“Black Ancient Futures” brings together a significant group of 11 artists from the vast African diaspora, some of them presented for the first time in Portugal, who employ different languages to propose a wide range of alternative narratives and landscapes that contest the dominant panorama of the contemporary arts.
Baloji, April Bey, Jeannette Ehlers, Lungiswa Gqunta, Evan Ifekoya, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Gabriel Massan, Jota Mombaça, Sandra Mujinga and Tabita Rezaire are the participating artists.
The works on display are the result of the combination of specific features of African culture with other cultures and other geographical spaces, and reveal the original energy of the itinerant fate of the African condition – of exile and settlement, demanded by the context of slavery, or of voluntary or forced migration as a result of the current global economic, political, and climate crises – offering a universe of creative possibilities. «These proposals neither illustrate a historically defined trend or movement nor advocate a specific ideological reading; rather, they call on diverse techniques, disciplines and languages, combining frenzied fantasies of form, colour, and sound, material experiences, thematic and temporal leaps, and direct references to non-Western spiritualities with the use or evocation of post-industrial technology to create magical or science-fictional narratives.”
The commission to the artist Gabriel Massan expands an existing video game work, to show it in a new immersive environment. The artist worked to produce sculptures as game stations to play the video game. Together with architecture office CLUBE and a team of producers, the artist looked into the physical space as an extension to the digital field.
The work included two sculptures forming a gaming seat for the visitors on a stage. A system was built to transmit either one of live gameplay on a tv wall, turning the video game into a movie, which can be watched by the public present in the space. In such, moments of collectivity are shaped through a certain articulation of spatial elements.
