In collaboration with Creative Industries Fund NL, the Prince Claus Fund is organizing a mentoring program with the aim of supporting the global art scene and re-imagining the future through a new, creative and immersive artistic approach. Entitled “Building Beyond“, this incubation program kicks off its 3 cycle by unveiling a new cohort of 12 talented mid-career artists.
Drawn from eight different countries, these hand-picked contemporary actors present a diversity of artistic orientations, including visual arts, performance, research, photography, architecture, urban planning and digital design. Through their singular art practice, these artists promise a glorious new perspective on the future of their region.
Over the course of a year-long, interdisciplinary program, the Building Beyond mentorship, jointly organized by the Prince Claus Fund & Creative Industries Fund NL, will bring together 12 artists and cultural practitioners. A period during which they will be supported by four mentors specialized in art, design and architecture: artistic advisor and curator, Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy; artist, architect, critical space practitioner, Ola Hassanain; architectural researcher, designer and performer, Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk; curator and cultural practitioner, Hicham Bouzid as well as by their peers. Program recipients will work to accelerate their engaged community practices centered on the ideas of urban space and citizenship.
For this 3 cycle of the Building Beyond mentoring program, the cohort of artists will take an analytical look at the challenges and opportunities in their local context. The subject of study will be their respective communities, primarily spatial practices and vernacular conceptions, of the (im)permanence attached to public spatial dynamics and the holding of space. The incubation period offered by the “Building Beyond” program will enable artists to explore artistically the interactions between individuals, communities and their spatial environment, leading to the emergence of transformative urban programs that fuse community realities with an imagination of their own.
The 12 contemporary artists selected to benefit from the personalized support offered by the “Building Beyond” mentoring program are Akwasi Bediako Afrane, Chantell Hassan, Doha Ibrahim, Elolo Bosoka, Isabella Asiimwe, Jesse Gérard Mbango, Khotso Lamola, Michael Tesfaye, Nneoma Angela Okorie, Oratile Mothoagae, Victor Adéwálé and Yasmin Abdu Bushra.
Focus on the new cohort of Building Beyond Cycle 3 artists
Akwasi Bediako Afrane is a Ghanaian artist living and working in Kumasi, his homeland, who explores the mediums of video and visual art with a strong interest in artistic research. In his art practice, the African artist centers his technique on the use of technological gadgets, which he describes as “amputated” and which he reinvents by offering them a reflexive, engaging and interactive character. His growing interest in the cycle of these tools is currently directing Akwasi Bediako Afrane towards a pertinent theme of the continent’s contribution to the fast-growing technological universe, which he unveils through artistic workshops and documentary films.
An interdisciplinary artist based in Biera, Mozambique, Chantell Hassan adopts an artistic practice of pooling, frenetically and aesthetically fusing performance, spoken word and installation. In her approach, she addresses issues around the decolonization of art, the simplification of contemporary forms and the extension of art’s accessibility to local communities, pertinent themes that make contemporary African art today a mine of large-scale creativity and innovation in perpetual emergence. His Kayisaana organization reflects this vision, which is to bring black art to the world with a solid foundation, and to create valuable opportunities for artists and children through art education.
Critical and design-oriented, Doha Ibrahim is an Egyptian architect based in Cairo. She is actively involved in multidisciplinary projects centered on participatory design action and the rebirth of spaces in the historic city of Cairo. This engagement with regional partners and local initiatives enables the contemporary actress to expand her knowledge of the city’s disparate urban ecology, and to feed her passion for disrupting colonial and post-colonial heritage narratives as well as other professional interests.
A multidisciplinary artist based between Accra and Kumasi, Elolo Bosoka turns his art to photography, visual art, artistic research, installation, transparent soft sculpture and more. In his practice, the Ghanaian artist transforms accessories from the urban environment into eye-catching art objects. He reappropriates materials of banal use, giving them an artistic character that expresses a place, a narrative, an economic exchange and a materiality.
Ugandan architect, visual artist and founder of the isabella isabeau studio, Isabella Asiimwe, explores local crafts on a grand scale. With a disparate approach to filmmaking, eco-fashion and interior architecture that is constantly expanding, she takes a singular approach to art while promoting local crafts in an eco-contemporary design context. Her collaboration with skilled local artisans and her studio’s multi-faceted, ecologically resilient culture are testament to her desire to elevate native Ugandan creative processes and techniques.
Originally from Tanzania, Jesse Gérard Mbango is a storyteller who thrives on artistic research as well as video art and film. Based in Dar er Salaam, he is a founding member of the multimedia curatorial collective Ajabu Ajabu. Through participatory and open approaches, the curatorial collective explores decentralized and community-based forms of presentation, production and preservation of audiovisual works in Tanzania.
Khotso Lamola is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, writer and architect based in Cape Town, South Africa. In her work, the South African artist examines vulnerable processes through which she investigates the emotional perspectives that dot the urban environment. She attempts to devise new modes of archiving through softer, personal narratives of cities in order to understand how we find identity and cultivate action in spaces. Through her art, Khotso Lamola seeks new languages to address the question of belonging in its contexts in order to support a spatial discussion of equality, particularly in postcolonial circumstances.
Originally from Ethiopia, Michael Tesfaye is an architect based in Addis Ababa. Bamboo is his preferred material, which he works and uses in his constructions, an approach that meets the current challenges of a rapidly urbanizing Ethiopia. In the course of his work, the artist researches Ethiopian bamboo species, develops relevant construction techniques and prototypes, as well as academic publications and commercial projects.
Nneoma Angela Okorie is a Nigerian artist, curator and researcher based in Accra, with a keen interest in equitable forms of cultural production, public space strategies, interrogations and archival research. In her practice, the contemporary artist explores new forms of dialogue and display using visual, audio, archival, textual and activist materials. She also founds INCHIKOTA, a culmination of converging ideas of documentation on play, non-linearity and alternative strategies in cultural practices.
Oratile Mothoagae is a South African architect and filmmaker based in Pretoria, South Africa. One of the directors of SSL Studios, a multidisciplinary practice focused on cinema and architecture, his research uncovers hidden narratives of marginalized bodies in archives. A discovery that also led him and his colleague to design an archive to preserve these stories within the Department of Architecture and Industrial Design at Tshwane University of Technology (TUT).
A member of the African Photojournalism Database (APJD) and Diversify Photo, Victor Adéwálé is a Nigerian photographer, film producer and event curator. He owes his artistic education to his early hobbies of literature and music, as well as his childhood in the city of Lagos. Victor Adéwálé uses the photographic medium to visualize profound personal narratives that are, however, unpopular in the traditional Nigerian media. He places the human person at the heart of his introspective art practice, and introduces the public to his community as well as to current social and environmental issues.
An architect and urban planner based in Addis Ababa, Yasmin Abdu Bushra is a contemporary Ethiopian artist whose work draws attention to aspects of urbanity that remain enigmatic if global capitalism remains the main point of reference. She works to focus the production of knowledge about African identities and environments in the imagining, reading and production of space through a practice that draws on and navigates between methods.
Cycle 3 of the Beyond Building mentoring program, offered by the Prince Claus Fund and Creative Industries Fund NL, gives these talented recipients a valuable opportunity to examine the challenges and opportunities within their local communities. The focus is on spatial practices and the dynamics of public space, to explore new perspectives and strengthen their links with their environment. A fruitful collaboration between a number of players, fostering the enhancement of artistic practice and offering an in-depth reflection on the ownership of space and its impact on everyday life.
