Black Ancient Futures

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.» write the curators Camila Maissune e João Pinharanda in the exhibition text.

The exhibition will take place in MAAT's two buildings, MAAT Central and MAAT Gallery, and the Garden.