The Lusaka Contemporary Art Center (LuCAC) is a new private foundation founded by artist Victor Mutelekesha to further the advancement of contemporary Zambian arts. The centre is in New Chamba Valley and it houses a gallery, a library, and an artist residency. The LuCAC aims to foster and encourage creation of new arts and cultural knowledge around themes of decolonisation, relevant histories, contemporaneity, and so on, in Zambia and internationally.
The centre is open to artists of all ages and artists whose contemporary practices and interests coincide with those of the new center. LuCAC will focus more on emerging talents by encouraging self-awareness, respect, tolerance, critical thinking, and constant exploration of shared histories. By documenting and curating its activities, the center will support artistic literature (writing and publication) to build a resource archive for the coming generations.
At LuCAC, the gallery will function as a testing ground for artistic experimentation, while the library will serve as a location for study, research, and the critical evaluation of both new and old knowledge for valid documentation. Informal and formal talks and recordings will be catered to in a social room in the centre. The center also has two private rooms set aside for visiting national and international guests invited to the center to take part in events that relate to the center’s core values.
The Lusaka Contemporary scene will open with an inaugural exhibition titled ‘Prospice, Kwacha!’ and it will run from 6th of January 2023 to 17th of December 2023. Curated by Karen Reini, the exhibition will feature works from four artists including Banji Chona, Sana Ginwalla, Daut Makala and Germain Ngoma, each with their own hybrid Zambian identities and unique relationship with the dynamic crossroads of Lusaka.
“Zambia has a very wide cultural diaspora and that component is extremely relevant to the development of Zambia itself. We wanted to have this express connection with the diaspora networks that Zambia has and to give them a place where they would be as comfortable as they would be abroad, to provide a gateway into the Zambian cultural landscape. We hope that in the next 10 to 20 years, there will be so many of such centres spread across the region. We want to make Lusaka one of the major parts of the network of these centres, being mutually beneficial to each other while playing a unique role that is relevant to the bigger picture,” says Mutelekesha.
The founder and LuCAC Director, Victor Mutelekesha [b. 1976] is a Zambian artist living and working in Oslo Norway. He is also the co-founder of the Livingstone office for Contemporary Art. Since 2004, Victor’s work has appeared in numerous regional, national, and international group and solo exhibitions, such as those at the Dakar Biennale, Havana Biennial, OpenART international ART symposium in Sweden, NSK State Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, Stavanger Museum, Kunstnerforbundet Gallery for Contemporary Art in Oslo, Gallery Palazio Tito in Venice, Italy, and the Akershus kunstsenter in Lillestrom, Norway. His work deals with subjects such as hybridity, diaspora identity, and the human condition. His focus is also oriented towards expanding the definitions of diaspora, hybridity and identity in order to reduce conflict.
