Beyond Geography: Rethinking Contemporary African Art
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, In Minor Keys, by Koyo Kouoh, offers a timely reminder that the conversation around Africa and its diasporas is no longer peripheral. It is central. Contemporary African art can no longer be contained by geography alone. The continent remains an essential point of reference, but many artists today work across cultural, linguistic, and geographic contexts that reflect the realities of migration, mobility, and global exchange. For a broader overview of the field, see our guide to contemporary African art.
From Lagos to London, Dakar to New York, or Fort-de-France to Paris, artists engage with influences that unsettle fixed ideas of origin. Contemporary African art, in this sense, is not bound to a single territory. It is shaped by movement: a field in which identities are continually negotiated, reworked, and redefined. Museums such as Zeitz MOCAA have made this shift especially visible in the way they frame contemporary art from Africa and its diaspora.
Identity as a Constructed and Evolving Narrative
Hybrid Identities and Cultural Layering
For many artists working across Africa and its diasporas, identity is not a stable category. It is something formed, tested, and reformulated over time. Their practices often bring together local traditions, global references, and personal histories in visual languages marked by density and complexity.
These works do not present identity as singular or settled. They hold several perspectives at once. Cultural heritage, urban experience, and transnational exposure sit side by side, producing images that resist simplification and make room for ambiguity, tension, and nuance.
Memory, History and Reappropriation
Memory is central to this process. Artists frequently return to archives, oral histories, and inherited narratives, revisiting them through contemporary perspectives. This often involves a critical engagement with colonial histories and with the visual and cultural frameworks they continue to shape.
Through reappropriation, fragmentation, and reconstruction, these practices open up a broader reconsideration of how history is represented. History does not appear here as a closed record. It remains a site of negotiation, revision, and reinterpretation.
Transnational Practices and Global Circulation
Artists Between Worlds
Many contemporary African artists work within transnational networks, moving between studios, residencies, and exhibition contexts across continents. This mobility is not simply logistical. It leaves a visible mark on their artistic language and shapes their conceptual approach in lasting ways.
Their work often reflects a condition of being between worlds, where different cultural references meet, overlap, and come into friction. Such artists are often better understood through circulation, encounter, and exchange than through national categories alone.
Exhibitions, Biennials and Networks
International exhibitions and biennials have played an important role in bringing these transnational practices into clearer view. Large-scale group exhibitions and institutional programmes have increasingly foregrounded artists from Africa and its diasporas within broader global narratives. Events such as Dak’Art in Senegal, the Bamako Encounters, 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, and La Biennale di Venezia have helped expand the map of contemporary art into a more polycentric field, one in which African voices are increasingly central. This shift is also visible in the trajectory of artists such as Armand Boua, represented by OOA Gallery, whose work addresses the lives of street children in Abidjan and was presented at the Ivory Coast Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2022.
These curatorial, institutional, and market networks support the visibility and circulation of contemporary African art, while also shaping the ways in which it is framed, contextualised, and understood.
Visual Languages: Between Figuration and Symbolism
Portraiture and Presence
Figuration, and portraiture in particular, holds a significant place in contemporary African art. Through representations of the human figure, artists explore questions of presence, identity, and self-definition, often challenging inherited modes of representation. This remains especially visible in the work of Tiffany Alfonseca, whose richly layered portraits engage with Black and Afro-Latin diasporic identity. The continued relevance of portraiture within African visual traditions is also reflected in major institutional collections such as that of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
These portraits do more than describe. They assert visibility, dignity, and agency. The figure becomes a site through which larger questions of belonging, memory, and representation are brought into view.
Symbolic and Conceptual Approaches
Alongside figuration, many artists develop symbolic and conceptual visual languages that move beyond direct representation. Through abstraction, repetition, and material experimentation, they produce works that operate across several levels of meaning. Such concerns also resonate in the work of Jomad, where memory, atmosphere, and layered visual language play a central role.
These approaches often draw on cultural references, spiritual systems, or highly personal vocabularies, inviting interpretation rather than prescribing a single reading. Meaning, in this context, emerges through sustained engagement rather than immediate clarity.
Diaspora and the Global Art Ecosystem
Collectors and Transnational Narratives
The growing visibility of artists working across the African diaspora has also reshaped how their work is discussed, exhibited, and collected internationally. This shift reflects a broader awareness of the complexity of contemporary African art, beyond definitions that are overly narrow or tied too closely to geography alone.
Dedicated platforms have been instrumental in supporting this evolution. Fairs such as 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair — present in London, New York, and Marrakech — have created focused spaces for discovery, dialogue, and acquisition, connecting artists with an increasingly global collector base. Meanwhile, a new generation of collectors across the diaspora — from Accra to Atlanta, from Paris to São Paulo — is building collections shaped by personal histories of migration, heritage, and cultural belonging. These collectors do not simply acquire works; they also help expand the contexts in which contemporary African art is seen, discussed, and valued.
From Cultural Identity to Market Recognition
As these practices gain greater institutional visibility, they also become more prominent within the global art market. The relationship between identity and value, however, remains complex.
Rather than reducing artistic practices to market categories, it is more useful to consider how cultural narratives, institutional recognition, and critical discourse intersect in shaping longer-term trajectories. At OOA Gallery, this conviction informs the way we work with artists whose practices are rooted in diasporic experience and transnational dialogue, as reflected in our exhibitions.
Conclusion: A Field Defined by Movement
Contemporary African art is not defined by borders, but by the capacity of artists to navigate, reinterpret, and transform multiple cultural realities. Through diasporic experience and transnational practice, artists contribute to a reconfiguration of contemporary art that challenges established frameworks and expands the terms of global artistic discourse.
Identity, in this field, is not a fixed point of origin. It is something continually made and remade through movement, memory, and exchange.
Sources: La Biennale di Venezia, “Biennale Arte 2026: In Minor Keys”; Biennial Foundation, “Dak’Art: African Contemporary Art Biennale”; Biennial Foundation, “Bamako Encounters”; 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, “About Us.” These sources support the references to international biennials, art fairs, and transnational platforms discussed in this article.
May 2026 — Editorial by OOA Gallery
