As the first contemporary art and design fair dedicated to Africa in France, AKAA is the Parisian rendez-vous for visitors who are passionate or curious about the vibrant creativity of the African continent, and its artistic influence throughout the world.

For its fourth edition, AKAA returns to the Carreau du Temple, with an rigorous selection of art galleries showing artists whose work reveals a link to Africa– defined by their place of birth or origin, their cultural or family heritage, aesthetics, travel, residency, new encounters or collaborations.

With over 45 exhibitors and a 100 artists each year from all over the world, AKAA is now established as a primary event for contemporary art lovers, collectors and professionnals.

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In 2019 Francisco Vidal, one of the most exceptional voices from Angola, will take over the walls and floors of AKAA UNDERGROUND with CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPES x BEYOND THE LINE. 

Vidal is well known for his paintings and drawings with bold colors and patterns. The artist’s work playfully blends various aesthetic influences, including Cubism, African wax-print textiles, and 1980s hip-hop culture, as well as contemporary graffiti and street art. Born in Portugal to Angolan and Cape Verdean parents, the artist deals with ideas which are closely tied to the diaspora experience, examining narratives and identities which arise from a hybrid of cross-cultural upbringing.

“The choice of machetes refers to both tools used in agriculture and weapons symbolizing African liberation movements. Through painting, the machete yields to poetry, becoming a canvas depicting portraits and flowers.“ – Namalimba Coelho, Project Curator

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Les Rencontres AKAA, the fair’s cultural platform welcomes artists, curators, thinkers, art professionals and visitors invited to express themselves and debate publicly. This year, the theme will be urban space as a place for creation, where the cities of tomorrow are invented, in Africa and the world.

The demographic explosion of cities and their environmental impact ; urbanism and architecture; questions of justice in the city, survival and violence; the intimate experience of individualism and communities; the future of cities; or the urban sensory landscape, all question and nourish the intellectual and artistic work of city dwellers, from Lagos to Dubai, Cairo to New Delhi, Johannesburg to Sao Paulo and Dakar to New York. With a program of conferences, performances, concerts and film screenings, Les Rencontres AKAA invite the public to learn from different urban experiences, and to invent new ways of thinking, imagining and creating the City.

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Every year AKAA also dedicates the central aisle of the Carreau du Temple to a monumental installation, a landmark of the fair. In 2019, the congolese artist Houston Maludi represented by MAGNIN-A gallery, will invest the central aisle of the Carreau du Temple, to immerse the public into a unique artistic experience.

Inspired by the cubist painters Georges Braques and Pablo Picasso, and after years of experimentation and aesthetic research, he developed in 2008 a personal cubism, the “Monochromic Quantum Symbiotic Cubism” that he obtained through a “Symbiosis of forms.” Maludi mainly uses black and white (or other contrasted duotone) and a sinuous continuous line that defines all levels of reading of the work. He seeks to achieve “a perfect and discreet unity of the elements.” The same curve can trace the shoulder of a character in the foreground and the edge of a crowded road at another reading level. Everything is in everything.

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