Unity in Diversity: Pan-African Art Practices of Collective Care – Group Show

In fall & winter 2025 M.Bassy is curating the exhibition project Unity in Diversity: Pan-African Art Practices of Collective Care with multi-media installations, objects and video works by the artists and colletives Larry Achiampong, Sammy Baloji, Hamedine Kane & The Otolith Group. Hamedine Kane from Dakar will be our artist in residence and be present at the opening on Oct 11 for an artist talk together with the artist, musician and filmmaker Larry Achiampong from London, moderated by Joyce Maria Muvunyi. Furthermore, in the run time of the show, there will be a panel conference with the screenwriter and actress Aïssa Maïga, the writer, archivist and activist Attillah Springer and Larry Achiampong (i.a.) at M.Bassy on Nov 8.

The exhibition project Unity in Diversity: Pan-African Art Practices of Collective Care explores the connection between the Pan-African movement and art as a means to explore African and diasporic identities and heterogeneities and to pave the way for a decolonial future. To this end, we invite artistic positions, initiatives and voices to Hamburg that engage with Pan-Africanist values of community, alliance, colonial resistance, collective economies, hospitality, indigenous knowledge preservation, shared environmental and resource protection and spiritual consciousness.

The participating artists & speakers approach Pan-Africanism as a conceptual space that hosts collective and shared visions of a sustainable future that affects the well-being not only of the African continent but of the entire planet. In view of the increasing political pressure of the right-wing voices in the West, the urgency of a common discourse on collective values focusing on unity instead of separation—which in our globalized, racially hyper-capitalized, (post)colonial world is in direct correlation with our neighboring continent—is evident here. To what extent can African knowledge systems and Pan-African efforts to find Unity in Diversity serve as a model to enable alliances and social change and combat racism? Can we create a new vision of the world from a Pan-African perspective?

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