We are delighted to present four female artists, all living and working in Africa, at this year's Discovery Platform at Photo London, Somerset House.
Each of or four artists is engaged in the art of storytelling, throwing a light on personal and national African histories and geographies through portraiture and landscape photography.
Senzeni Marasela lives and works in Soweto, South Africa. A cross-disciplinary artist who explores performance, photography, video, prints, and mixed-medium installations involving textiles and embroidery, her work deals with history, memory, and personal narrative, emphasising historical gaps and overlooked figures. Marasela is interested in the multiplicity contained within the experience of waiting and in the pathologies of women who are made to wait or who, perhaps, choose to do so. We will present rare photographs from the series Theodorah Comes To Johannesburg alongside significant textile pieces and images from Izithombe Zendawo Esizithandayo.
Maheder Haileselassie is a self taught Ethiopian photographer and visual artist, born and based in Addis Ababa. Her work is inspired by her own history, memory and experiences as well as those of the people she engages with every day. We will present landscape photographs from her project, Between Yesterday and Tomorrow for which Maheder was a winner of the Contemporary African Photography Awards (2023) and recipient of the Prince Claus seed grant.
Tshepiso Moropa is a visual artist and archivist based in Johannesburg. She produces work in a variety of mediums including illustration, collage making, painting, photography and film. Moropa's work explores themes of identity, family relations, violence, race, gender, love and sexuality, solitude and the sense of belonging. Her subject matter is either a self-portrait or archived images of African women found in library resources or research sites on the internet. A rich source of material is also found in African folkloric tales that the artist translates from Setswana and re-constructs as short animations, She explores connections between South Africans living today and their forgotten ancestors, describing this process as a way of bringing the figures in the photographs back to life.
Yassmin Forte lives and works in Maputo Mozambique. She is interested in stories of Africans, told by Africans. Her series This Is A Story About My Family won the Contemporary African Photography award in 2023. Forte's images attempt to dissect and navigate the effects of colonialism and migration from her family's history using family archives and her own images to unpack her African identity. In this process, she investigates how Africans have become the result of mixtures, migrations and colonisation, their histories blended in the repetition of patterns.
