The 2026 RMB Latitudes CuratorLab exhibitions are live! Now in its fifth year, RMB Latitudes CuratorLab is an online mentorship and residency programme supporting early-career curators from across Africa through professional guidance, peer exchange and hands-on curatorial experience. Supported by RMB, the programme has nurtured more than 50 curators to date.
This year, 11 curators from South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda and Egypt bring their perspectives to the fore through a new collection of online exhibitions, exploring diverse ideas, stories and approaches to contemporary art. Discover the exhibitions and meet the next generation of curatorial voices.
It seems like African contemporaneity is often imagined, talked about, and conceived as moving in between one thing and the other. Its histories (broadly addressed as pre- and during colonialism) and its future (there was not long ago a raving excitement of afrofuturism), between geographies (an here and a there) and inevitably between cultures (a local and a global), between identities (afropolitan, global citizen, cosmopolitan, Yoruba, Swahili), and between political states, economic fluxes, and spiritual understanding of self.
This exhibition asks what is to be found in considering the present as is; beyond a portal to the past or a springboard for the future - a dense, active space where histories, futures, identities, commodities, bodies, and geographies coexist? What's in the present beyond memories of the past and ideas and directions for the future?
Inherited Forms brings together the practices of five Ugandan women artists whose work explores how material knowledge, memory and cultural inheritance move across generations and into contemporary forms of making. At the centre of the exhibition is the Ugandan mat, or omukeeka, as a point of departure for thinking about inheritance as an active process. A mat carries knowledge through its materials, patterns and techniques, as well as through the people, relationships and communities involved in its making. What happens when an inherited form moves into another material, another context or another generation? What remains, what changes, and what becomes possible?
The exhibition begins with Keerera Nellie’s photographs of the Karibu Project, documenting women artisans engaged in the traditional practice of mat-making. Her images draw attention to the materials, gestures and relationships through which cultural knowledge is shared and transmitted. This lineage continues through the work of the participating artists.
Olivia Mary Nantongo uses the traditional woven mat as a canvas and reflective surface, combining acrylic paint, oil pastels, and foreign and repurposed objects to explore identity and relationships.
Darren Akoragye draws from childhood memories of her grandmother’s mat, reimagining its physical form through digital landscapes. Laruni Diana Mary transforms maize husks into sculptural forms and masks, while Namala Olivia works with raffia and banana fibre to create sculptures inspired by everyday Ugandan life. Together, the works bring craft-based materials and knowledge into contemporary artistic practices, creating new relationships between inherited forms, materials and ideas.
Inherited Forms considers what happens when craft enters contemporary art and how this changes the way we understand both. Craft carries histories of skill, material knowledge, labour and community, yet its place within contemporary art and collecting continues to evolve. The exhibition invites viewers to encounter these materials as part of a living artistic practice and to consider their place within the future of art collecting. As artists continue to reinterpret inherited materials through sculpture, photography, painting and digital practice, craft can be understood as a continuing source of contemporary artistic knowledge, with the capacity to shape how future collections represent culture, material history and artistic practice.
The built environment is often understood as a testament to permanence. Buildings, roads, bridges and other forms of infrastructure are designed to resist time, to impose order upon the landscape and to project stability into the future. Yet every constructed form is subject to transformation. Concrete fractures, steel oxidises, timber expands and contracts, paint peels, vegetation takes root in neglected surfaces and architecture slowly absorbs the traces of weather, occupation, maintenance, and abandonment. Rather than existing outside of nature, the built environment remains in constant dialogue with it.
Material Witness proposes that these processes should not be understood simply as signs of decline or failure. Instead, they reveal the temporal lives of materials. The exhibition approaches weathering as an ongoing condition through which architecture records its encounters with environmental forces, human intervention and the passage of time. In doing so, it shifts attention away from the ideal of the pristine building and towards the dynamic, unfinished life of the constructed world.
Bringing together the work of Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Damon Botha, Lesego Forbes, Michele Mathison, Silindokuhle Shandu, Guy Simpson, Brigitta Stone-Johnson, Kirsty Tinkler, Cathy Xiao and Khanya Zibaya.
The exhibition explores the built environment as a site of continual negotiation between permanence and impermanence. Although each artist employs a distinct visual language and material approach, their practices share an attentiveness to the changing conditions of architecture and urban landscape. Their works observe surfaces that have been marked by exposure, that bear the evidence of use and adaptation, and environments where natural and human processes intersect. Together, they reveal the built environment not as a collection of static forms but as an evolving material ecology.
Underlying the exhibition is the proposition that materials possess their own temporalities. Buildings are not completed when construction ends; they continue to change through weather, maintenance, repair, erosion, occupation, and neglect. Rust, cracks, stains, dust, and improvised interventions are not merely signs of deterioration but records of these ongoing transformations. They testify to architecture's capacity to accumulate histories, making visible the slow and often imperceptible processes through which the world is continually remade.
To weather is not simply to deteriorate; it is to endure through transformation. The works assembled in this exhibition suggest that the built environment is best understood not as a finished object but as a living process, continually shaped by material forces that exceed architectural intention. By attending to these slow and often overlooked changes, Material Witness proposes a different way of seeing the spaces we inhabit, one in which time is made visible through matter, and in which the traces of change become evidence not of loss but of the ongoing life of the built world.
The Body Remembers the Earth emerged as I considered the idea of a shared memory or consciousness between ourselves and the land, and the ways we can attempt to access it. Returning home to Uganda earlier this year made me more aware of this idea and forced me to consider what might happen if we cannot learn from the land.
Perhaps that’s why we are so stagnant, why we are trapped in a cycle of extraction and exploitation across the continent, because we fail to pause and remember the stories of the earth.
The exhibition, therefore, asks what it might mean to move beyond simply remembering acts of violence and to actively attempt to repair damaged relationships. Healing, in this context, cannot be separated from the land.
If the earth has been wounded through systems of dispossession, then caring for it becomes part of caring for ourselves and the communities that depend upon it. By recognising the earth as something we are connected to rather than something we possess, the exhibition proposes that healing the land can also become a form of collective healing. Ultimately, this allows us to acknowledge the wounds of colonial history while creating the conditions to grow beyond them.
Wahu-Mũchiri’s research demonstrates how landscapes carry political and ideological meanings, revealing that questions of land are inseparable from questions of power, history, and belonging. Mbembe’s work allows us to consider how the violence of colonialism continues to shape the present rather than existing only as a historical event.
The violence that occurs on land remains visible in its soil, ecosystems, borders, resources, and in the communities that continue to inhabit it. The body similarly becomes a site of accumulation, carrying histories that are inherited across generations. Land and body, therefore, mirror one another, both holding memories of what has been endured and what continues to shape the present.
To sustainably grow and heal, we need to move past the nostalgic haze when considering our relationship to the earth. Instead, it asks how the memories held within land and body can help us imagine decolonial futures. By recognising the earth as something we are connected to rather than something we possess, the exhibition proposes that healing the land can also become a form of collective healing. Ultimately, this allows us to acknowledge the wounds of colonial history while creating the conditions to grow beyond them.
Retrieve is a group show bringing together artists whose work turns away from the spectacle of crisis and toward something closer: the interior lives and spaces inside it. This exhibition visualises the softness, quiet, exhaustion, and weight of respite within melancholic times. Writing about the emotional condition of our present moment, critic Vamika Sinha reaches for a term coined by Sri Lankan artist Abdul Halik Azeez: melancholy, to describe not a temporal state, like the now-familiar postcolonial or neocolonial, but an experiential one — the stupefying affect of living in a world still functioning on imperialist capitalist logics, and watching it self-cannibalise into collapse.
It is a feeling, Sinha writes, that is "oddly universal, uniting in its thick, clotting grief." Retrieve begins here, inside that thickness of grief, and erects a spatial dimension for melancholy to be investigated, meditated on, and made visible.
What does it look like to sit with a grief we are expected to ignore, in a time of extreme censorship and disempowerment, and of extreme reactiveness, when everything demands an instant response? In his 1931 review-essay "Linke Melancholie" (left-wing melancholy), Walter Benjamin took aim at the poets of his own defeated left. They had, he argued, turned political disappointment into a cultural commodity: a melancholy that mistook the shape of loss for a politics, possessing its grief rather than risking it for something unproven. Faced with fascism, he judged this melancholy disabling. It paralysed artists and writers when it should have propelled them to speak, or to make new language.
Drafts of the Future examines a deceptively simple question: How does the future come into existence?
The exhibition begins from the proposition that the future does not suddenly arrive. Before it manifests, it is continuously imagined, inherited, experienced, and constructed through three interconnected movements: memory, presence, and speculation.
Memory is where we begin. It is the archive of what has already happened: the places we grew up in, the people who shaped us, the objects we remember, the spaces that hold emotional residue, and the histories we inherit before we have the language to name them. Memory is not simply a record of the past. It is an active force that continues to shape how we understand ourselves and the worlds we inhabit.
Presence, or being, is the second movement. It is the space of the now: what we experience, desire, negotiate, and become in the present. The decisions we make today, the relationships we form, the identities we inhabit, and the conditions in which we live all contribute to the person and the society we are becoming.
Speculation, or becoming, is the final movement the space of what is still being written. Here, the exhibition turns towards what has not yet arrived. We imagine, we hope, we question, and we project. We carry the lessons of our histories and the realities of our present into possible futures. In doing so, we do not simply wait for the future; we draft it.
The works in Drafts of the Future therefore operate as fragments of a larger temporal conversation. They move between domestic spaces, childhood, cultural memory, inherited knowledge, identity, womanhood, belonging, labour, grief, selfhood, and transformation. Together, they ask what it means to inherit a past while actively participating in the creation of something that does not yet exist.
The exhibition proposes that the future is not a blank page. It is a document already being drafted, written by all of us as we move actively between memory, presence, and speculation.
A line, a mark, a piece of fabric, an image or a word can feel familiar because we have encountered it before.
How much can we know about another person through what they make? And what happens in the space between what an artwork offers us and what we bring to it?
meeting you where you are considers the relationships that develop between artists, artworks, and viewers. Bringing together practices that explore marks, repetition, writing-like forms, and accumulation. The exhibition begins with the curiosity that arises when an artwork seems to communicate something without making itself entirely legible.
Rather than looking for a single visual language across the works, the exhibition considers how meaning changes through the act of looking, and what happens in the space between recognition and understanding.
I have found myself reading these works through text, even when text is not necessarily what they are concerned with.
These are not necessarily statements about the artists’ intentions. They are my own ways of engaging with the artworks, shaped by my particular interests and experiences.
The works hold traces of their making. Marks gather, patterns emerge, and gestures reveal moments of stopping, returning, and beginning again. These traces offer glimpses into an artwork's life, but they do not necessarily explain it. An artwork may change as an artist returns to it, or remain physically unchanged while the people encountering it see something different each time.
The exhibition considers how artworks meet us through different forms of encounter. I see writing in the accumulation of Cathy Abraham’s marks, residue in Kganya Malatjie’s almost-legible forms and obscurity in Luncedo Phillip’s dimmed paintings.
An artwork's physical dimension cannot determine the significance it will hold for us, just as an image cannot fully prepare us for the experience of encountering the work in person.
Rather than offering a single way to interpret the works, meeting you where you are makes space for shifting impressions. It asks us to consider what we notice, what we assume, and what might change when we encounter an artwork again. The work may be different, we may be different, or both may remain as they were.
The Weight of Distanceexamines connections between Africa, Portugal and Brazil shaped by colonialism, migration, displacement and cultural exchange. Bringing Anglophone and Lusophone histories into dialogue, the exhibition considers the lasting effects of Portuguese colonialism within wider African histories.
Taking Atlantic continuity as its point of departure, the exhibition explores how cultural knowledge, beliefs, memories and identities move across the Atlantic, transforming through displacement and exchange. The Atlantic is understood not as a seamless connection, but as a space marked by rupture, movement and persistence, where histories, languages, beliefs and forms of knowledge have been carried, adapted and reconstituted across generations.
The exhibition considers distance as more than geographical separation. It can fracture relationships between places, generations and histories, while also creating new forms of connection and belonging. It asks how histories remain present when displaced, transformed or excluded from dominant narratives, and how memory is shaped through cultural transmission, lived experience and place.
The Weight of Distance moves through two interconnected themes: Atlantic Continuities and Making Home.
Atlantic Continuities — Beré Magalhães, Benigino Mangovo and Eunice Pais — explores ancestry, spirituality, ecology and cultural memory. Their works consider how inherited knowledge, beliefs and histories persist across generations while acquiring new meanings through changing places and contexts.
Making Home — Débora Sandjai, Mário Macilau, Queila Fernandes and Beatriz Manteigas — considers belonging, displacement and relationships to place. Through the body, portraiture, landscape and lived environments, the artists explore how identity and notions of home are shaped by movement, memory and experience.
Presented through Latitudes Online as part of the RMB Latitudes and Art School Africa CuratorLab, The Weight of Distance brings diverse geographical and historical perspectives into conversation. The exhibition uses the digital space to bring geographically dispersed practices into proximity. Here, distance becomes both subject and method: the separation between places becomes a way of thinking about what connects them.
To Fold a Line brings together eight artists associated with the Nsukka School who extend line beyond drawing through their handling of material. Working through folding, weaving, coiling, binding, carving, incising, and painting, they turn line into a visual language that engages material memory, contemporary identity, and thought.
Here, to fold a line is not necessarily to bend it. It is to make line enter material, emerge through the connection and arrangement of materials, occupy space, acquire volume, and generate new relationships. Here, line is woven, painted onto fibre, bound, carved into wood, excavated as grooves, and built up from discarded materials. Across these varied approaches, line moves beyond the surface and becomes a physical presence.
Rooted in the experimental legacy of the Nsukka School, these artists extend an approach to line that draws on Indigenous visual traditions, where line, pattern, incision, and geometry have long served as aesthetic and communicative languages. From Igbo Uli to Ndebele geometric mural art, Yolŋu Rarrk, Māori Kōwhaiwhai, and Whakairo, line and linear structures have taken diverse cultural and material forms.
To Fold a Line considers how artists have broadened the horizon of how lines can be created, encountered, and understood in art.
The exhibition also draws from the philosophy of Igwebuike (“strength in multitude”), in which individual elements gain greater presence and force through coming together as a whole. In this exhibition, materials, lines, fragments, gestures, and forms are similarly brought together to create complex wholes. What may appear ordinary or insignificant in isolation acquires new meaning through the artist’s intentionality and process.
Rather than presenting the Nsukka School as a fixed historical movement, To Fold a Line positions it as an evolving collective that encourages experimentation while remaining grounded in local knowledge systems. The exhibition asks how seemingly simple ideas, forms, and materials can be transformed, manipulated, and reorganised into complex wholes.
To look beyond the limitations of the human figure, which have been echoed in structures of representation across the globe, Kindred moves us away from the familiar figure of the human form, calling upon artists to explore the other-worldly through their distinct practices in an effort to dismantle how we see and make sense of the world and what it means to inhabit our skin.
For centuries, human exceptionalism has put us at the apex of what is living simultaneously, creating exclusionary practices of defining the proper perception of what it means to be an individual. Western enlightenment positioned the white man as the exemplar of civilisation, with everyone else seen as peripheral and secondary existence.
What would it mean to dismantle these hierarchies and rethink regimes of representations that help us make sense of the world? What can foreign forms teach us about what we consider familiar and why?
The speculative, which is intrinsically linked to other-worlding, has shown itself to be a generative practice that helps us journey beyond present times and present configurations, testing the limit of how familiar the foreign can actually be.
The speculative is an area which allows for less documented, marginalised and underrepresented modes of being to enjoy unadulterated exploration not hampered by real-life conventions. To speculate is to dream and to allow what would be considered strange to lie up closely beside you in an effort to make sense of the world and the futures we are constructing.
Julia Kristeva puts words to this quite succinctly, reminding us that the uncanny allows for the foreign to push up against the familiar in an effort to examine that which we wish to expel from the human form and, in turn, examine our vulnerabilities and limitations as a society. Some artists like Lionel Mbayiwa pull from a very real and ancestral place, their figures and creatures inspired by indigenous oral storytelling. They then speculate from this archive and create worlds where their stories can be engaged with in this contemporary moment.
Other artists like Liam Van der Heever and Oupa Sibeko create a parallel world based on our existing one where the human condition can be unravelled to a point of no recognition. The uncanny lives true in Van Der Heever’s sculptures, which take a recognisable object like dominoes and fuse materially with a foreign household object like the dishwashing sponge, making commentary on the power of play whilst simultaneously interrogating generational trauma. Sibeko, on the other hand, creates these abstract creatures through footage and his close relationship with the real streets of Cape Town, from which he picks up the surface in his pastel works, divorcing us from any point of recognition of the source, which in this case is the street itself. When reaching this point of no recognition in what we see these artists open up the space to address the intangible like social dynamics, political upheaval and human plight.
This exploration of other worlds must go beyond just the figurative or the creature, but should also include the strangely familiar that artists reach in the creation of space or mood. For artists like Hanna Noor Mahomed, with a practice heavily embedded in the abstract, the environment is created through productive ambiguity, space, and colour all mingling to create hushed moods and symbolic moments that engage certain political or social statements. On the other hand, Stodel attempts to use the foreign in order to find the familiar by using found images and archive to collage a sense of home, building environments that can become a transgressive act of homing. For some of these artists, like Stodel, Mahomed, and Sibeko, the figure is nowhere to be seen. However, a room, a forest, or an abstract space of shapes disturbs what we may consider as foreign to the self or familiar to our bodies. Other worlds in this case become an imaginative means to refigure how we see our surroundings and possibly fill in the gaps where reality just cannot muster.
The strangely familiar is engaged with in a wide variety of ways. For some it is more of a direct confrontation with the depiction of otherworldly creatures. For others, the strangely familiar takes on an uncanny flavour as we explore what wants to be expelled or what could be defined as abject. Sibeko yet again is a testament to this as his frottage traces the neglected streets that made up District Six littered with potholes that then become these attractive playful figures. He explores what has been forgotten, displaced, or disregarded through performative play and gesture. For artists like Ande Magoso, the human and the creature become intermingled as they explore hybridity and dualism through their own heritage being Xhosa and Zulu. Donna Haraway’s cyborgian theory shows how the exploration of such hybridity, which destabilises the human, allows us to begin to think of more expansive ways of being and identities that step outside of the normative construction of the human. Sadiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, which calls for the need to speculate where there is erasure within certain marginalised histories, is pertinent within this group of artists.
This juncture between speculation and restoration builds another world where Blackness and other fringe identities attached to our ontological form are seen to be free, safe to embody, elastic in its aesthetics, and all-encompassing in its unapologetic nature. Lionel Mbayiwa invigorates traditional Shona oral storytelling using symbolic tropes of animals like the fish and the bird to make commentary on contemporary issues like political leadership in A Broken Nation (2025) and modern-day surveillance in Pasi Pamera Ziso (2024). Another example of critical fabulation is Ande Magoso’s uNomadonsa, where he takes the historical accounts of uNonggqawuza and the cattle killings movement of 1856 and decides to speculate and insert a figure who was a witness to the moment, bringing in a different perspective.
Scientific and traditional forms of knowledge often position other-worlding and the speculative within mysticism or other fields that fall outside formal analytical approaches to humanity and ontology. Yet speculation is, at its core, a mode of knowledge production: a process in which the event itself becomes a site of inquiry, generating possible futures while revealing where we are situated as communities and where we wish to direct our collective trajectories. Other-worlding that releases the human figure as the centre allows for expansive thinking that brings in new possibilities that could be helpful to understanding the realities we live in.
Speculation or other-worlding is therefore not rooted in naivety, toxic positivity, or an unwavering investment in individual advancement and material success. The speculative can instead offer a means of excavating the obscured truths of life, drawing on histories and realities that may unsettle us, produce unfamiliar perspectives, and compel us to interrogate the true limitations of what it means to be human and what it means to occupy certain communities and earth.
