ART BASEL 2022

Misheck Masamvu

Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Misheck Masamvu’s (b. 1980, Mutare, Zimbabwe) works allow him to address the past while searching for a way of being in the world. As one of the most significant artists from Zimbabwe, Masamvu’s work offers a renewed understanding of visual culture in Africa and the decolonial project more broadly. Rhythmic lines and layered fields of colour have become a prominent language for Masamvu to explore structures of power and how history comes to bear on the contemporary moment, but also how one can adapt to a new way of interacting with the world.

Selected solo exhibitions: Show me how ruins make a home, A Gentil Carioca, São Paulo (2024); Exit Wounds, Goodman Gallery, New York (2024); Safety Pin, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2023); Pivot, Bernier/Eliades Gallery, Brussels (2023); Talk to me while I’m eating, Goodman
Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2021); Hata, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town (2019); Still Still, Goodman Gallery, Cape Town; Misheck Masamvu, Institut Français, Paris, France (2015); Disputed Seats, Influx Contemporary Art, Lisbon, Portugal (2009).

Notable group exhibitions include: Kuvhunura/Kupinda nemwenje mudziva, Fondation Blachere Bonnieux, France (2024); Translations: Afro-Asian Poetics, The Institutum, Singapore (2024); Inside Out, Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, Geneva (2022); Witness: Afro Perspectives, El Espacio 23, Miami, USA (2020); Allied with Power: African and African Diaspora Art from the Jorge M. Pérez Collection, Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami (2020); Two Together, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town (2020); Five Bobh: Painting at the End of an Era, Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2017); Africa 2.0 > is there a Contemporary African art?, Influx Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2010); Art, Migration and Identity,, Africa Museum, Arnhem (2008); and 696 , National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare (2008).

Major international exhibitions include: The ‘t’ is silent , 8th Biennial of Painting, Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium (2022); STILL ALIVE , 5th Aichi Triennale, Aichi, Japan (2022), NIRIN , 22nd Sydney Biennale, Sydney (2020); Incerteza Viva (Live Uncertainty), the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo (2016) and his international debut at Zimbabwe’s inaugural Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).

Collections include: A4 Arts Foundation (Cape Town, South Africa); Braunsfelder Family Collection (Cologne, Germany); Uieshema Collection (Tokyo, Japan); Perez Art Museum (Miami, USA); Pigozzi Collection (Geneva, Switzerland); Taguchi Art Collection (Tokyo, Japan); Fukutake Foundation (Auckland, New Zealand); COMMA Foundation (Damme, Belgium); ANA Collection (Lagos, Nigeria); Sigg Art Foundation, Le Castellet, France; Fondation Gandur pour l’Art (Geneva, Switzerland); and Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Cape Town, South Africa).

Masamvu lives and works in Harare, Zimbabwe.

William Kentridge

William Kentridge (b. 1955, Johannesburg, South Africa) is internationally acclaimed for his drawings, films, theatre and opera productions.

In 2024, in Venice, Kentridge premiered a new nine-episode video series SELF-PORTRAIT AS A COFFEE-POT – a site-specific installation curated by long-time collaborator and curator Carolyn Christov Bakargiev at the Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation. Folowing this, in October, MUBI presented: William Kentridge’s ‘Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot’ Premiere in New York.

In conjunction with the world premiere of his newly commissioned opera The Great Yes, The Great No, which debuted at LUMA Arles in July 2024, the solo exhibition Je n’attends plus (I’m Not Waiting Any Longer) presents a collection of major works, some of which had not been seen in Europe before.

Kentridge’s largest UK survey to date was held at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2022. An iteration of Kentridge’s Royal Academy survey opened at the Taipei Museum of Fine Arts in May 2024. In the same year Kentridge opened another major survey exhibition, In Praise of Shadows, at The Broad, Los Angeles. In 2023, this exhibition travelled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Kentridge’s work has been seen in museums across the globe since the 1990s, including the Luma Foundation, France (2024); Arsenale Institute for Politics of Representation, Venice (2024); Taipei Fine Arts Museum (2024); Museum of Modern Art, New York (1999, 2005, 2010); Albertina Museum, Vienna (2010); Musée du Louvre, Paris (2010); National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (2015); Kunstmuseum Basel (2019); Norval Foundation, Cape Town (2019). The artist has also participated in biennale’s including Documenta in Kassel (2012, 2002, 1997) and the Venice Biennale (2015, 2013, 2005, 1999, 1993).

Collections include: MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto; Guggenheim, Abu Dhabi and Zeitz MoCAA, Cape Town.

Kentridge lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

David Goldblatt

David Goldblatt (1930 – 2018) was born in Randfontein, a small mining town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Through his lens, South African he chronicled the structures, people and landscapes of South Africa from 1948 until his death in June 2018. Well known for his photography which explored both public and private life in South Africa, Goldblatt created a body of powerful images which depicted life during the time of Apartheid. Goldblatt also extensively photographed colonial era monuments and buildings with the idea that the architecture reveals something about the people who built them.

In particular, Goldblatt documented the people, landscapes and industry of the Witwatersrand, the resource-rich area in which he grew up and lived, where the local economy was based chiefly on mining. Equal parts artist and documentarian, Goldblatt was known for his practice of attaching extensive captions to his photographs, which almost always identify the subject, place, and time in which the image was taken. These titles often play a vital role in exposing the visible and invisible forces through which the country’s policies of extreme racism and segregation shaped the dynamics of life, especially along axes of gender, labor, identity, and freedom of movement. Beyond endowing his images with documentary power, Goldblatt’s titles also dignify the people and places he photographs.

In 1989, Goldblatt founded the Market Photography Workshop, a training institution in Johannesburg, for aspiring photographers. In 1998 he was the first South African to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Goldblatt Archive is held by Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut.

In 2001, a retrospective of his work, ‘David Goldblatt Fifty-One Years’ began a tour of galleries and museums. He was one of the few South African artists to exhibit at Documenta 11 (2002) and Documenta 12 (2007) in Kassel, Germany. A more recent retrospective includes, ‘David Goldblatt: No Ulterior Motive at the AIC’ (2018), which is now touring. This major traveling retrospective exhibition spans the seven decades of this South African photographer’s career, from the 1950s to the 2010s, demonstrating Goldblatt’s commitment to showing the realities of daily life in his country. The exhibition and accompanying publication bring together roughly 150 works by Goldblatt from the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago—two major Goldblatt repositories—including his early black-and-white photography and his post-apartheid, large-format color photography.

Goldblatt was the recipient of the 2006 Hasselblad award, the 2009 Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, the 2013 ICP Infinity Award and in 2016, he was awarded the Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the Ministry of Culture of France.

Other notable group exhibitions and biennales include: ILLUMInations at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, South Africa in Apartheid and After, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2013); Everything Was Moving: Photography from the 60s and 70s, Barbican Centre, London (2012). He also exhibited at the Jewish Museum (2010); and the New Museum (2009), both in New York.

Selected key collections include: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); Tate Modern, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The J. Paul Getty; Museum, Los Angeles; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; The Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm, Germany and New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Johannesburg Art Gallery, South Africa; Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago, Chile) is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who considers social injustices and human suffering through thought-provoking installations. Throughout his career Jaar has used different mediums to create compelling work that examines the way we engage with, and represent humanitarian crises. He is known as one of the most uncompromising, compelling, and innovative artists working today.

Through photography, film and installation he provokes the viewer to question our thought process around how we view the world around us. Jaar has explored significant political and social issues throughout his career, including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and the balance of power between the first and third world.

Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002).

Important individual exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005) and The Nederlands Fotomuseum (2019). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); and Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017).

The artist has realised more than seventy public interventions around the world. Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He was awarded the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018, and has recently received the prestigious Hasselblad award for 2020.

His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of institutions and private collections worldwide.

The artist lives and works in New York, USA.

Carlos Garaicoa

Carlos Garaicoa (B. 1967 Havana, Cuba) studied thermodynamics and later painting at the Instituto Superior de Arte, Havana (1989 – 1994). 

Garaicoa developed a multidisciplinary approach to address issues of culture and politics, particularly Cuban, through the study of architecture, urbanism and history. He focuses on a dialogue between art and urban space through which investigates the social structure of our cities in terms of their architecture. Through a wide variety of materials and media, Garaicoa found ways to criticise modernist Utopian architecture and the collapse of the 20th century ideologies. 

Garaicoa has held numerous solo exhibitions including Lunds Konsthall and Skissernass Museum, Lund (2019); Parasol Unit Foundation, London (2018); Fondazione Merz, Torino (2017); MAAT, Lisbon (2017); Azkuna Zentroa, Bilbao (2017); Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2016); Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo (2015); CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, Madrid (2014); Fundación Botín, Santander (2014); NC-Arte and FLORA ars + natura, Bogotá (2014); Kunsthaus Baselland Muttenz, Basel(2012); Kunstverein Braunschweig, Brunswick, Germany (2012); Contemporary Art Museum, Institute for Research in Art, Tampa (2007); H.F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (2011); Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA), Amsterdam (2010); Centre d’Art la Panera, Lérida (2011); Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Caja de Burgos (CAB), Burgos (2011); National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), Athens (2011); Inhotim Instituto de Arte Contemporáneo, Brumadinho (2012); Caixa Cultural, Río de Janeiro (2008); Museo ICO (2012) and Matadero (2010), Madrid; IMMA, Dublin (2010); Palau de la Virreina, Barcelona (2006); Museum of Contemporary Art (M.O.C.A), Los Angeles (2005); Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Bogotá (2000).

Garaicoa has participated in prestigious international events such as the Biennials of Havana (1991, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2003, 2009, 2012, 2015), Shanghai (2010), São Paulo (1998, 2004), Venice (2009, 2005), Johannesburg (1995), Liverpool (2006) and Moscow (2005), the Triennials of Auckland (2007), San Juan (2004), Yokohama (2001) and Echigo-Tsumari (2012); Documenta 11 (2003) and 14 (2017) and PhotoEspaña 12 (2012).

In 2005 Garaicoa received the XXXIX International Contemporary Art Prize Foundation “Pierre de Monaco” in Montecarlo, and the Katherine S. Marmor Award in Los Angeles.

Garaicoa currently lives and works between Havana and Madrid.

Shirin Neshat

Shirin Neshat (b. 1957, Qazvin, Iran) is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat’s early photographic works include the Women of Allah series (1993–1997), which explored the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political content or critique in favor of more poetic imagery and narratives. In her practice, she employs poetic imagery to engage with themes of gender and society, the individual and the collective, and the dialectical relationship between past and present, through the lens of her experiences of belonging and exile. 

She has mounted numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, including: the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Recent solo exhibitions include: Kunstraum Dornbirn, Austria; Faurschou Foundation, Copenhagen; Kunsthalle Tübingen, Germany; and Museo Correr,Venice,  Italy, which was an official corollary event to the 57th Biennale di Venezia in 2017. A major retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013. Neshat was awarded the Golden Lion Award, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), and the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize (2006). In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for “Best Director” at the 66th Venice International Film Festival. Dreamers marked her first solo show on the African continent, which exhibited at Goodman Gallery Johannesburg in 2016. That same year, Neshat featured in the New Revolutions: Goodman Gallery at 50 exhibition in Johannesburg and in the Summers group exhibition at Goodman Gallery Cape Town. In 2017, Neshat was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award for Painting. That same year, Neshat directed Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg. In 2017, Neshat was awarded the prestigious Praemium Imperiale award for Painting. That same year, Neshat directed Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida at the Salzburg.  The Broad Museum in Los Angeles recently hosted a survey exhibition of the last 25 years of Neshat’s work, which travelled on to Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2021. This year Neshat was the feature artist and Master of Photography at Photo London festival which took place in Somerset House in September. 

Neshat has directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival,  Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017,) and most recently Land of Dreams (2021) which premiered at the Venice Film Festival.  

The artist lives and works in New York, USA.

El Anatsui

El Anatsui (b. 1944, Anyako, Ghana) is an internationally acclaimed artist who transforms simple materials into complex assemblages that create distinctive visual impact. Anatsui uses resources typically discarded such as liquor bottle caps and cassava graters to create sculptures that defy categorisation. Anatsui’s use of these materials reflects his interest in reuse, transformation, and an intrinsic desire to connect to his continent while transcending the limitations of place. His work interrogates the history of colonialism and draws connections between consumption, waste and the environment. But at the core of Anatsui’s work is his unique formal language that distinguishes his practice.

Anatsui is well-known for large scale sculptures composed of thousands of folded and crumpled pieces of metal sourced from local alcohol recycling stations and bound together with copper wire. These intricate works, which can grow to be massive in scale, are both luminous and weighty, meticulously fabricated yet malleable. He leaves the installations open and encourages the works to take different forms every time they are installed.

In 2023, Anatsui was awarded the highly reputable Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. He was also included in TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2023. His major solo exhibition titled Behind the Red Moon, at the Tate Modern, explored elemental forces interwoven with human histories of power, oppression, dispersion and survival. In 2019, El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, a major career survey curated by Okwui Enwezor, opened at Haus der Kunst and travelled to Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Kunstmuseum Bern and Guggenheim Bilbao in 2020. In 2015, Anatsui was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, the Venice Biennale’s highest honour. Anatsui’s solo exhibition Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui, was organized by the Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio (2012), and travelled to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa (2013); then to the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, Florida (2014); and concluded at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California (2015).

Collections include: African Studies Gallery, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria; Akron Art Museum, Akron, Ohio; Asele Institute, Nimo, Nigeria; The British Museum, London, UK; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi, UAE; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Jordan National Gallery of Arts, Amman, Jordan; Musée Ariana, Geneva, Switzerland; and Osaka Foundation of Culture, Osaka, Japan.

Anatsui currently lives and works between Ghana and Nigeria.

Kapwani Kiwanga

Kapwani Kiwanga (b. 1978, Hamilton, Canada) traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and mediums including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Kiwanga co-opts the canon; she turns systems of power back on themselves, in art and in parsing broader histories. In this manner Kiwanga has developed an aesthetic vocabulary that she described as “exit strategies,” works that invite one to see things from multiple perspectives so as to look differently at existing structures and find ways to navigate the future differently.

In 2024, Kiwanga’s acclaimed solo presentation titled ‘Trinket’, for the Canadian Pavilion, at the 60th Venice Biennale, commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada, debuted a site-responsive sculptural installation made of conterie, also known as seed beads. The installation examined Global trade and transactional relations between Africa and Europe and continues the artist’s concerns with how diverse forms of power are manifested.

In 2023, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg presented Kiwanga’s first comprehensive mid-career retrospective, ‘The Length of the Horizon’. This show includes her memorable Venice Biennale installation Terrarium (2022).

In 2020, Kiwanga received the Prix Marcel Duchamp (FR). She was also the winner of the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and the annual Sobey Art Award (CA) in 2018.

Selected group exhibitions include: Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK); Serpentine Galleries, London (UK); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (CHN); MOT – Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (JPN); Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (DE); Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden – MACAAL, Marrakech (MAR); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (CA); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (USA); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (USA); Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal (CA); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus (DK) and MACBA, Barcelona (ESP).

Solo exhibitions include: Copenhagen Contemporary, Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunstinstituut Melly – Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Albertinum museum, Dresden; Artpace, San Antonio; Esker Foundation, Calgary; Tramway, Glasgow International; Power Plant, Toronto; Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago; South London Gallery, London and Jeu de Paume, Paris.

Collections include: NOMAS Foundation, Rome, Italy; FRAC PACA, Marseille, France; Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Castilla y Léon, MUSAC, León, Spain; Musée départemental d’art contemporain de Rochechouart, Rochechouart, France; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; Kadist Art Foundation Paris/San Francisco, France and USA; and Mead Art Museum, Amherst, USA.

Kiwanga lives and works in Paris.

Yto Barrada

Yto Barrada (Moroccan, French, b.1971, Paris) is recognized for her multidisciplinary investigations of cultural phenomena and historical narratives.
Engaging with the performativity of archival practices and public interventions, Barrada’s installations reinterpret social relationships, uncover subaltern histories, and reveal the prevalence of fiction in institutionalized narratives.

Barrada arrived at her artist practice through studies of history and political science, particularly in the negotiation of political and personal experiences. Her first series of photographs, ‘A Life Full of Holes,’ (1998–2004), used the Strait of Gibraltar as a site of inquiry, examining its status as a border between North Africa and Europe and its impact on the residents of Tangier.

Much of Barrada’s work has since focused on borderlands, microhistories, and autonomous agency within a political landscape. Interested in developing a platform for cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, she founded Cinémathèque de Tanger in 2006. North Africa’s first and only repertory cinema and archive, the Cinémathèque operates out of a restored 1930s theater known as the Cinema Rif, located in one of the city’s main squares.

In keeping with her exploration of identity, economics, and notions of authenticity, Barrada’s ‘Faux Guide,’ presented at Pace London (2015), focused on the fossil and mineral trade as an aspect of cultural production. Using museum collection practices as conceptual strategies, the artist’s multifaceted exhibition reflected on acts of subversion within tourist economies. Her first exhibition with Pace in New York, ‘How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself’ (2018), included a survey of the artist’s practice and included her installation and film essay, Tree Identification for Beginners, which revisited her mother’s 1966 trip to the United States on a State Department-sponsored travel program.

Informed by postcolonial thought and socio-political concerns, Barrada’s interests range from the tensions around borders, immigration, and tourism to the urban landscape, and from children’s toys to botany and paleontology. Her practice encompasses photography, film, sculpture, painting, printmaking, and publishing, while her installations often comprise both original work and found objects.

Within the interlinked logic of Barrada’s work lie secrets, pleasures, and a celebration of strategies of resistance to domination.

Barrada’s work has been exhibited at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2011); Tate Modern, London (2011); Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, Minnesota (2013); The Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams (2021); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021); and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022). In 2007, Barrada was selected to participate in the Venice Biennale. The artist has received multiple awards, including the Deutsche Guggenheim Artist of the Year (2011); the Abraaj Group Art Prize, UAE (2015); the Roy R. Neuberger Prize (2019); Mario Merz Prize (2022); Queen Sonja Print Award (2022), and Soros Arts Fellowship (2023). Works by Barrada are held in public collections worldwide, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; International Center of Photography, New York; Kunsthalle Basel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, among others.

Leonardo Drew

Leonardo Drew (b. 1961, Tallahassee, Florida, USA) is known for his significant installations and sculptures which explore the tension between order and chaos. Drew transforms accumulations of raw materials such as wood, scrap metal and cotton to create works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. His surfaces often approach a language of their own, embodying the laboured process of writing oneself into history.

Drew’s work has been seen in major museums worldwide. He was commissioned for a new outdoor project City in the Grass for Madison Square Park in 2019, marking the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s 38th public commission and the artist’s first major public outdoor art project. City in the Grass was presented as a solo exhibition in three museums, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut (2021); Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson (2020); and North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh (2020). In 2022, Drew was elected as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design. Another major new commission featured at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK in 2023. Drew’s mid-career survey, Existed, premiered at the Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston in 2009 and travelled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Collections include: Tate, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD.
Drew currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Ghada Amer

Ghada Amer was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1963 and moved to Nice, France when she was eleven years old. She remained in France to further her education and completed both of her undergraduate requirements and MFA at Villa Arson École Nationale Supérieure in Nice (1989), during which she also studied abroad at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts in 1987. In 1991 she moved to Paris to complete a post-diploma at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques. Following early recognition in France, she was invited to the United States in 1996 for a residency at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has since then been based in New York.

Amer’s wide-ranging practice spans painting, cast sculpture, ceramics, works on paper, and garden and mixed-media installations. Further, she often collaborates with her long-time friend Reza Farkhondeh. Recognising both that women are taught to model behaviors and traits shaped by others, and that art history and the history of painting in particular are shaped largely by expressions of masculinity, Amer’s work actively subverts these frameworks through both aesthetics and content. Her practice explores the complicated nature of identity as it is developed through cultural and religious norms as well as personal longings and understandings of the self.

Amer’s work is in public collections around the world including The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; the Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah; the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; the Guggenheim Museum, Abu Dhabi; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the Samsung Museum, Seoul; among others. Among invitations to prestigious group shows and biennials—such as the Whitney Biennial in 2000 and the Venice Biennales of 1999 (where she won the UNESCO Prize), 2005 and 2007—she was given a midcareer retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York in 2008. Multiple institutions across Marseille, France are currently co-organising a retrospective for 2022 that will travel to the United States and Asia.

Yinka Shonibare

Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962, London, United Kingdom) studied Fine Art at Byam Shaw School of Art, London (1989) and received his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London (1991). His interdisciplinary practice uses citations of Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation. Through examining race, class and the construction of cultural identity, his works comment on the tangled interrelationship between Africa and Europe, and their respective economic and political histories.

In 2024, Serpentine Gallery, London UK, presented a solo exhibition of works in their Serpentine South gallery titled Suspended States. Shonibare’s work is also featured at the Venice Biennale 2024 as part of the Nigerian Pavilion, in the group show: Nigeria Imaginary.

To mark Sharjah Biennial’s 30th anniversary in February 2023, Shonibare was commissioned to create a series of new works for the exhibition. He also unveiled a new outdoor sculpture commissioned by the David Oluwale Memorial Association in Aire Park, Leeds as part of Leeds 2023.

In November 2022, Shonibare hosted the international launch of Guest Artists Space (G. A. S.) Foundation, a non-profit founded and developed by the artist. The Foundation is dedicated to facilitating cultural exchange through residencies, public programmes and exhibition opportunities for creative practitioners from around the world. The live/work residency spaces are set across sites in Lagos and a rural working farm in Ijebu, Ogun State.

A major retrospective of his work opened at the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg in the same year followed by his co-ordination of The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London which opened in September 2021. The survey solo exhibition, Yinka Shonibare CBE: Planets in My Head, opened in April 2022 at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan followed by the unveiling in June 2022 of a major new sculptural work, Wind Sculpture in Bronze I at Royal Djurgården, Stockholm.

In 2013, he was elected a Royal Academician and was awarded the honour of ‘Commander of the Order of the British Empire’ in 2019. His installation ‘The British Library’ was acquired by Tate in 2019 and is currently on display at Tate Modern, London. Shonibare was awarded the prestigious Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon Award in 2021.

In 2010, his first public art commission ‘Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle’ was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London and is in the permanent collection of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London. In 2008, his mid-career survey began at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, travelling in 2009 to the Brooklyn Museum, New York and the Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize.

Notable museum collections include: the Tate Collection, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome and VandenBroek Foundation, The Netherlands.

Shonibare lives and works in London, United Kingdom.