1-4 October 2026
The group presentation from Borderlands Art will take collectors on a journey from the DR Congo, to Uganda and across the globe to the UK.
Alexander Kyungu Mwilambwe links African pasts to new imagined futures. He uses traditional symbols and discarded tyre inter tubes as storytelling agents to depict what he calls an ancestral passport. It connects materials historically connected to the DRC but are today mostly made in Asia then shipped across the world.
Kusa Kusa Gael Maski’s Cold Memory series collages images from remains of Mobutu sese seko’s lavish palaces. Blending the etchings from liberation leaders, rebels and the dictator’s vision traverses time, rendered in canvases stretching up to ten feet wide. In this, he features the families that have been caretakers of the architecture, portrayed as heroes in a kind of renaissance fabulation.
Deploying his work in fashion, British-Caribbean artist Othello De’Souza-Hartley set up a collaborative studio during his residency in Uganda. He used the studio as a staging ground for conversations about gender, identity and tradition. The resulting photographs capture these individuals in the Kanzu, traditional garment, fusing contemporary and traditional culture. The works are printed onto barkcloth, fusing the print with an ancient textile of the region. ‘Within’ explores cultural identity, the importance of listening to local voices, and traditions in contemporary art-making.
The materials will peak interest for collectors unfamiliar with the histories or materials deployed by the artists but who connect with masterful techniques and shared diasporic ways of being.