1-54 London

Sakhile&Me is excited to present a selection of works by Adelaide Damoah, Mbali Dhlamini and Owanto at?the eighth edition of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair?at Somerset House in London, taking place from 8 - 10 October 2020.

British-Ghanaian artist Adelaide Damoah works at the intersection of painting and performance within the context of colonialism, identity, sexuality and spirituality. Her practice involves using her body as a "living paintbrush" to paint or print onto various surfaces. Initially inspired by a desire to subvert Yves Klein's Anthropometries, in which he directed a group of women to cover their nude bodies in his signature blue paint and then imprint themselves on white paper, Damoah prints her body onto white surfaces, thereby remixing Klein's original performance through her own identity and encouraging discussions about female representation, feminism, sexual stereotypes and art history. Damoah is an academician of the Royal West of England Academy and cites Judy Chicago, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Hammons, Yves Klein, Sokari Douglas Camp, Rachel Ara and Ana Mendieta among her influences. Damoah is a founding member of the Black British Female Artists and the Intersectional Feminist Art collectives.

Mbali Dhlamini is a multidisciplinary South African artist and visual researcher whose work explores the decolonisation of contemporary African identity-making. She performs visual, tactile and discursive investigations into current indigenous cultural practices and her work is in constant conversation with her past and present visual landscapes. Working to maintain a state of unlearning and relearning, her process recognizes language as a medium of understanding and as a repository of knowledge. Her series "Look Into" features digitally reworked colonial portraits of West-Africans wearing traditional clothing and stem from a research fellowship at the RAW Material Company in Dakar, investigating the cultural significance of traditional indigo dyeing and the symbolism of indigo fabric within indigenous Senegalese communities. Dhlamini trained as a printmaker at the Artist Proof Studio in Johannesburg and received a Bachelor of Technology in Visual Arts from the University of Johannesburg in 2013. She completed her Master of Arts degree at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2015.

Owanto is a multi-cultural Gabonese artist whose current projects focus on the female condition, emancipation and the breaking of silence. Her work on this matter reflects upon the psychological concept of resilience by exploring the notion of healing, repair and transformation. In her "Flowers" series, Owanto showcases enlarged archival pictures of a Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) ceremony. The analogue photographs are digitalized, enlarged and printed on aluminum before the artist veils the violation in the image by removing the sections deemed most private and covering the void with delicate hand-crafted cold porcelain flowers. The viewer is thus confronted with a delicate and powerful protest where "the flowers mask the pain and symbolize a re-birth." Her work aims to shed new light on relevant but uncomfortable and often ignored topics. Owanto has exhibited at the Zeitz MOCAA, the MACAAL, the MADRE, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art and the Fowler Museum (among other institutions) and she represented Gabon at the 53rd Venice Biennale.