Termine

Beyond the Sweet and Obvious: African Feminisms Refracted 

by Natasha A. Kelly and attending artists

Beyond the Sweet and Obvious: African Feminisms Refracted” takes its cue from Colette Omogbai’s 1965 manifesto “Man Loves What Is 'Sweet' and Obvious”, in which the Nigerian artist challenged established expectations of what art should look like, how it should be understood, and whose forms of expression are recognized. Her call for a “new way of looking” becomes a point of departure for the exhibition: an invitation to move beyond familiar categories and to approach feminist artistic practices through shifting perspectives and unexpected relations.

Bringing together artistic positions from the Goethe-Institut’s African Feminisms project with works and materials from Iwalewahaus collection and archive, as well as Black diasporic histories and family archives, the exhibition explores different ways in which feminist knowledge is produced, embodied, transmitted, and transformed. Across the exhibition, questions of presence, value, storytelling, knowledge, inheritance and re-reading emerge through dialogues between contemporary artistic practices and historical collections.

Rather than organizing these positions chronologically or geographically, “Beyond the Sweet and Obvious: African Feminisms Refracted” works through constellations. Works, objects, archives, and histories illuminate, interrupt, and reshape one another. Through diasporic, archival and institutional refractions, the exhibition asks not only how Iwalewahaus can engage with African feminisms, but how African feminist practices might in turn change the ways the institution sees, remembers, collects and produces knowledge.

Further information about the exhibition, including the curatorial concept, individual works and biographies of the participating artists, can be found in the accompanying exhibition booklet available at Iwalewahaus and on the website of House of African Feminisms.

The exhibition is part of a series of programmes. The whole programme can be downloaded here.