Luanda-Angola, 1979, Kiluanji Kia Henda is an autodidact which a profound springboard into this realm comes from growing up in a household of photography enthusiasts. His conceptual edge was sharpened by immersing himself into music, avant-garde theater and collaborating with a collective of emerging artists in Luanda ́s art scene. Kia Henda participated in several residency programs in cities such as Venice, Cape Town, Paris, Amman and Sharjah, New York and Arles.

... class="p1">Kia Henda´s selected solo exhibitions includes Something Happen on the Way to Heaven, at Museo di Arte di Nuoro (2020), The Isle of Venus at Museum of Leuven in Leuven (2020),  A City Called Mirage at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York (2017), In the Days of a Dark Safari at Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon and Goodman Gallery in Cape Town (2017) and Self-Portrait As A White Man at Galleria Fonti in Naples (2010).

Kia Henda has participated in group exhibitions at numerous institutions, amongst which Barbican Art Center in Lonodon (2020), Migros Museum in Zurich (2020), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2020), Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town (2019), Tate Modern in London (2019), MAAT in Lisbon (2018), the National Museum of African Art – Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. (2015) and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2015).

His work was shown at the Gwangju Biennale (2018), Bergen Assembly (2013), São Paulo Biennale (2010), Venice Biennale (2007) and the Luanda Triennale (2007). In 2017, Kia Henda received the Frieze Artist Award. He presented his work The Fortress in the Somerset House courtyard (London) in 2019. The artist won Angola’s National Culture and Arts Award in 2012. His work can be found in public collections, including Tate Modern (London), the Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Centre George Pompidou (Paris), Pérez Art Museum (Miami) and Coleção de Arte Moderna Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon).

Justin Randolph Thompson is a new media artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Living between Italy and the US since 1999, Thompson is Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence, a multi-faceted exploration of African and African Diasporic cultures in the context of Italy founded in 2016. Thompson is a recipient of a Louise Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin, two... Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants, A Jerome Fellowship from Franconia Sculpture Park and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and hierarchical organization by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity.

 

 

Binta Diaw born in1995 is a Senegalese-Italian visual artist based in Milan, Italy. 

Her research is aimed at the creation of installations of various dimensions and works commenting social phenomena like migration and immigration, anthropology as well as her body in relationship with nature and notions of identity. Defying the Western gaze through a subverted reality, her practice questions perceptions of Italianness and Africanness in relation to her... own cultural heritage and upbringing.

Embracing visual art with a strongly intersectional, afro-diasporic and feminist methodology based on a physical, personal experience, she is ultimately able to explore the multiple layers of her blackness, her self as a social body and her position as a black woman in a Western context. She studied Fine Arts at the Academy of fine arts of Brera in Milan and obtained a MA at ESAD Grenoble-Valence, in France. In 2018 she moved to Germany for an internship at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin. In 2020 she debuted with her first solo show at Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio in Milan.

Raziel Perin was born in 1992 in the Dominican Republic. He received a BFA in Visual Arts at Naba Milano. Drawing upon his personal experience, mental associations and cultural references, Raziel Perin creates mysterious, unexpected and direct works of art that recall precise moments of clarity and dense memories that evoke the complexity of the process of reconciliation of the diasporic identity freed from Western stereotypes. Perin was born in the hinterland of the Dominican... Republic, where he lived until the age of four. In 1996 he moved to Northern Italy with his mother. His artistic production takes shape between two very distant realities, rooted in the need to be accepted as “the Other” and at the same time feeling the duty to suppress the sensitive part of his personal history, which constantly re-emerges. The introspection and reconnection with the echoes of those ancestral bonds that seemed to have been severed in this process of ‘whitening’ are the result and are channeled into drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations that unite and synthesize a series of recurring elements. His body of work conveys a compelling visual metaphor of the layers of personal memory and cultural history that inform and intensify his experience of the present.

Francis Offman (b. 1987, Butare) lives and works in Bologna. In 2021, Offman took part in a workshop project for Valentino’s Autumn/Winter Haute Couture Show 2021-22. 2022 group shows include: Expressions. The Epilogue, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Italy; YGI-Group show, United States; The 3 ecologies, MACTE, Italy; The Tending of the Otherwise, Italy as well as the second iteration of Throw the Stone and Hide your Hand at the Italian Cultural Institute in... Paris, France. In 2021, Offman had solo exhibitions at P420 Gallery, Italy; Baleno International, Italy; Herald St | Museum St, United Kingdom and MA*GA Museum, Italy. He also had a two-person show with Christian Offman at The Garage Lab, Italy. Previous group exhibitions include The Geological Viens, Palazzo D’Accursio, Italy; Painting in Person, Castello di Rivoli Museum, Italy; Italy at Frieze, Italian Embassy, United Kingdom; MEDITERRANEA 19 Young Artists Biennale: School of Waters, Republic of San Marino; Painting Stone, Villa Lontana, Italy; Throw the Stone and Hide your Hand, Murate Art District, Italy (2021); Premio Combat Prize 2020, Giovanni Fattori Civic Museum, Italy; Premio Zucchelli 2019, Zucchelli Foundation, Italy (2020); Open Tour 2019, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy; Rundgang 2019, Art Academy, Germany, Art White Night, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy (2019); Decoration between history, nature and poetry, Zucchelli Foundation, Italy; Open Tour, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy; Rambling rides, distractions from a destination, P420, Italy; Art white Night, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy; Scrap-Collective, Monumental Complex of Baraccano, Italy; Monsters-phenomena, Monumental Complex of Baraccano, Italy (2018). Awards received include: Agitu Ideo Gudeta Fellowship – Performance Act Award (2021); Emilia-Romagna Region Award in support and dissemination of Contemporary Art; 9th edition of the Francesco Fabbri Award for Contemporary Arts (finalist); Premio Combat Prize (honourable mention) (2020); Eighth edition of the Francesco Fabbri Award for Contemporary Arts; Zucchelli Prize Scholarship; Tree Time workshop with Massimo Bartolini; Contemporary Minds Prize (finalist) (2019); ArtUp Collectibles Award; Switch The Rules, curated by the Elica and the Ermanno Casoli Foundation (finalist) (2018).

Victor Fotso Nyie was born in 1990 in Douala, Cameroon and lives and works in Faenza. In 2018 he attended the Biennium of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He attended the Istituito Tecnico Superiore Tonito Emiliani / Diploma of Superior Technician for the design and prototyping of ceramic products, Faenza, IT in 2015. His artistic research leads him to explore human variety and beauty, without forgetting a spiritual dimension. He creates works that recall his... homeland, Africa, which merge with others that metaphorically describe the globalized world in which we live. He has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions including The Armory show, New York city 2020, Stand P420 gallery,(2020), III Biennale d’Arte don Franco Patruno, curated by Gianni Ceroli, Museo MAGI ‘900, Pieve di Cento (BO) (2020).To be going to, curated by Francesca Bertazzoni & Davide Ferri, P420, (2019) In 2020 he participated in the project Research Residency for BHMF, OCAD University, (Florence). Winner of various awards including the Roberto Daolio Prize, 2018 the III Art Biennale Don Franco Patruno, Museo MAGI ‘900, Pieve di Cento (BO), (2019). His next exhibitions include Museo MAGI ‘900, Pieve di Cento (BO), IT (only) (2020) and the Biennale del Mediterraneo, Republic of San Marino (2020).

Emmanuel Yoro is an Italian visual artist of Ivorian origin working between Vicenza and Milan. Adopting an artistic practice that embraces collage, design, fashion, graphics and photography, he breaks down into images the questions of the multiple facets of his cultural identity and different nuances of queerness.

An Afro-diasporic sensibility and a raw and monochromatic aesthetic characterize his research and recent artistic production, always in the... attempt of a wider redefinition of the self that dwells in the symposium between past and present, between memory and imagination.