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).

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.

Angelica Pesarini is Professor of Sociology at New York University in Florence where she teaches “Black Italia”, a course dedicated to the analysis of the intersections of race, gender and citizenship in Italy. She holds a Ph.d. in Sociology and Gender Studies in England and worked as a professor of Gender, Race and Sexuality at Lancaster University before returning to Italy in 2017. Pesarini’s research focuses on the performativity of race in colonial and... post-colonial Italy and the racialisation of contemporary Italian political discourse. Pesarini has previously investigated the relationships between gender identity and economic activities in some Roma communities living in Rome, analyzing risk strategies, survival and opportunity in the context of male child prostitution in Rome. She has published several academic essays and participated in various collective publications.

Jessica Sartiani is a Florentine coffee trainer and coffee expert. With an Italian father and a mother who is half Filipino and half African-American, it is from her origins that her journey as a woman of coffee starts. As someone trained, operative and attentive to the recent sub-cultures of coffee, she started her work in one of the pioneer coffee shops of this selected product, Ditta Artigianale, ten years ago, studying and discovering all the work that precedes the service in... the coffee shop, giving importance to the producing countries. Her experience evolved with the opening of the first Speciality coffee in Italy, dealing with the training of baristas and customers. She has participated in various competitions such as the Brewers cup, to improve her contact with the public and enrich her background, and has been part of training projects in Honduras, Lithuania and several local coffee start-ups.

Simao Amista is an anthropologist and doctor of Italian-Afro-Brazilian descent. A scholar of African and Afro-descendent religions and spiritual philosophies, he has been working for years in the field of hospitality and education.

Patrick Joël Tatcheda Yonkeu was born in Cameroon in 1985, lives and works in Bologna. He moved to Italy in 2009 where he obtained a scholarship for the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and obtained a Master’s degree in Visual Arts in 2016 with a research project on the theme of Zen in the arts. His interest in metaphysics remains the basis of his practice, which concerns the relationship between human beings and nature and our place in the universe, and he searches for... forms of spirituality more suitable for our times. His research is based on the idea of existence as a harmonious flow whose balance must be preserved and often refers to themes of life and death, the visible and the invisible and energy in its infinite forms. He deepens this research through numerous collaborations between Africa and Italy and by creating seminars on intercultural painting with schools and associations in Emilia-Romagna.

Born and raised in Kingston Jamaica, Jordan Anderson is a fashion and culture journalist & creative director who is currently based in Milan. His work often magnifies & explores political themes in and outside the fashion industry including race, gender, sexuality, identity & cultural ethics. He contributes to a variety of publications including Document Journal, Teen Vogue, Vogue Italia, The Face and is currently online editor & editor-at-large for Twin Magazine and nss magazine respectively.

Black History Month Florence was founded in 2016 is a cross institutional network for Black cultural production that celebrates Afro-descendent Cultures in the context of Italy. The initiative is engaged in programming, advising and co-promoting over 50 events annually within the month of February, through a network formed and supported by the Comune, foundations, institutions, cultural associations, museums, schools and venues dedicated to art and to music. BHMF as a curatorial team is headed... by Justin Randolph Thompson and Janine Gaelle Dieudji.

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.

 

 

Janine Gaëlle Dieudji is a bi-national French and Cameroonian graduate of Culture and International Relations from Lyon 3 University in France. She also holds a Master Degree in Political Science from Paris 2 Panthéon Assas University.

She’s been living in Florence, Italy, for the past six years, a city she has since fallen in love with. This is how Florence became home to her and the place where she started to build her career as an art professional. She considers herself as a... ‘multi­local’ by believing that we belong to all the places we have lived in. Home is where the mind can create and feel rested at the same time. This is what the life journey is made for, exploring to become the person we decide to be.