AfroRenaissance
Afro Renaissance: African Art, Contemporary African Art & Black Art Exhibition
African Art and Contemporary African Art in Portugal
Black Art and Afro-descendant Creativity at Afro Renaissance
Contemporary African Art: Legacy and Transformation
UNCONTAINED PRESENCES
About this Room
The body emerges as archive, gesture, and force — resisting containment and classification. Through painting and collage, the artists reimagine the Black body beyond exoticism and normativity, invoking it as mask, dance, childhood, and ritual. Colour becomes language, and the line carries tension between intimacy and collectivity. These works reveal not passive forms, but presences in motion — where art is a space of resistance, transformation, and becoming.
About this Room
These works explore the space between body and fable, where boundaries blur between the human and the dreamlike, the flesh and the symbolic. Figures are distorted, multiplied, fragmented — becoming portals to possibility. A raw, feverish energy runs through these images: masks that reveal, eyes emerging from chaos, gestures caught between humour and ritual. The grotesque and the sacred coexist, as do memory, myth, and the digital. Rather than explain the Black body, these artists question it, exaggerate it, celebrate its complexity. Hybridity becomes language, and critique unfolds through excess and reinvention. Each piece resists immediate meaning. The body here is not fixed — it is friction, dream, transformation. A field where strangeness and sensitivity meet, proposing a poetics of becoming.
THE ARCHIVE AS A SITE OF IMAGINATION
About this Room
These works do not preserve the archive — they reinvent it. Through photography, collage, and symbolic layering, the artists reclaim Black memory as a space of invention and resistance. Portraits appear fractured, ambiguous, layered with erasure and repetition. Time is stretched and reimagined; memory becomes fluid, not fixed. Graphic signs, fabric, childhood, and ceremonial motifs emerge as visual tools — not of nostalgia, but of transformation. The archive, here, is not a closed system, but a site in motion — open to rupture, to rewriting, and to the viewer’s own intervention.
Sponsors & Coproduction
