1-54 LONDON 2022: GROUP PRESENTATION

Kanbi Projects is pleased to announce its participation at the 10th edition of the flagship 1-54 London art fair. The gallery bring together works by 3 artists on the continent - Adegboyega Adesina, David Olatoye and Odinakachi Okoroafor.

As a group, central to their practice is portraiture and the notion of the contemporary African identity. Through their works presented at the fair, the group of artists interrogates the narratives of Black life with specificity to being Black and African. The works are deeply invested in the group of artists' own intersecting identities: young, African, influenced by a globalised western pop- culture and social-media driven consumerism contemporary society. Though they work across different mediums with distinctive visual styles, tones and textures, their practices reflect the immense variation in the field of Black African experience. The works presented at the fair examines the complexities of the African identity while acknowledging the fragmentation, multiplicity and nuances in collective African experience and that  the complexities of the African identity cannot be encapsulated in a singular view of Black portraiture.

The works of these three artists seek to negotiate the meaning of Black portraiture situated with an African context, going beyond the generalization of simply portraying Black individuals to understanding the diversity and specificity of the plenitude and multivalent of expressions of practices in Black portraiture.

Kanbi Projects will be presenting at Booth S12, located in the South wing of the fair at Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA.