Installation & Contemporary Art | António Ole Art

"António Ole’s work is an ongoing dialogue with the layers of Angolan history and the lived experience of its people. He approaches the city as both a subject and a material: fragments of urban architecture, discarded objects, and everyday debris are reassembled into structures that carry memory, resistance, and testimony. Through this process, Ole not only documents decay and neglect, but also celebrates invention, improvisation, and survival.

His visual language resists categorisation. It oscillates between abstraction and figuration, permanence and ruin, tradition and rupture. Across mediums, Ole invokes the tensions of a country marked by colonial trauma, civil war, and accelerated modernisation — yet he does so with a profound sense of humanity and dignity.

For Ole, art is a space of reconstruction: a territory where the broken can be reimagined, and where the peripheral becomes central. His work invites us to look not only at what remains, but at what can still be made from it."

MEET

António Ole

António Ole (b. 1951, Luanda, Angola) is one of the most influential figures in contemporary Angolan art. A multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, photography, installation, film, and sculpture, Ole has played a central role in shaping post-independence visual culture in Angola and beyond. He studied African-American culture and cinema at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and has exhibited internationally since the 1980s, participating in major events such as the Venice Biennale, the Havana Biennial, and the São Paulo Biennial.

Deeply rooted in the complexities of Angola’s colonial and postcolonial history, his work explores themes such as urban transformation, memory, identity, and resilience. His iconic installations made from found materials — often referencing Luanda’s musseques (informal settlements) — offer both a poetic and political reflection on lived realities, structural inequality, and the possibility of renewal.

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