Atlanta Art Fair (Booth)

Fair Overview

Borderlands Art debuted at the 2nd edition of the Atlanta Art Fair from 25-28 September 2025 (Booth D27)

Borderlands Art USA debut presents three female African artists: Charity Atukunda (Uganda), Gloria Kiconco (Uganda) and Laeïla Adjovi (Benin). These artists present textiles, zines, and photography that reimagine contemporary African experiences through materials, memory, and the environment through the showcasing of large scale hand painted kangas (traditional East African fabrics with proverbs), small intimate sculptural zines made from Lubugo (Ugandan barkcloth), and photography as well as a cyanotype print on cotton. The range of works are tied together by their materiality and perspectives, taking traditional materials as the source for creating contemporary artworks.

The selection engages with the process of mixology as an impactful connection to cultures, identities, and ideas. All the works have been made in the last three years in Uganda, Senegal and Benin. 

Charity Atukunda’s presentation of kangas, an important medium for the artist, ground her social commentary on gender and tradition. She connects with a textile that is normally worn by everyday women across East Africa as a social and political script to

narrate life through proverbs. Using illustration, charcoal painting and patternmaking, Atukunda seamlessly merges human, technological, and natural elements to reimagine this traditional textile as a space for contemporary art that is both familiar and fabulous.

Gloria Kiconco’s presentation of the series “Negative Space (Collection I)” is an exploration into how to say the unsayable and represent a past that was erased and a present that is criminalized. Through four sculptural barkcloth paper zines, Kiconco revisits pre-colonial relationships in East and Central Africa that are today considered taboo. She uses poetry, as well as modern and retro symbology, and terms from Africa and around the world to be the mouthpiece that can liberate the silence. 

Laeïla Adjovi began the project “Cotton Blues” in November 2023, in northern Benin, with farmers from the Bariba community. With this series, she is exploring a wide range of material through an artistic and artisanal approach to photography. Using the cyanotype technique, she creates a connection between painting and photography: cross-processing, multiple exposures and alterations of the images amplify the dreamscape aspect of the portraits and scenes of harvest. The title of the project derives from the Blues expressed and sung by enslaved Africans in the Americas.

Exhibition Images