The Goethe-Institut presents Fantastic, an exhibition that seeks to re-ignite critical thought about the fantastic in contemporary art and visual culture.

Drawing inspiration from writers such as Ben Okri, this exhibition brings together video art and photographs that engage with the fantastic. Fantastic includes international artists such as Jelili Atiku (Nigeria), Dineo Bopape (South Africa), Kudzanai Chiurai (Zimbabwe), Andrew Esiebo (Nigeria), Milumbe Haimbe (Zambia), Aida Muluneh (Ethiopia), Terence Nance (USA), Tracey Rose (South Africa), Zina Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria) and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum (Botswana).

The exercise of power is related to the control of visibility/ invisibility, deception and silencing which begins, often, with the manipulation of images and of the imaginary. Works exploring the fantastic in photography and video art have been selected precisely because of the complex relations these technologies have in the construction of fantasies about ‘Africa’. This exhibition celebrates popular technologies such as video-film that have created novel ways of seeing and reading the real/ imaginary dialectic. The works show how the ‘real world’ and the ‘spiritual world’ collide but at the same time they remind us of the ideological machinations that construct these worlds.

This exhibition, curated by Nomusa Makhubu and Nkule Mabaso, invites us to see the fantastic as a tool for engaging with distortions of our histories and as a conceptual framework for our debates about biopower and biopolitics.

www.goethe.de/