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After the 1958 race riots, there was an effort to heal the rift between the black and white communities. From that intention, those immigrants from Trinidad, St Lucia, Jamaica and other countries established the Carnival, bringing through the influences and flair from back home. The first Carnival was held on 30th January 1959 in St Pancras Town Hall under the organisation of political activist Claudia Jones. Jones founded The West Indian Gazette, the UK’s first black newspaper, and the carnival was televised by the BBC in an aid to build bridges in Britain.

Christabel Johanson: How Notting Hill Carnival was meant to heal the rift between the black and white communities

Carnival costume designed by Peter Minshall Read more »

Living in the era of the selfie where many millions of people seem to be busy with their self-image, without political or social necessity, but just for fun or vanity or insecurity, in which that can happen effortlessly through the lightning-fast technical developments and in which those images in no time at all spread around the world, it may be difficult to fully appreciate the importance of these staged, historical photographs, photographs that, on top of that, cannot be massively distributed because they were made with cameras that immediately printed them on paper.

In this article Rob Perrée shows how important these historical photographs of black Americans were and still are.

Unknown American maker, Studio-Portrait, 1940s-50s, Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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“I use everything I see and experience in my daily life as a source of inspiration. Things I encounter, hear or read. I am interested in people’s reactions to their environment; when we talk about migrants for example, I ask myself: how do they cope with their new surroundings and with being illegal? What kind of human reactions and emotions pass through them?”

Rosalie van Deursen in conversation with Abdulrazaq Awofeso

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It is hard to talk about how my work is perceived. I think it’s received well but there have to be enough critics from the continent reviewing it for me to learn how it is perceived. When I started, people doing the kind of work I do in my country were negligible though some existed in other countries. All I can say as my mother often says, ‘the future is abundant’.

Raquel Villar-Pérez in conversation with Dar es Salaam based Rehema Chachage (1987)

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By engaging African ritualistic elements in order to invoke themes of historic healing, the artist demonstrates the measure with which what is perpetual about the moral putrefaction that characterizes society is persevered by what is ambiguous between the play of history and time, and between historic moments and contemporary examination.

Themba Tsotsi on the last exhibition of Lhola Amira

Lhola at the opening of the exhibition

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