My aim is to bring more young people on Curacao in contact with art. I have had so many friends in high school who ended up in crime. I want to show them that there are other ways. Just as people in the Netherlands should be more aware of the past and how that past shaped the present, people on Curacao should be more aware of the fact that the future is in their own hands. Instead of fighting each other, we should be fighting together for a better world.
The very fact that 1-54 exists sends a huge message out to emerging black artists and we get to see important and interesting works expressing a dialogue that we can relate to and can understand. Because 1-54 attracts a broad audience it provides an amazing platform and has an incredible reach.
This article of the South African art critic Athi Mongezeleli is a “solidarity criticism” in what appears to be an interesting public provocation about the state or economies of the South African visual arts industry. He reacts on an article of the art historian and curator Thembinkosi Goniwe in the newspaper Main and Guardian.
The Kampala Biennial 2018 was not a normal one.
Curator Simon Njami chose to introduce a system that could make the contemporary artist. Since he is convinced that Kampala does not have contemporary artists worth showing–off to the world, he invited seven internationally acclaimed and foreign artists to train young artists from the city. Designated ‘masters’ and their students ‘apprentices’, they were tasked to pass on their precious knowledge to the young ones in a ten-day intensive studio workshop session for each of them. Within that context, the title of the biennial, The Studio, made sense.
Nitegeka’s exhibitions make the audience conscious of the exhibition space; the audience member comes to form part of the exhibition this way. (…)Perception in a Nitegeka exhibition is significant to the extent that its extension related the audience member to the physical malleability of the gallery space.