Africa has many vibrant performance art scenes.
Africa is huge, diverse and covers an insane amount of art, culture, thought, history, and influences (including colonialism). The contemporary art scene of Africa is characterized by a dynamic list of creators, who interpret and capture socio-economic realities, political challenges, rich traditions and diverse beauty.
‘It wasn’t until recent years that contemporary art genre of performance art became a veritable art type especially on the African continent. However, this do not mean that this art type is new to the continent as a whole. Available evidence reveals and confirm that this art style is as old as human civilization on the continent even though its context, purpose and aims differs through the ages.’ (Africa Palatte)
Artists by Country
Guinea – Bissau
Saint Helena
Seychelles
Mayotte
Sierra Leone
South Sudan
Western Sahara
- Links and information
- Heike Becker & Dorothea Schulz (eds.), “Un/making difference through performance and mediation in contemporary Africa,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 29, no. 2 (2017).
- Aimée Bessire, “Ephemeral Art and Performance in Africa,” Oxford Bibliographies, 2021— annotated bibliography, strong on South Africa and Senegal; Ephemeral art may include transient materials intended to decay, those created in order to be destroyed, or even a piece marking a temporal instant, as in performances and site-specific installations. Zina Saro-Wiwa, Kendell Geers, Doung Anwar Jahangeer, Nandipha Mntambo, Tracey Rose, Athi-Patra Ruga, and Berni Searle.
- Okwui Enwezor & Chika Okeke-Agulu, Contemporary African Art Since 1980 (2009) — Contemporary African Art Since 1980 is the first major survey of the work of contemporary African artists from diverse situations, locations, and generations who work either in or outside of Africa, but whose practices engage and occupy the social and cultural complexities of the continent since the past 30 years.
- Journal, African Arts (MIT Press, since 1967) — long-running peer-reviewed journal regularly publishing performance-art coverage across the continent.
- Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art (founded 1994 by Okwui Enwezor; published by Duke University Press) — Nka focuses on publishing critical work that examines contemporary African and African Diaspora art within the modernist and postmodernist experience and therefore contributes significantly to the intellectual dialogue on world art and the discourse on internationalism and multiculturalism in the arts.
- AFiRIperFOMA Biennial
- Africa Palette
- African Artists’ Foundation
- The Role of Performance Art and Transitionalism in African Art
- African Ideograms
- Category: Multi-discipline
- Dak’Art, Biennale de l’Art Africain Contemporain
- Design Indaba: Performance Artist
- 10 of Ghana’s Best Contemporary Artists
- Contemporary African Artists You Should Know
- Grove Press: African Art – Performance Art
- Aimée Bessire: Ephemeral Art and Performance in Africa
- African American Expatriate Artists + other articles
- How Art Can Be Thought: A Handbook for Change
- Digital Art Exhibition: freedom is a durational practice
- How African Art influenced 20th European and American Art: African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde
- Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art