Foundations (at Haus Kunst Mitte)

The group show Foundations is on view at Haus Kunst Mitte from 11 April to 27 July 2025 and brings together 15 artists working in painting, photography, sculpture, mixed media, video, and installation. The exhibition intentionally highlights African-Diasporic and African-American positions in an effort to provide an inclusive space for focusing on contextual specificity in content, medium, and genre and for engaging with diverse perspectives.

Thematically, Foundations draws on the concept of “building blocks” of life as it is, as we perceive it, and as we co-create it. The exhibition considers ideas that are (or are perceived to be) fundamental, foundational, and elemental. As such, a group of works consider the development of social concepts like human rights or the impact of individual and collective histories, for example in the way childhood experiences reverberate into adulthood. Some works put a spotlight on the cross-generational consequences of colonialism, whereas others highlight the influence of traditional arts and crafts on contemporary practices. Several works also focus on the importance of biological, social, and cultural ecosystems or the butterfly effects in our shared global, cultural, economic, political, and environmental systems.

Several artists whose work is part of Foundations experiment with materials such as steel, wood, textiles, or self-made bio plastics, transforming these materials while also investigating historic or philosophical concepts to rebuild or develop them. Osi Audu’s work, for instance, reimagines traditional West-African head dresses and carved sculptures. Maintaining a visual language of geometric shapes and a palette of blacks, whites, greys, as well as monochromatic contrasting colors, he draws from ancient Yoruba philosophies. Following the Yoruba concept of Ori Inu ("the inner head"), his works draw our attention to the head as a “base” or “signifier” of consciousness and as an object of self and self-knowing. Similarly, Ato Ribeiro channels traditional knowledge systems in his work, creating sculptures from discarded wood fragments to reference traditional West-African Kente textiles and Adinkra symbols while hinting at historical practices of gerrymandering and gentrification.

Highlighting environmental issues and questions of sustainability, Nnenna Okore and Ghizlane Sahli both create abstract textile sculptures paying homage to weaving and embroidery traditions in Nigeria and Morocco, respectively. Okore’s fibre installations woven over lightweight wire framing take inspiration from patterns in nature. Her most recent work experiments with food waste to create sculptures made of bioplastic. Sahli takes inspiration from cellular beds, coral reefs, and the microbiological landscapes of the body to create intricate silk sculptures covering the tops of used plastic bottles.

A second grouping of artistic work focuses on representational and abstract painting, with a particular focus on individual and shared histories and experience. Mario Moore's work reflects on social contracts pertaining to land and home ownership within African-American communities, Mario Joyce documents his own coming of age as a Queer, Black boy in rural America through the lived experience of his ancestors, Kevin Demery merges collective and individual history to contextualize contemporary experiences of African-American youth and Raelis Vasquez captures daily life in the Dominican Republic while incorporating moments of self-actualization.

Jerry Helle, Adelaide Damoah, and Sekai Machache focus on the foundational contributions of emotionality and spirituality to our lived experience. This manifests in the exploration of sexuality and spirituality in the performance-based body prints of Adelaide Damoah, the fundamental archetypes of human experiences represented in Sekai Machache’s Major Arcana tarot series, or the immediacy and universality of color and material in the abstract paintings of Jerry Helle. Philip Crawford, Anike Joyce Sadiq, Lerato Shadi, and Helena Uambembe employ video, drawing, and installation to tug at the seams of the often hidden parts that make up our ways of knowing or understanding any whole. Their work focuses on historically attuned examinations of meaning-making, sensory experience, language, psychological states, spiritual constellations and collective memories as they shape and are being shaped by our world views.

Sakhile Matlhare and Daniel Hagemeier curated the exhibition in collaboration with Anna Havemann of Haus Kunst Mitte.