1-54 LONDON

For 1-54 London 2023, MOVART is proposing a narrative where African identity intervenes as the catalyst for a dialogue that, departing from the experience of the self, ends up generating a rich and diverse portrait of the questions affecting migration, cultural mobility and hibridisation through the lenses of the own experience of living, in three voices.

Thus, the Luanda-born visual artist Alice Marcelino offers us some pieces of her series ‘Kindumba’ (meaning “my hair”), that aims to talk about the Eurocentric concept of beauty by deconstructing the narratives that actively prevent members of the black community from seeing themselves represented in the media. As well as not fitting into the Western standard of beauty and being under- represented, black hair is often contemptuously judged in its various manifestations in the day-to- day and professional context of a majority made up by women.

In ‘The Giants from the New World’, the conceptual photographer Àsìkò brings us an emotional, cultural and spiritual exploration of the points of encounter and friction between his British citizenship and his Nigerian origin, through the use of the iconography of the Yoruba cultural mask of the Egun in an exchange of aesthetics and spaces between UK and Africa that, on a broader sense, delves into the transformation of this sacred and cultural artifact in a diasporic perspective.

For his part, the multidisciplinary artist and activist Mário Macilau, considered one of the key figures among the new generation of Mozambican artists, presents ‘Faith’, a photographic document inspired by the practice of ‘animism’ in contemporary Mozambique, that stems from traditional religions in which members believe in the existence of individual spirits that inhabit objects and natural phenomena.