Sonke, through 8000 years of African Art

Across the continent and its diasporas, artists are engaging archives, recovering forgotten histories, reclaiming indigenous knowledge systems, interrogating colonial narratives and imagining new futures. Their practices reveal that art is not simply about representation or aesthetics. It is a site where cultural memory can be restored and where new forms of African self-understanding can emerge. This course invites participants to view African contemporary art through this broader lens. Rather than asking only whether an artwork is beautiful, valuable or investment-worthy, we ask deeper questions: ● What cultural knowledge does this work preserve? ● What histories does it recover? ● What forms of forgetting does it challenge? ● How does it contribute to the ongoing project of cultural renewal? ● What future does it imagine? By exploring African art history, contemporary artistic practice and the structures of the art world, participants will develop a richer understanding of how culture is made, maintained and transformed. They will learn how artists, curators, collectors, galleries, museums and cultural institutions participate in shaping collective memory and public consciousness. The course also examines the role of collecting within this framework. Collecting is approached not simply as the acquisition of objects but as participation in a cultural ecosystem. To collect art thoughtfully is to support artists, sustain cultural production and contribute to the preservation of ideas, histories and ways of knowing that might otherwise be lost.