ENCOUNTERS
Black Rock Senegal alumni cycle 3 & cycle 4: Sophia Nahli Allison, Gouled Ahmed, Ousmane Bâ, Ngimbi Bakambana, Lilah Benetti, Adrian L. Burrell, Panmela Castro, Nicolas Lambelet Coleman, Chinwe Chigbu, Souleye Fall, Ayan Farah, Enam Gbewonyo, Stephen Hayes, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Ange-Frédéric Koffi, Diop Makhone Issa, Chase Johnson, Amina Kadous, Mae-ling Lokko, Samuel Nnorom, Kwabena Appiah-Nti, Nengi Omuku, Léonard Pongo, Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Khalif Thair Thompson, Keith Tutt II, Ardeshir Tabrizi and Paul Verdell.

Encounters is a group exhibition showcasing a diverse range of media, including painting, sculpture, installation, photography, prints, drawings, film, and multimedia. It features Black Rock Senegal alumni who were in residence between 2022 and 2024, who present their unique perspectives on contemporary life and artistic practice. The artworks reveal each artist's engagement with the prevailing issues of the past and present - a time where thinking and doing collide, contrast, fuse, and merge.

Poetic, experimental, enigmatic, and sometimes familiar, each work resonates unexpectedly with audiences. The exhibition is a survey of artists from different generations, working globally, who come from a broad range of social and cultural backgrounds, brought together by their time spent in Senegal, where they developed their practice beyond their usual environments.

In bringing together a selection of current and past artists-in-residence, multiple perspectives, histories, and wide-ranging areas of interest, Encounters is a communication of sorts, or a mediation, between artists. It focuses on how many encounters - from the personal to collective, past, present, and future - shape our perceptions of who we are and our place in the world. This exhibition opens up a space to connect thoughts and acts as they have unfolded in artworks on view. We stand at several crossroads at this moment concerning the visual arts and cultures, historical and contemporary, and theories and methods of analysis yet this exhibition seeks to open up new fields of collaboration in the visual cultures through encounters between ways of thinking, doing and making in the arts.

Encounters throw up the question of time and temporality, and how our encounters shape how art is made and our experiences of it. It is also layered reactions to ideas and personalities; cultures and politics, stylistic considerations and varied histories.

Curator
Dr Jareh Das

Project managers
Kéwé Lô, Michelle Fikrig, Gabriella Wilks

Event Production and coordination
Naett M’baye, Gaby Dior Dieng

Installation and set-up
Madior M’baye, Djiby Ba, Dahirou Siby, Alassane Sow

Exhibition Design
AYO Design
Sarah Bamigboye

Image: installation view Samuel Nnorom and Enam Gbewonyo. Photographer (c) Badara Preira.