Testaments to the Beautyful Ones

About the exhibition

The exhibition takes as its point of departure the tensions animating an intergenerational dialogue about the promises of African self-determination between Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and a series of photographic transfer-based paintings by Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b.1983, Nigeria) titled The Beautyful Ones. Anchored by a colored inks-and-watercolor drawing of the cover of Armah’s novel by Cauleen Smith (b. 1967, United States) and three works by Akunyili Crosby, the exhibition foregrounds how communities continue to hold spaces of quiet possibility for themselves within the constraints of everyday living.

Photographs by Tatenda Chidora (b. 1988, Zimbabwe), Fatoumata Diabaté (b. 1980, Mali), Yagazie Emezi (b. 1989, Nigeria), Zana Masombuka (b. 1995, South Africa), Hashim Nasr (b. 1990, Sudan), Jean-Louis N’cho (b. 1994, Côte d’Ivoire), Sackitey Tesa  (b. 1995, Ghana), and Sarah Waiswa (b. 1980, Uganda) are presented in clusters, staging conversations about pressing concerns such as gender and sexuality; spirituality; war and displacement; self-representation; and people’s relationships to the natural world, to museum spaces, to the Covid pandemic, to waste and found objects, and to dreams. Newly commissioned texts in response to the clusters by Kweku Abimbola (b. 1997, The Gambia), TJ Benson  (b. 1991, Nigeria), Safia Elhillo (b. 1990, United States), Tsitsi Jaji (b. 1976, Zimbabwe), Cheswayo Mphanza (b. 1993, Zambia), and Ladan Osman (b. Somalia) further testify to these renewed manifestations of the “beautyful ones”, which Armah explains, as a misspelling of the praise name for the ancient Egyptian god Osiris that he saw painted on a minibus taxi in Accra, is paradoxically “a sorrowful reminder of our human vulnerability to division, fragmentation and degeneration, and at the same time a symbol of our equally human capacity for unity, cooperative action, and creative regeneration.”

Taken together then, the visual and written works in Testaments to the Beautyful Ones index the reverberations of social life and living in Africa today, on their own terms, in spite of it all.

Curated by Yuan-Chih (Sreddy) Yen