Introduction
In contemporary African art, materiality is never a neutral condition.
When an artist chooses cardboard over canvas, tar over pigment, discarded metal over polished steel, or retrieved rubber over manufactured polymer, the choice is not merely practical. It is conceptual. The material arrives in the studio already charged – with use, with movement, with damage, with labour, and with the histories of the hands and systems through which it has passed.
A surface is where those histories are deposited. A support carries what has already happened to it.
This is the central argument of any sustained engagement with contemporary African mixed-media art: material transformation is not only a technical operation. It is historical, aesthetic and philosophical. The artist who works with found, discarded or repurposed matter does not simply convert waste into form. They interpret what that matter has seen, what it has carried, what it has survived, and what new structure it can bear without erasing the trace of its former life.
Sustainability may be part of this conversation. Ecological consciousness is genuinely present in certain practices, and it would be wrong to dismiss it. But it does not exhaust the meaning of the work. To speak of contemporary African art solely through the language of sustainability is to reduce a complex field of material intelligence to a single ethical register – and to miss the historical and philosophical weight of what these artists are producing.
For a broader orientation in the field, OOA Gallery’s guide to contemporary African art offers a comprehensive critical framework.
A Work as Point of Departure
Patrick Tagoe-Turkson, Abunanun 2, 2022. Found flip-flops on suede, 198.5 × 132 cm.
Patrick Tagoe-Turkson’s Abunanun 2 offers a precise point of entry into this question. Made from found flip-flops on suede, the work transforms worn fragments of rubber into a dense field of colour, rhythm and tactile structure. Greens, blues, yellows and darkened traces accumulate across the surface like a woven landscape, yet the material never fully loses the memory of its previous life. Each fragment once belonged to an object designed for walking, for contact with the ground, for movement through weather, streets, coastlines and everyday economies.
The work does not ask the viewer to admire waste transformed into beauty. It asks the viewer to read use itself as a material history. Rubber becomes colour; wear becomes rhythm; discard becomes structure. Abunanun 2 makes visible one of the central arguments of material transformation in contemporary African art: the artist does not erase what the material has carried. He reorganises it into a surface where memory, movement and form remain inseparable.
This logic extends well beyond a single work or a single practice. It describes a significant strand of contemporary African art over the past two decades – and one that has gained renewed critical attention in the most prominent international contexts.
A Renewed Attention to Material Transformation
Basel’s recent art week offered several presentations that foregrounded the afterlives of materials without reducing them to ecological messaging alone. At Art Basel, Ibrahim Mahama’s public commission The God of Small Things brought together hand-woven textiles, metal head pans and reclaimed tyre ply in a work rooted in labour, postcolonial industry and collective memory. At Africa Basel, Circle Art Gallery’s presentation of Dickens Otieno extended the conversation around urban residue and transformed matter through woven aluminium works. At VOLTA, Flowing Upstream, a project by Martin Wöllenstein in collaboration with the Supreme Masqueraders Society of Ghana, used hundreds of discarded costumes from the Ankos Masquerade in Sekondi-Takoradi, reassembled into patchwork textiles forming a modular, immersive architectural environment.
These examples do not announce a single movement. They clarify how, within African and Africa-related artistic contexts, materials that have passed through systems of use, trade, performance, technology or damage can undergo more than a simple change of medium. Their transformation becomes a change of status. What had been residue becomes evidence; what had been overlooked becomes structure.
Beyond Recycling: Materiality as Artistic Language
The word recycling can be useful, but it can also flatten the complexity of contemporary African mixed-media art. It risks reducing artistic decisions to environmental virtue or practical ingenuity. In many practices, the question is not simply how waste becomes art, but how matter becomes language. The distinction is significant.
El Anatsui has articulated this principle with characteristic economy. In remarks reported by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker (2021), he described his approach as: “I let the material lead me.” The statement shifts the frame. It moves attention away from recycling as a moral or ecological category and toward material intelligence as an artistic method. The material is not passive matter awaiting elevation. It is already a field of formal possibilities, historical constraints and aesthetic decisions.
A discarded flip-flop is not only rubber. It may carry the pressure of walking, migration, coastal erosion, informal trade and global consumption. A sheet of metal is not only industrial residue. It may hold dents, rust, painted marks and traces of labour. A piece of cardboard is not only a poor substitute for canvas. It may evoke fragility, urban density, damaged walls, temporary shelters, torn posters and the unstable surfaces of the city.
The artist’s intervention does not erase these histories. It reorganises them. Cutting, stitching, scraping, assembling, hammering, burning, layering or suspending matter becomes a way of producing meaning. Surface becomes archive. Texture becomes thought. Accumulation becomes rhythm. Repair becomes form.
This distinction matters because it protects the work from two kinds of reductive reading. Found materials are not signs of poverty to be aestheticised, nor proof of a supposedly innate resourcefulness. They are chosen, handled and transformed because they possess a density – historical, tactile, social – that more neutral materials often lack.
Discarded Matter as Archive
If material can become language, it is because it already carries memory. An archive is usually imagined as a room of documents: dates, records and official memory. Yet many contemporary artists work with another kind of archive – the archive held in matter itself.
A jute sack, a plastic container, a bottle cap, a torn poster, a tar-darkened surface or a fragment of metal can preserve histories without words. These materials register use through wear. They retain the pressure of hands, roads, markets, labour, trade, water, dust and time. Their surfaces are not blank. They are marked by circulation.
This archival quality is central to the power of materiality in contemporary African art. The work does not simply represent history from a distance. It allows history to remain physically present inside the object. Matter becomes evidence, but not in a literal or documentary sense. It becomes a charged substance through which memory can be seen, touched and reconfigured.
Art-Historical Anchors: Metal, Plastic and Textile
This understanding of matter as archive has important art-historical precedents.
El Anatsui remains a decisive reference in this field. His flexible metal works – made from discarded bottle caps and aluminium seals connected by copper wire – have altered the global understanding of sculpture, textile and installation simultaneously. Their power lies not only in scale or visual splendour, but in the way they hold together trade, consumption, colonial histories, labour, repetition and formal freedom. Each component is modest; the accumulation is monumental. The visual logic of the work and its material logic are inseparable.
Romuald Hazoumè offers another important point of reference. His masks made from plastic jerry cans do not simply transform functional containers into sculptural faces. They redirect familiar objects – tied to informal fuel economies, cross-border movement and postcolonial mobility – into satire, social critique and political memory. The material does not decorate the argument. It is the argument.
Abdoulaye Konaté expands this discussion by demonstrating that material transformation in contemporary African art is not limited to discarded or found objects. Working primarily with fabric, he develops large-scale textile compositions in which colour, cutting, layering and chromatic rhythm become instruments of historical and political thought. The textile is not a decorative surface, nor a neutral support. It is the very structure through which meaning is organised.
In Konaté’s practice, materiality operates through accumulation, tension and scale. Strips and fields of fabric produce visual density while carrying references to collective memory, social crisis, cultural inheritance and political experience. His work therefore broadens the argument: matter becomes language not only when it has been discarded and recovered, but also when it is cut, layered, assembled and transformed into a surface capable of holding history.
Ibrahim Mahama’s broader practice with materials associated with trade, labour and postcolonial economies deepens this conversation further. His installations reveal how matter linked to transport, commerce and industrial histories can become a monumental surface of historical reflection. The material is not treated as symbol alone; it remains a physical trace of economic circulation.
Together, these practices show that material transformation in contemporary African art cannot be reduced to assemblage or recycling alone. It includes metal, plastic, textile, industrial residue and architectural scale. It includes what has been discarded, but also what has been cut, layered, woven, suspended and formally reconfigured.
Violence, Repair and Transformation
Once material is understood as archive, the argument becomes more difficult when the material carries histories of violence. Some objects do not merely bear traces of use; they retain the memory of harm.
In the work of Gonçalo Mabunda, decommissioned weapons and related fragments from Mozambique’s civil war are transformed into masks, figures and throne-like objects. The violence embedded in the material does not disappear through this transformation. It is redirected. A weapon fragment may be cut, welded, assembled and given sculptural form, but its prior function continues to shape how the object is read.
This is what makes Mabunda’s practice so important to the argument of this insight. His work demonstrates that transformation is not the same as purification. The artwork does not ask the viewer to forget the material’s history. It asks the viewer to confront the fact that history can be reorganised without being erased. The tension between repair and residue is therefore central: his masks and thrones show how matter can be redirected from destruction toward symbolic presence while still carrying the political afterlife of conflict.
Cyrus Kabiru approaches material transformation from an entirely different register. His sculptural eyewear, known as C-Stunners, assembled from retrieved and recycled materials recovered from Nairobi’s streets and markets, brings found objects into contact with performance, self-portraiture, design and urban imagination. Where Mabunda’s practice is rooted in the weight of historical violence, Kabiru’s is oriented toward the speculative: discarded matter proposes not a return to the past, but a reconfiguration of how the future might be seen.
Together, Mabunda and Kabiru clarify the range of material intelligence within contemporary African art. Transformation may address historical violence, or it may open toward technological imagination. It may carry grief, critique, humour, invention or self-fashioning. It is never one thing.
Surface, City and the Density of Use
From historical violence, the argument moves toward another field where material carries pressure: the city.
Contemporary African cities are environments in which use is sustained, accumulated and written visibly onto surfaces. Walls hold successive layers of paint, poster, water damage, repair and repainting. Objects move constantly between function and discard, visibility and neglect, usefulness and residue. The city is an archive of decisions, forces and transformations that have left their marks without being fully erased.
Assemblage speaks directly to this condition. It does not smooth over fragmentation. It allows fragments to remain legible as fragments while giving them structure and relational meaning. It converts density into composition.
Surface, in this context, becomes a major site of artistic intelligence. The surface is where history is deposited, covered, scratched away, repainted, torn and rewritten. It is where the city leaves its marks – and where the artist intervenes, not to produce a clean image on a neutral ground, but to work with and through what has already happened to the material.
This also bears on questions of figuration. As explored in our previous insight on portraiture, presence and self-definition, the figure in contemporary African art does not appear on a neutral background. It emerges from a surface that is already socially and historically charged – and the nature of that surface changes the meaning of the figure it holds.
A Second Work: Surface as Condition
Armand Boua, Le Djossi, 2024. Mixed media on canvas, 146 × 208 cm.
Armand Boua’s Le Djossi offers a second point of entry into the argument, this time through figuration and damaged surface. The work presents human forms that do not appear as fully secured bodies, but as figures emerging through abrasion, opacity and partial erasure. Blackened passages, exposed ground, pale fields of paint, electric marks of blue, and areas of yellow and orange intensity create a surface that seems less painted over than worked through. The image is not placed upon the support; it appears to have been wrested from it.
This matters because Boua’s material language makes vulnerability formally legible. In Le Djossi, the figure cannot be separated from the unstable ground that holds it. The surface carries tearing, interruption and residue, so that the human presence appears through the same conditions of damage and persistence that structure the work materially. The result is not illustration. It is a form of material thinking: the support becomes part of the figure’s condition, and the figure becomes inseparable from the history carried by the surface.
OOA Gallery: Distinct Practices, Shared Concerns
Within OOA Gallery’s programme, material transformation does not present itself as a unified style or movement. It appears as a shared intellectual concern across distinct practices, each with its own visual grammar, formal logic and historical situation. What connects these artists is not a common medium, but a common refusal to treat material as passive support.
Armand Boua’s practice offers one of the most sustained investigations of surface as urban memory. Across his broader body of work, cardboard, acrylic, tar, scraping, damaged grounds and dense fields of paint become more than technical means; they form the conditions through which the figure appears. In works such as Le Djossi, this logic is carried into a mixed-media surface where human presence seems to emerge through abrasion, opacity and partial erasure. Boua does not simply place figures on a support; he makes the support part of the figure’s condition. The surface evokes walls, streets, erosion and the physical fragility of public life in Abidjan. His paintings do not rely on subject matter alone to produce meaning. They make vulnerability visible through the skin of the work itself, producing a visual structure in which fragility, exposure and persistence are materially present.
Francklin Mbungu approaches materiality through paper, cut-out forms, threads, ribbons and layered surfaces. His figures, musicians and scenes of Kinshasa’s social life are constructed through fragments rather than simply drawn onto a neutral support. In his work, collage becomes a structural language: a way to give rhythm, relief and tactile presence to urban memory, popular culture and collective imagination. The surface is not a background. It is a process – built up through decisions that remain partially visible in the finished work.
Patrick Tagoe-Turkson, as Abunanun 2 demonstrates, gathers discarded rubber and plastic fragments in relation to Ghana’s coastal environment and converts worn material into fields of colour, rhythm and material density. The force of the work lies in the way an object of everyday movement and global mass production accumulates meaning when extracted from circulation and reorganised as art. Its worn surface, colour and form all remain active within the composition.
DOFF brings a different material intensity to the question of damaged matter. His mixed-media practice incorporates found and industrial materials – circuit boards, steel wires, burned surfaces, fabric, bullet casings and paxalu, a bituminous waterproofing material – that carry the physical evidence of damaged environments, technological residue and historical vulnerability. These are not decorative additions. Through scraping, heating, assembling and layering, he builds surfaces that function as sites of resistance and reconstruction, where damage is not aestheticised but formally confronted.
Onyis Martin engages with the city as a surface of communication and erasure. His work draws on the layered visual language of urban walls – the accumulation of posters, texts, signs, painted-over surfaces and public writing that constitutes the informal archive of the street. What has been written, covered, torn or repeated becomes structural to the work. The wall is not a metaphor here. It is a material condition that the work internalises and extends.
Hamed Ouattara, working across art, design and sculptural object, transforms discarded oil barrels, sheet metal and industrial remnants into objects with strong formal and material presence. Scratches, dents, painted markings and surface oxidation are not defects to be concealed. They are part of the object’s memory, incorporated into its visual logic. His practice demonstrates that material intelligence in contemporary African art is not confined to painting or traditional sculpture. It extends into design and functional form, where the distinction between aesthetic object and use object is itself part of the critical proposition.
Across these practices, OOA Gallery’s position becomes clear: contemporary African art cannot be understood through subject matter or geography alone. It must be read through the intelligence of material choice, the logic of surface, the precision of formal transformation and the historical consciousness that each material carries into the work.
Innovation Beyond Newness
The movement from material archive to material language also changes how innovation should be understood. Innovation is frequently confused with novelty – new tools, new technologies, new images, new systems of production. Yet some of the most rigorous forms of innovation in contemporary African art begin not with the new, but with what already exists: with materials already present in the world, already charged with history, already shaped by use.
This distinction matters particularly in discussions of contemporary African art, where questions of innovation have too often been framed by external expectations. Material experimentation asserts a form of artistic autonomy. It refuses the idea that contemporary African art must derive its authority from imported media or inherited institutional categories. It insists, instead, on the possibility of building complex, formally rigorous contemporary languages from local, industrial, urban and post-consumer materials – without reducing those materials to symbols of scarcity, and without reducing the practice to a gesture of ecological virtue.
A found object does not become innovative by virtue of being unusual. It becomes innovative when the artist changes the conditions under which it can be seen, read and understood. A worn material may become structural; an industrial remnant may become surface; a discarded object may become archive; a fragment may become a method of thinking about collective memory, historical violence or urban transformation.
This positions materiality within a broader question that extends across contemporary practice – including photography, digital collage and image-based work: how do artists work with what already exists? How do they transform available images, archives, objects and memories into autonomous visual languages? The passage from matter to image does not dissolve the question of materiality. It deepens it.
Why Material Intelligence Matters
For those who engage seriously with contemporary African art – including collectors, institutions and critics – material experimentation is not a secondary or decorative concern. It is a primary condition of meaning.
A work made on a neutral support may carry profound meaning, but its material ground often remains separate from the history it depicts. By contrast, a work made from cardboard, tar, discarded rubber, recovered metal, bullet casings, fabric remnants or layered paper brings its own history into the artwork. The material is not simply the carrier of an image. It is one of the conditions through which the image becomes intelligible.
This difference matters because it changes the temporal life of the work. Such objects do not begin at the moment of artistic production. They have a before: a life of use, circulation, damage, abandonment or transformation. The artist’s intervention does not erase that earlier life; it gives it a new structure. The work therefore holds more than one time at once – the time of the material, the time of the artist’s gesture, and the time of the viewer’s encounter.
To collect such works is to engage with objects whose significance is not only iconographic or formal, but historical and material. What has this surface absorbed? What histories remain visible? What has been cut, repaired, layered or preserved? How does the material affect the meaning of the image? How does the object carry evidence of labour, circulation or memory?
These questions deepen the experience of collecting without reducing art to a market category. They invite a more attentive form of looking – one that recognises the full complexity of what the work holds, and the precision with which the artist has transformed that complexity into form.
Sustainability is part of this conversation, but it should not be allowed to dominate it. To speak only of contemporary African art and sustainability is to foreclose the deeper question. The most rigorous works do not simply announce ecological consciousness. They ask viewers and collectors to recognise matter as a bearer of time, conflict, labour, social life and artistic thought.
Transformation as Knowledge
At this point, material transformation can no longer be understood as a formal effect or an ethical gesture alone. It is a way of making visible what ordinary categories tend to separate: object and history, surface and memory, labour and image, damage and invention.
The artists discussed in this insight do not treat matter as mute substance waiting to be elevated by art. They work with materials that already carry pressure – whether that pressure comes from trade, migration, urban precarity, ecological damage, conflict, performance or everyday use. Their task is not to cleanse those materials of their histories, but to reorganise them into forms that can be seen, felt and thought.
This is the intellectual force of materiality in contemporary African art. A discarded object, a torn support, a woven fragment or a decommissioned weapon does not become meaningful because art redeems it. It becomes meaningful because the artist reveals what was already latent within it: a record of movement, a social relation, a trace of violence, a rhythm of labour, a possibility of transformation.
Material transformation, then, is not simply the passage from waste to artwork. It is the passage from residue to relation. It shows that matter is never outside history – and that the most compelling contemporary practices are often those capable of making history visible through the very substance of the work.
For related essays in this series, explore the OOA Gallery insights archive.
Sources: OOA Gallery artist pages and contemporary African art guide; OOA Gallery artwork documentation on Patrick Tagoe-Turkson’s Abunanun 2 (2022); OOA Gallery artwork documentation on Armand Boua’s Le Djossi (2024); White Cube documentation on Ibrahim Mahama’s The God of Small Things, Art Basel public commission; Circle Art Gallery documentation on Dickens Otieno, Africa Basel; VOLTA documentation on Flowing Upstream, a project by Martin Wöllenstein in collaboration with the Supreme Masqueraders Society of Ghana and Impari, curated by Carlos Cabral Nunes; Goodman Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery documentation on El Anatsui; Julian Lucas, “How El Anatsui Broke the Seal on Contemporary Art,” The New Yorker, 2021, source for the El Anatsui quotation; October Gallery and QAGOMA documentation on Romuald Hazoumè; Templon documentation on Abdoulaye Konaté; THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE, Artsy and related documentation on Gonçalo Mabunda; AKKA Project, SMAC Gallery and museum documentation on Cyrus Kabiru.
Note on sources: The quotation attributed to El Anatsui – “I let the material lead me” – is cited as reported by Julian Lucas in The New Yorker (2021), not as a direct studio-published statement. Descriptions of Basel week presentations reflect documentation available at the time of publication; readers are encouraged to consult the linked sources directly. All artist material descriptions are based on official gallery, museum or fair documentation.
