ArtReview has released its annual ranking of the world’s most influential people – artists, curators, gallerists – in the art scene. This list is a diverse compilation of some of the most influential figures who have impacted the art world today with their work.
The list includes some African artists, curators, thinkers, gallerists, architects and art collectives. Check them out below.
Zanele Muholi
Zanele Muholi is a South African artist and a visual activist. Muholi’s work capitalizes on joy and celebration, instead of exploiting trauma. Recent solo shows at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, the Finnish Museum of Photography in Helsinki, Fotografihuset in Oslo, and GL Strand in Copenhagen are just a few examples of how Muholi has been celebrated.
By establishing the Muholi Art Institute this year, which provides studios and residencies to underprivileged artists from Cape Town and rural South Africa, they are also inspiring the next generation.
Koyo Kouoh
Koyo Kouoh is a Cameroonian-born curator who has been serving as Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town since 2019. Kouoh has been vocal about the importance of funding curatorial work over the years, positioning the profession as one that focuses on caring for society and its citizens to ensure their well-being and vitality. Her advocacy for funding must have inspired the partnership with Gucci to host the museum’s first fundraising gala under the theme “Art & Opulence.”
Achille Mbembe
Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian historian, political theorist, and public intellectual. He is a major and influential thinker in postcolonial studies. Mbembe remains an intellectual point of reference not only for artists and curators interested in Africa’s colonial past and postcolonial future.
Achille Mbembe’s expansive work defies categorization, addressing topics as diverse as (post-)modernity, statehood, violence, death, slavery, capital, sexuality, urbanity, and political economies of brutality imaged, imagined, and objectified by race, racism, and colonialism. All of this is conveyed through his captivating, humane, and distinctive voice and style.
Ibrahim Mahama
Ibrahim Mahama is an artist of monumental installations. His monumental installations, particularly the jute sacks dropped over buildings, are among the most recognisable art interventions around the world. He is the founder and director of Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art, an art establishment that is helping to build an infrastructure for the thriving art scene in Ghana.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is an artist and writer of Ghanaian descent based in London, whose contributions to the artworks can’t be overstated.
Yiadom-Boakye’s hugely humanizing depictions of faces and informed adherence to European portraiture traditions. She has often downplayed race-related readings of her art as ‘easy answers’, saying her process is rooted in painting itself.
When you look at the artist’s work and experience, its timeless quality of encounter and connection with others: Yiadom-Boakye’s paintings speak to the moment.
Mariane Ibrahim
Mariane Ibrahim is a Somali-French art dealer that is based in Chicago, Illinois. She runs the eponymous Mariane Ibrahim Gallery. Her focus is on works that tend towards figuration and the politics of depicting Black life. Her artists, including portraitists Amoako Boafo (whose first European solo exhibition took place at Ibrahim’s Paris outpost this year) and Raphael Barontini, have garnered market and institutional attention, while Ibrahim herself has become a regular fixture at art-fair talks and on best-booth lists.
Michael Armitage
Michael Armitage is a Kenyan-born artist who works between Nairobi and London. His colourful, dreamlike paintings are loaded with provocative perspectives that play with visual narratives and challenge cultural assumptions, exploring politics, history, civil unrest and sexuality. He started the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute to promote the works of underseen East African artists, which he has showcased in his own international exhibitions.
Kader Attia
Kader Attia is an Algerian-French artist taking on colonialism and its legacies through his sculptures and installations. Through his work, he draws us into the double bind of pride and defiance that accompanies a history of loss and dispossession. His practice as an artist speaks about an intense preoccupation with aesthetic and psychological imbalance, with the disequilibrium created by an ideology of perfection and consumption.
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is a contemporary art curator, writer, biotechnologist and devoted multitasker from Cameroon. He is particularly curious about issues relating to economics, race, postcolonialism and care.
He is the founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and is the artistic director of Sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He is the artistic director of the 13th Bamako Encounters 2022, a biennale for African photography in Mali. Together with the Miracle Workers Collective, he curated the Finland Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. He was a recipient of the first OCAD University International Curators Residency fellowship in Toronto in 2020 and is currently a professor in the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. From 2023 he will take on the role of Director at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin.
David Adjaye
Sir David Frank Adjaye OM OBE RA is a Ghanaian-British architect. Known for designing a good number of notable buildings around the world, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, he was knighted in the 2017 New Year Honours for services to architecture. He believes that architecture should serve people, and as a prevalent force within all our lives it too should take to the realm of egalitarianism.
Otobong Nkanga
Otobong Nkanga is a Nigerian-born visual artist and performance artist that is interested in questions of home, place and displacement. The artist’s practice involves drawing, textiles, installation, video and performance with questions of home, place, displacement and the emotional resonance they have to our being.
Meriem Bennani
Meriem Bennani is a Moroccan artist whose work uses absurdist humour with pointed commentary on technology, power and the postcolonial condition. Interested in questioning fractured identities in contemporary society, her work which traverses video, sculpture, multimedia installation, drawing, and Instagram, makes references to Moroccan culture and history.
Azu Nwagbogu
Nigerian curator Azu Nwagbogu is the founder and Director of African Artists’ Foundation and Lagos Photo Festival. He continues to work apace, helping to create an international stage for African contemporary artists in 2007 in Lagos. He has hosted a series of exhibitions and residencies for emerging artists. With Lagos Photo festival, which just ran its 13th edition, he has presented a selection from its previous editions at the first Ozangé Biennale of African Photography, in Málaga.
blaxTARLINES
blaxTARLINES is an artist collective for artists, curators and writers in Ghana. It is a community and incubator for art in Ghana, and a template for independent art scenes around the world. Founded almost a decade ago as a response to a need to reform the art department of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, the fluid and experimental collective has curated multigenerational exhibitions and prioritised a dynamic, democratic approach over any specific media.
