Living Archives: Ancestral Currents Between Remembering, Resonance, and Renewal

Living Archives: Ancestral Currents Between Remembering, Resonance, and Renewal

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This curatorial exhibition aims to bring together African artists whose practices move through ancestral memory, spiritual lineage and the living archive. This exhibition considers how contemporary art functions as a vessel between ancestral resonance and a space of renewal. Here, this history is not only seen as a safeguard but also reshapes the way in which artists reimagine and create a sense of belonging. These artists aim to resist the confines of Eurocentric frameworks, offering African art as an evolving practice that is spiritually rooted. Rather than positioning African art as a static tradition or a symbol of postcolonial struggle, Living Archives: Ancestral currents remembering, resonance and renewal aims to invite viewers into a space of contemplation, connection, and transformation. Through a curated selection of diverse practices, the exhibition reveals how Contemporary African draw on the depth of their cultural inheritance – personal, spiritual and historical – to craft work that is complex, intimate, and resistant.

Living Archives: Ancestral currents remembering, resonance and renewal affirms that African contemporary art is not fixed in time. Through painting, photography, installation and mixed media, the artists engage with archives that are both personal and collective, tangible and intangible, material and immaterial. Their work references a sense of belonging, spiritual lineage, colonial past and everyday strategies or survival and adaptation. In doing so, art becomes a visual language of continuity, preserving memory, while creating space that resists erasure and invites transformation. The exhibition serves as a living archive—where past and present converge to become vessels for cultural, historical, and spiritual renewal. The featured artists respond to urban life, ancestral memory, and social change in ways that challenge reductive narratives and celebrate layered African realities. Their works are not merely illustrations of heritage; they embody theory, critique, and visionary insight. They speak on their own terms, with authority, rather than seeking validation from Western institutions. It is dynamic, globally engaged, and deeply reflective of its local and spiritual contexts. It challenges dominant frameworks by centering artists who use their practices to question, remember, and imagine.

This exhibition focuses on the connection between Francophone and Anglophone Africa context, highlighting how African artists use their practice to respond to colonial histories, while still positioning themselves within a cultural landscape. Through this exchange, art-making becomes a site of belonging, where the weight of history sparks visions of renewal. Their work are not merely illustrations of heritage, they embody theory, critique, and visionary insight. In this sense, African artists from West and Central Africa — regardless of the countries they currently reside in—use art-based practices to explore and express the poetics of urban life, diasporic identity, and intergenerational knowledge. Through their work, images become dynamic sites of preservation and transformation, capturing the essence of home and cultural memory while continuously reinterpreting what it means to belong. This artistic lens bridges distances and histories, allowing artists to hold space for fluid, living archives that resonate across borders. This exhibition understands memory not as something fixed, but as a living archive. Renewal is seen not as rupture, but as a cyclical movement that carries ancestral presence forward while nurturing the emergence of new artistic forms. It calls for a broader understanding of how spirituality, memory, and history continue to shape artistic innovation. These voices are not peripheral—they are central to how the works are framed, interpreted, and experienced. It aims to open a space for meaningful pan-African dialogue—bridging the artistic and spiritual landscapes of West, and Central Africa. It cultivates connection between artists, publics, and gallery space while resisting the flattening of African creativity into a singular narrative. This is not just an exhibition. It is a reclamation. A statement of multiplicity. A call to listen—deeply and differently—to the resonant and renewing currents of African contemporary art.

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Above Artwork Details: mixed media of artworks by Muyon Danyela Mafulu

This section explores how artists reconfigure memory through experimentation, blending digital media, photography, and material practice. Renewal emerges here not as rupture, but as rhythm—a constant reworking of ancestral presence through new forms.

Here, art becomes a medium of regeneration. Each artist transforms inherited imagery into something renewed—remixing the archive through the lens of personal and cultural evolution.

The final movement offers a meditative space that binds the exhibition’s threads together. The participating artists collectively remind us that to create is to remember—and to remember is to renew.

This section invites viewers to pause and listen—to feel how the ancestral pulse continues through paint, pixels, and photography. It positions creativity as ritual and the artwork as a site of communion between the living and the remembered.