berlin, 2025 © C/O Berlin Foundation. Photo: David von Becker.

MN: Is there a book, a film, music, or something else you discovered while preparing the exhibition that was particularly important to you and that you would recommend to readers who would like to further explore the themes of the exhibition?

OB: There were two artists I encountered while working on the exhibition. One of the artists selected for our Common Ground playlist curated by Touching Bass, a South London–based music movement, was the musician and composer Duval Timothy. His album Sen Am very beautifully articulates questions relating to temporality and identity through mostly instrumental music, and he’s a renowned music producer. It feels like an appropriate soundtrack for the exhibition.

Another artist who attracted my attention is the performer and film producer Baloji, who has a new film out called Augure. It’s a work that deals broadly with the politics of spirituality and identity within the context of the Democratic Republic of Kongo. He is related to the artist Sammy Baloji, who was included in the first iteration of the exhibition. I saw how connected our projects were, because he is interested in this idea of how spiritual customs and rites of passage create this fractured relationship to place and home.

I think that was something I was interested in A World in Common as well, this kind of relationship between global diasporic communities and contemporary experience on the continent: the possibility of time travel. Sometimes the fracturing of experience has to do with colonial and postcolonial history, but it also has to do with how fast our world is moving and how difficult it sometimes can be to reconcile all of the various parts of our identities in a globalized world.

This interview was initially published in C/O Berlin Newspaper No. 39 in January 2025. As part of the exhibitions A World in Common.Contemporary African Photography and Silvia Rosi. Protektorat. C/O Berlin Talent Award 2024, which are presented in parallel at C/O Berlin, the C& Book Residency is being created in the foyer in collaboration with Contemporary And (C&). Designed as a reading room, this central space offers a carefully curated selection of books from the C& library. The publications respond to the themes of the exhibitions and offer visitors a stimulating opportunity to engage more intensively with the content of the works in both exhibitions.

Mearg Negusse is a curator and writer. She has been working for Contemporary And (C&) since 2019 and heads the online project C& Commissions, as well as the offline project C& Center of Unfinished Business.