Photographic portraits, paintings, video installations and sculptures. At least 26 works feature in the exhibition “The True Size of Africa”, organized in Germany. The initiative is scheduled to take place from November 9 to August 17, 2025.
For nine months, she aims to broaden the understanding of Africa through art and cultural history. While the view of the continent is too often rich in stereotypes.
“We underestimate Africa’s role in history and its own history before colonialism. It’s all part of this exhibition, and that’s what we want to show, how great the influence of Africans was because they were forced to leave Africa. They also spread culture and a lot of music and dance that we know today is of Afro-world origin,” explains Ralf Beil, general director of the World Cultural Heritage Völklinger Hütte and curator of the exhibition.
Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Namibia, South Africa and others, the artists in the exhibition come from all over the continent. Kongo Astronauts is a collective from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Their video installation uses the image of the astronauts to denounce the current situation in their country.
“In the east of my country, people are killed for coltan to make electronic devices and the waste is then taken back to Congo. The world must be sincere and know this. As an artist, I tried to convey this message through the astronauts. For me, it’s a bit like that.”, says Pisko Crane, Kongo Astronauts
Works by artists with African roots, notably Cuban and British, are also on display. Slavery allowed the spread of African culture.
“The true size of Africa is not just the continent, the geographic continent of Africa, but also its expansion into other places in the world – the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe. So for me it’s like a big family across the world,” says Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, a Cuban artist, currently living in Amsterdam, Netherlands.
So clever who could define the size of Africa, so his head here embodies the terrestrial globe.
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