“…The struggle of black people inevitably appear in an intensely cultural form because the social formation in which their distinct political traditions are now manifest has constructed the arena of politics on ground overshadowed by centuries of metropolitan capitalist development, thereby denying them recognition as legitimate politics. Blacks conduct a class struggle in and through race. The BC of race and class cannot be empirically separated, the class character of black struggles is not a result of the fact that blacks are predominantly proletarian, thought this is true…”- (Frank Talk Staff Writers in ‘Azania Salutes Tosh’ – circa 1981)
front cover:
Tosh by Steve Gordon
back cover:
Kippie by Basil Breakey
A Gathering by Bulelwa Kunene (Arak Collection, 2025)
How do we sit with the violence of erasure? What do our personal biographies tell us about what has been erased? What alternative histories and narratives emerge when we gather and when we are in community?
A Gathering is an publication by 2024 ARAK Curatorial Fellow Bulelwa Kunene which brings together the work of 13 African artists, each grappling with the complexities of their identities and histories in the postcolonial context; a landscape that is at once generative and silencing, where erasures persist in the shadows of the production of new forms of knowledge. A place to contend with absence.
Without the impulse towards filling silences, mitigating erasures and bridging gaps, A Gathering is an opportunity to sit with the discomfort of a potentially unfinished and multivocal past, present and future.
A Gathering features artworks by Ade Adesina, Bougaard, Christine Nyatho, Donald Makola, Isheanesu Dondo, Lemek Sompoika, Lynette Musukubili, Odirile Khune Motsiri, Samuel Oyebode, Tahir Carl Karmali, Tuli Mekondjo, Zenaéca Singh and Zizicelo Sifumba.