Koyo Kouoh: Not a Footnote, but a Shift in Power The art world loves grand gestures. Grand halls, grand names, grand egos, grand budgets — and, when convenient, a thin layer of progressiveness on top. And then came Koyo Kouoh. Not as a decorative “diverse choice.” Not as a polite correction to a white, male canon. But as someone who entered the centre of power with knowledge, precision, international authority and an entirely different compass. Koyo Kouoh was born in Douala, Cameroon, in 1967. She grew up between Cameroon and Switzerland and later worked from several worlds at once: African, European, international, but never neatly reducible to one identity. That also shaped her way of seeing. She did not think...
Where Memory Continues to Operate History records what happened — art reveals what it did. This distinction is essential to understanding the work of Beatriz González. Her practice is not concerned with documenting events, nor with preserving them in a fixed form. Instead, it shows how images continue to operate long after the moment they refer to has passed, and how memory is shaped, altered, and redistributed through repetition and context. Beatriz González was born in 1932 in Bucaramanga, Colombia, and grew up during La Violencia, a period of intense political conflict that deeply affected the country’s social and visual landscape. Violence was not only present in lived reality, but also in the images circulating through newspapers, propaganda, and...
There are artists who make objects.And then there are artists who quietly—and relentlessly—shift the center of gravity. Simone Leigh belongs to the latter. Born in Chicago in 1967, Leigh didn’t rush into the art world with the usual urgency. In fact, she resisted it. Studied philosophy. Considered becoming a social worker. Tried, quite deliberately, not to be an artist. And yet—inevitably—she became one. Because some practices are not choices, but conditions. Today, Leigh is one of the most influential voices in contemporary art, known for monumental sculptures and immersive installations that do something deceptively simple: they place Black women—historically marginalized, overlooked, misread—firmly at the center. Not as subjects.As structures. The Body as Architecture Leigh’s work is immediately recognisable: powerful, often...
Annelies Nuy is currently developing Post-Colonial Gold, a research project at the intersection of art, fashion, and value systems. The project examines the shift of gold from a carrier of meaning in pre-colonial cultures to its current role as an economic instrument embedded within systems of power, ownership, and global distribution. In pre-colonial contexts, gold functioned within spiritual, social, and relational systems. During colonial expansion, this meaning was replaced by a model based on extraction, accumulation, and control. Post-Colonial Gold makes this shift explicit and places the historical meaning of gold in contrast with another understanding of value. From gold to meaning Where gold once represented connection, ritual, and collective meaning, it was reduced within the colonial system to ownership...
Martha Rosler (b. 1943, Brooklyn, New York) is one of the most incisive voices in contemporary art. For over five decades, her work has examined the intersections of power, war, domesticity, media and the position of women in society. Rather than offering aesthetic escape, Rosler uses art as a method of analysis and confrontation. Her practice spans video, photography, performance, text and installation. Across these media, she consistently questions how images shape ideology — and how everyday life is structured by political and economic systems. The Domestic as Political Space One of Rosler’s most influential works, Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), takes place in a familiar setting: the kitchen. Standing behind a counter, Rosler presents kitchen tools in alphabetical...
