In 1989, the mythical exhibition Magiciens de la terre revealed the work of non-western artists – like Chéri Samba or Frédéric Bruly Bouabré – with a vision far removed from neo-colonialist perspectives.

Nearly thirty years later, African artists or those from the African continent, both from the diaspora and settled in our contexts of proximity, in artistic residencies and centres of production or installed for several generations in the international art circuit, represent an invisible, complex network that provides a vehicle for some of the more unfamiliar questions regarding what is taking place in a kaleidoscopic continent, comprised of countries that contrast starkly with one another, which are both so distant and so near.

Today, in a hybrid context of globalisation, between different scales and focuses, from the Maghreb to South Africa, we realise that it is a geo-localised, atomised territory, both visible and invisible. Thus, after the trilogy of exhibitions surrounding the Mediterranean, through different agents, collectives and creatiors, Es Baluard proposes a project in progress which allows for a multifocal approach towards a construction of thought and creativity that surrounds and originates in the African continent: from its effervescent heterogeneity at source, to its influences or actual dislocation in other geographical points, giving rise to a correspondence of gazes. In «Africa. What Africa?»  we present a platform by way of a correlative open to permanent review that will gradually develop in different phases and processes.

The exhibition consists of three stages:

• Dolce Vita Africana: Malick Sidibé a documentation by Cosima Spender
  from February 6, 2018 – March 11, 2018

• presentation of the Platform HARAKAT i KIBRIT.
  From April 12 to May 27

• Ensayo: Marta Moriarty – Benji Liebmann (Fundación Nirox)-  Beathur Ngoza-Lucy McGarry.
  As of now June

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www.esbaluard.org