El Anatsui * 1944 Anyako, Ghana. Lives in Nsukka, Nigeria.

One of the most acclaimed sculptors on the international scene, El Anatsui trained as a sculptor
at the College of Art, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana
(1965–68). Since 1975, he has been a professor of sculpture at the University of Nigeria Nsukka
where he became a leading member of the Nsukka School.
Over the years, Anatsui has created innovative wood panel sculptures in which he has focused
on themes relating to African history and colonial experience, using marks made by the
chainsaw and oxyacetylene flame as a metaphor for the destruction of African indigenous
cultures by colonialism and its aftermath. Through a rigorous, formal experimentation with
African syllabary and sign systems, including Uli motifs, Nsibidi signs, Bamum scripts, Adinkra
symbols, and Vai scripts, his sculptures in wood, such as the Patches of History series (1993),
suggest a critical connection between slavery and colonialism on the one hand, and on the
other, the disappearance of African visual and textual archives, and the loss of historical
memory in the age of postcolonialism.
More recently, he has used metals—aluminum strips from liqueur bottle caps, rusty metal
graters used to make garri out of cassava, old offset printing plates, and evaporated milk cans—
to create large-scale, wall-bound and freestanding "metal cloths” with immense visual power. In
these highly allusive, monumental constructions (Adinkra Sasa, 2003, Crumbling Wall, 2000),
Anatsui transforms everyday materials, through exacting craft processes, into new orders of
surplus visuality, while linking forms of contemporary consumption and desire with enduring
global networks of commerce and politics.
Anatsui's project for Who Knows Tomorrow, a new monumental "metal cloth," is installed on the
colossal façade of the Alte Nationalgalerie. The visual confrontation and dialogue between the
draped sculpture—which perceptually refuses entry into the museum and the history it
embodies—and the assertive declaration of the building and its contents regarding German art,
suggests striking and fraught interconnections between the past and present, the self and its
other, between colonial imagination and postcolonial agency, and between different orders of
critical subjectivities.

ZARINA BHIMJI * 1963 Mbarara, Uganda. Lives in London, United Kingdom.

Bhimji trained in London at Goldsmiths College (1983–86) and The Slade School of Fine Art
(1987–89). Of Asian ancestry, she moved with her family to England as a child, following the
expulsion of Asian-Ugandans by the Idi Amin regime in the early 1970s. She was an active
participant in the black British art moment of the 1980s.
A photographer and filmmaker, Bhimji uses poetic bodily and architectural imagery, as well as
the landscape, to explore history, memory and the psycho-geography, especially of postcolonial
Africa and Europe. Her architectural spaces often evince feelings of desolation and pathos,
even as they also reveal suppressed histories of violence inscribed on walls, floors, or in the
abandoned furniture coated with grime and dust, or in smashed, cob-webbed windows. The
power of Bhimji's work lies in its stunning, intensely seductive pictoriality, seamlessly combined
with the tragic, melancholic sadness of troubled histories. While the human body was present in
the form of unsentimental, lifeless objects in her Collection of Charing Cross Hospital (1995), it
is often hauntingly absent in the bare rooms, dilapidated houses, run-down tenements and
abandoned factories in Love (1998–2006), Waiting (2007) and other works. Her masterpiece,
the powerful Out of Blue (2002), commissioned for Documenta 11, is a poetic meditation on the
human condition through the contemplation of serene landscapes and interior spaces bearing
marks of past violence, and thus simultaneously evokes the sublime as well as the horrific
violence emblematized no less by the genocides in Kosovo and Rwanda in the 1990s.
A fierce advocate of the poetic image, Bhimji nevertheless insistently imposes on her pictures
and films an ineluctable sense of tragic wonder, with the result that they become not just works
of art, but also archives of modernity's dark moments, and humanity's incomplete, perhaps even
impossible, visions of socio-political progress.

ANTONIO OLE * 1951 Luanda, Angola; lives there.

Ole studied African American culture and cinema at the University of California, Los Angeles,
and film at the Center for Advanced Film and Television Studies, American Film Institute, Los
Angeles. A versatile artist, he is distinguished for his photography, documentary films, and
large-scale multimedia installations, through which he explores the textures of life in marginal
urban sites.
His films, including Railway Workers (1975) and Rhythm of N'gola Rhythms (1978), examine the
role of organized labor and popular culture in the struggle for Angolan political independence. In
his early photography, such as the "Houses of Xicala” series (1976), and the various sculptural
installations created since the critically acclaimed Margem da Zona Limité: Township Wall
(1994–95), Ole suggests a link between failed modernist social engineering and urban dystopia
in postcolonial Africa and across the globe. Walls in his work become visual texts and archives
of the bare lives of inhabitants of shacks and makeshift buildings located at the margins of
Angolan cities and towns. The more recent wall constructions suggest resilience and creativity
in their assertive colorfulness (reminiscent of Pop Art), as well as the defiant impulse to
humanize even the harshest urban slums.
Ole's project for Who Knows Tomorrow, inspired by his Township Wall, covers one exterior arm
of the Hamburger Bahnhof building. Although the finished installation is reminiscent of the
improvised and precarious shanty constructions one might find at the fringes of so-called "Third
World” cities, the fact that all the materials come from Berlin points to the often unspoken
squalid living conditions of immigrant populations existing in the outskirts of contemporary "First
World” cities. The juxtaposition of the quiet decorum of the building's neo-classical architecture
and the visual rebelliousness of his installation speaks to the continuing tensions between
dominant and established ciphers of tradition, civilization and the nationhood on the one hand,
and on the other, competing, unstable forces resulting from the inevitable existence of
disenfranchised and disaffected immigrant cultures and peoples in the heart of Europe.

Yinka Shonibare  MBE ( The Most excellent Order of the British Empire ).Born February
10,1962) is a British-Nigerian  conceptual artist. Yinka Shonibare is a senior figure in the British
art world but one who intentionally eludes easy categorization. He calls himself a "postcolonial
hybrid."
Erudite and wide ranging, Mr. Shonibare, is a disabled black artist who continuously challenges
assumptions and stereotypes. He makes art that is sumptuously aesthetic beautiful and draws
you in and often wickedly funny. When he deals with pithy matters like race, class, disability,
colonialism and war, he does so deftly and often indirectly. (New York Times)
Yinka Shonibare is a painter, photographer and installation artist, whose art is influenced by
both the cultures of Nigeria, where he grew up, and Britain, where he was born , studied and
now lives. He has exhibited widely all over the world.Shonibare's videos, photographs and
installations playfully mix up cultural and historical signifiers to blur boundaries between class
and ethnicity, high and low art and coloniser-colonised relationships. Since the 1990s Shonibare
has exhibited internationally extensively, including the Venice Biennale, 2001, and Documenta
11, Kassel, in 2002. In 2004 he was nominated for the Turner Prize.
Background:
He was born in London in 1962 of Nigerian parents who moved back to Lagos when the artist
was three, Shonibare has always straddled different identities, both national and physical. Son
of an upper middle-class lawyer, his brothers are a surgeon and a banker, his sister is a dentist.
It would be something of an understatement to say that his parents were appalled when he
started talking about wanting to be an artist. "I was a freak! Success is so important in Nigeria.
When you're some young, tramp artist, you're considered a drop-out."
He summered in London and Battersea, attended an exclusive boarding school in England at
age sixteen (where much to his amusement he learned that his classmates assumed that all
black people are poor), and enrolled in Byam Shaw School of Art, London (now part of Central
Saint Martin's College of Art and Design) at age nineteen. One month into his art school studies
he contracted a virus that rendered him paralyzed. After three years of physical therapy,
Shonibare remains partially disabled.
These dual identities--African/British; physically able/challenged--are only two of Shonibare's
acknowledged hybrid conditions.
His paintings and his sculptural installations make extensive use of dyed fabrics, which became
popular in West Africa after independence. But many of these textiles betray Indonesian
influences, are manufactured in Holland and are purchased by the artist in Brixton in south
London. The complexities of nationality and identity, of history and ethnicity, post-colonialism
and today’s global economy, form the intellectual and aesthetic arena in which Shonibare works
His works have a strongly contemporary feel, but at the same time they engage with the
traditions and masterworks of western art history. The results are witty and playful, sensuous
and poetic.
Yinka Shonibare's work takes us on a roller-coaster ride through our own history, from
colonisation to space exploration, taking in literary works and modern art, and all the while
collapsing the idea of national identity, authenticity and cultural ownership.
Shonibare parodies European culture and cultural works in photographic tableaux and three-
dimensional sculpted figures, dressed in or made of such 'traditional African' fabrics as batik —
which actually originated in Indonesia and was exported around the world by Dutch and British
colonists, and which the artist now buys at Brixton market in south London. But Shonibare does
not use parody for its own sake. He is interested in the resonances of combinations of
seemingly incompatible elements within a strong western tradition.
In Shonibare's world (and, he encourages us to suspect, in our own), cultures and histories shift
about. Western thought's monolithic sense of itself is undermined. New ways of thinking about
the world, relating to history, race, ethnicity and culture, are introduced in a riot of colour and
with humour. This is a non-didactic political art which creates questions in the mind rather than
simply posing and answering a political point

Pascale Martine Tayou (born 1967) is a Cameroonian artist born in Yaounde, Cameroon in
1967. He began his career as an artist in the 1990s, and has carried out exhibitions in
Cameroon, Germany, France, and Belgium, among others. His work combines various
mediums and seeks to artistically redefine postcolonial culture and raise questions about
globalisation and modernity. Formerly known as Pascal Marthin Tayou, he changed his name to
Pascale Marthine Tayou in the 1990s
Tayou is recognised nationally and internationally for his artistic works. He is associated with the
Douala-based doual'art association, which has contributed significantly to promoting the artist to
the international scene. His first works focused on drawing and sculpture that expressed
societal problems such as AIDS. More recently, he combines popular visual cultures and social
realities through improvisational styles to construct installations that depict post-colonial African
lifestyles and contemporary social, political and cultural realities across countries.[2] Tayou, who
now works and lives in Belgium, has travelled extensively across the globe to showcase his
exhibitions. The artist describes himself as an explorer, one who moves across the world to
explore the common issues of the global village.[3]
"His work is directly influenced by the scenes he witnesses in the countries he visits. He collects
ephemera from his journeys, including train and airline ticket stubs, restaurant and shop receipts
and labels or wrappings for socks, razors, batteries and plastic bags. Tayou's insistent reuse
and recycling of these objects reminds us that contemporary life is inextricably linked with
economics, migration and politics."[3]
Tayou won the 2011 ARKEN Prize, awarded by the Annie & Otto Johs. Detlefs' Philanthropic
Foundation at Copenhagen, presented on 17 March 2011. This prize of DKK 100,000 is one of
the largest art prizes in Denmark. It was awarded for his ability to create a compelling and
challenging work that relates to pressing issues in the modern, globalised world.