Being Her(e) Exhibition 2017 – Featured Artists

Ethiopian born Muluneh has lived in Yemen, Cyprus, Canada, UK and the US. She graduated from the Communication Department of Howard University, Washington D.C, with a major in Film (2000) and is the recipient of the European Union Prize in the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie, in Bamako, Mali (2007) and in 2010 won the CRAF International Award of Photography in Spilimbergo, Italy. She is the founder and director of the Addis Foto Fest and curates and develops cultural projects with global institutions through her company DESTA (Developing and Educating Society Through Art) For Africa Creative Consulting PLC (DFA) in Addis Ababa.

Kenyan born Malinda lives and works in Rotterdam, Amsterdam. She holds an MFA from Transart Institute, New York. Her works consist of performance, drawing, painting, installation, video, and ceramic object-making. Her practice investigates the hybrid nature of African identity, contesting notions of authenticity. In addition, she also focuses on gender and female sexuality. Malinda was one of the awardees of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2015) and won the One Minutes Award (2012) for moving photography.

Born in Polokwane, Bopape studied at the Durban University of Technology, South Africa, and earned her MFA from Columbia University (2010.) Her work has been shown internationally, including at the New Museum (New York), ICA (Philadelphia); Mart House Gallery (Amsterdam); the 12th Biennale de Lyon (France) and most recently the 32nd Bienale de Sao Paolo (Brazil). Bopape lives and works in Johannesburg. Using performance, experimental video montages, sound, found objects, photographs and dense sculptural installations, her artwork "engages with powerful socio-political notions of memory, narration and representation." Recent awards includes the notable Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art and the prestigious Future Generation Art Prize (both 2017) founded by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Kiev, Ukraine.

Egyptian born, New York based Amer views herself primarily as a painter, but has produced worked in a variety of media including: ceramics, site-specific garden works, photography, printing, drawing, installation, and performance. Amer trained to be an artist at Villa Arson, Nice, France. Her work has always explored ideas related to women, femininity, and gender roles. Amer continuously allows herself to explore the dichotomies of an uneasy world and confronts the language of hostility and finality with unsettled narratives of longing and love. She has shown extensively all over the world, including the Istanbul, Johannesburg, Whitney, Gwangju, Sydney and Venice biennales; in major travelling shows such as The Short Century; Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora; and Africa Remix. She has exhibited at P.S. 1 in New York and SITE Santa Fe, and in 2008 the Brooklyn Museum hosted Love Has no End, a retrospective of twenty years of Amer’s work.

Kganye lives and works in Johannesburg. She completed the Advanced Programme in Photography at the Market Photo Workshop (2011) and is currently completing a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at the University of Johannesburg. Kganye was the recipient of the Tierney Fellowship Award (2012), which led to her solo exhibition Ke Lefa Laka at the Market Photo Workshop Gallery. Kganye has participated in several photography workshops and masterclasses locally and internationally and her work has been presented in several notable exhibitions in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Harare, London, Amsterdam, Paris and New York.

Mali is a multimedia artist living and working in Kampala. Her work revolves around personal narratives related to life in home country. She creates precarious installations in an attempt to digest the pain of childhood incidents and offer perspectives on human resilience and what can be overcome by representing pain as an emotion that can be touched. Mali graduated with a Bachelor’s in Industrial and Fine Arts from Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts, Makerere University (2013). Her work has been included in group exhibitions and festivals such as: the Kampala Contemporary Arts Festival (2014); the travelling exhibition Kabbo Ka Muwala ( The Girl’s Basket) in Harare, Kampala and Bremen; and workshops including: AtWork Kampala Chapter (2015) with Lettera 27, KHOJ International Artists Workshop in Pune Maharashtra India (2015), and the 5th ÀSÌKÒ CCA Lagos International Art Programme, Maputo Mozambique (2015).

Cherono Ng’ok lives and works in Nairobi. She studied Photography at the University of Cape Town (2006). Her experiences growing up between Kenya and South Africa have engendered an intimate body of work centred on issues of home, displacement, loss and identity. Recent group exhibitions include: The Walther Collection (New York and Ulm, 2016 and 2017), La Villette, Paris (2017), Dakar Biennale international exhibition (2016 and 2014); Rencontres de Bamako (2015); Tiwani Contemporary, London (2015); Fondation Donwahi, Abidjan (2015); National Museum of Kenya, Nairobi (2013) and SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2011). Cherono Ng’ok is among the winners of the Magnum Foundation Grant of 2017.

Born in Mbabane, Swaziland, Mntambo lives and works in Johannesburg. She graduated with a Master’s in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town (2007)2007. She won the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art (2011), for which she produced the national travelling exhibition Faena. She has had six solo exhibitions at STEVENSON Cape Town and Johannesburg (2007-15) and two at Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm (2013-15). Notable group exhibitions include Regarding Africa: Contemporary Art and Afro-Futurism at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2017); Disguise: Masks and Global African Art at the Seattle Art Museum (2015) and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2016); What Remains is Tomorrow, the South African Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) amongst others. Mntambo was shortlisted for the AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize in Canada (2014) and was a Civitella Ranieri Fellow (2013).

Born in Nairobi, Boswell now lives and works in London. She combines traditional draftswomanship and digital technology to create drawings, animations and installations. Boswell studied Painting at the Slade School of Art and 2D Animation at Central St Martins, London. She was shortlisted for the Art Foundation's Animation Fellowship (2012) and was the first recipient of the Sky Academy Arts Scholarship, which she used to produce her immersive installation The Matter of Memory at Carroll / Fletcher Gallery, London (2014). She participated in the Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015) and the Biennial of Moving Images (2016) at the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, and has exhibited at Art15 and 1:54 London and New York, and galleries including Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, The Fine Art Society, and New Art Exchange. She was recently awarded the Special Prize by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation as part of the Future Generation Art Prize (2017) and her British Council-commissioned film Dear Mr. Shakespeare, directed by Shola Amoo, was selected for the Sundance Film Festival this year.

Rezaire is a French born Guyanese/Danish new media artist, intersectional preacher, health practitioner, tech-politics researcher and Kemetic/Kundalini Yoga teacher based in Johannesburg. She holds a Bachelor in Economics and an MA in Moving Image from Central Saint Martin’s College, London. Rezaire’s practice explores decolonial health and knowledge through the politics of technology. Navigating architectures of power - online and offline - her works tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and its affects on identity, technology, sexuality, health and spirituality. Her digital healing activism offers alternative readings decentering occidental authority to dismantle our oppressive white-supremacist-patriarchal-cis-hetero-globalized world screen. She is a founding member of the tech health agency NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and mother of the house of SENEB.

Known as The Salooni Project the collective comprises of Kampire Bahana, Darlyne Komukama, Dr. Aida Mbowa and Gloria Wavamunno. Salooni is a multidisciplinary art project that posits black hair practices as systems of knowledge through which culture and survivalist strategies are passed from generation to generation. Created by four Ugandan women, the collective makes use of short film, live art performances, theatre and photography, to present ways in which historical memory and ways of being are weaved into the nape of black peoples’ hair.

Muholi was born in Durban and lives and works in Johannesburg. She co-founded the Forum for Empowerment of Women (FEW) in 2002, and in 2009 founded Inkanyiso, a forum for queer and visual (activist) media. Muholi’s self-proclaimed mission is ‘to re-write a black queer and trans visual history of South Africa for the world to know of our resistance and existence at the height of hate crimes in SA and beyond’. She continues to train and co-facilitates photography workshops for young women in the townships. An alumni of the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg, she completed an MFA: Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto (2009) and is an Honorary Professor at the University of the Arts/Hochschule für Künste Bremen. Muholi has won numerous awards including the ICP Infinity Award for Documentary and Photojournalism (2016); Africa'Sout! Courage and Creativity Award (2016); a Prince Claus Award (2013); and many more.

Opoku was born in Germany and now lives and works in Accra, Ghana. She is a versatile artist whose work employs media including installations, photography and video to explore the sophistication of textile cultures in disparate spaces targeting fashion’s political and psychological role and socio-cultural dynamics in relation to African history and individualistic or societal identities. This experience enroots her aesthetic practice into sculptural modules as her [in]direct social commentary. Opoku has exhibited her work in association with Gallery Commune1 Capetown, CCA Lagos, ANO Ghana/ DAK´ART 11th Biennial, Nubuke Foundation Accra, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Gallery Peter Herrmann Berlin, Musée de l´Ethnographie Bourdeaux, Guggenheim Bilbao, Broad Art Museum Michigan, Kruger Gallery Chicago and 1.54 NY. Her residencies include Art OMI Ghent(NY), Iwalewa Haus Bayreuth(DE), Jan van Eyck Institute Maastricht(NL), Kala Institute Berkeley(CA) and Institute Sacatar Salvador Da Bahia(BR).