Chidimma Nwafor is a Lagos-based painter whose work explores imagined memory, dreams, and the psychological spaces between the seen and the unseen. Through figurative oil paintings, she explores the themes of longing, absence and presence, loss, and transformation, using the body as a vessel through which emotional and spiritual experiences unfold. Her figures exist in states of emergence and disappearance, inhabiting spaces where memory, imagination, and reality meet.

Nwafor's interest in painting developed in adulthood through a fascination with colour, storytelling, imagination, and the ways personal experiences continue to shape identity over time. She studied Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Benin, where she deepened her commitment to painting and began developing a visual language rooted in memory and human experience.

Her early practice examined questions of nature versus nurture, exploring how social expectations influence identity and behaviour. This inquiry gradually evolved into a deeper investigation of imagined memory and the unseen connections that persist beyond time, presence, and lived memory. Her paintings often feature multiple, repeated figures, layered bodies, psychological spaces, and a restrained palette of blue-green tones that evoke the sensation of memory suspended underwater.

More recently, Nwafor's work has centred on sisterhood, absence and presence, and imagined memory. Her ongoing series, between presence and absence, explores the emotional space between lived experience and imagined connection, considering how memory can be shaped not only by what has happened, but also by what could have been.

Her work has been exhibited in Nigeria and internationally, including exhibitions with Rele Arts Foundation, Kuenyehia Prize Ghana, and Mitochondria Gallery in the United States. She was a finalist for the Art X Prize (2023) and the Kuenyehia Prize (2024), and was shortlisted for the Cassirer Welz Award (2025).

Nwafor continues to develop figurative paintings that explore imagined and lived memory, absence and presence, dreams, and the unseen forces that shape our inner lives.

Láura Viruly is a Cape Town-based sculptress working primarily in forged and formed aluminium, alongside installation. She completed her Master of Fine Art with distinction at the University of Cape Town in 2025.

Her practice investigates world-building, fantasy, spectacle, and cultural myth-making in South Africa, examining how colonial aesthetics, consumer culture, and inherited symbols continue to shape contemporary ideas of desire, belief, and affluence. Through labour-intensive techniques of beating aluminium over serial and decorative objects—often cement garden ornaments—she creates hollow sculptural replicas that simultaneously venerate and vandalise their source. By rendering these mass-produced objects singular again while extracting their image through hammer and heat, Viruly employs replication as both a material process and conceptual methodology, questioning authenticity, imitation, canonical notions of aura, value, and the role of her labour in producing meaning.

Viruly has exhibited throughout South Africa, including at the National Arts Festival, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Kalashnikovv Gallery, WORLDART, and kumalo | turpin. In 2026, she completed the Tankwa Artscape Residency in the Karoo and is the founder and creative director of Via Wax Atelier.

Mankebe Seakgoe is a Johannesburg-based multidisciplinary artist born in Pietersburg, Limpopo. In 2019, she completed her BFA at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Her practice is a continuous exploration of language, emotion, and the nuanced spaces that exist between comprehension and feeling. Seakgoe’s work seeks to move beyond conventional communication, inviting audiences into a realm where affect and intuition take precedence over literal understanding.

Seakgoe’s process, often likened to André Breton’s concept of “dictation of thought in the absence of all control,” is deeply intuitive. Beginning with meditation, Seakgoe allows her ideas to surface freely, often translating them into charcoal works, canvas compositions, or sculptural forms. This approach underlines her belief in art as a tool for deeper understanding—both of the self and of shared human experience, seeking ever more profound ways to communicate the inexpressible.

Her debut solo exhibition, This is not piano…, was presented by RESERVOIR (2026). In 2025, Seakgoe presented a solo project with BKhz at the Investec Cape Town Art Fair, titled The Invisible Man’s Herbarium. Recent group exhibitions include I keep coming back here, I don’t know why at Stevenson (2026); RMB Latitudes Art Fair with Stevenson (2026); The Poets Art Working at Southern Guild (2026); Experiment. Introduce. Enjoy at KwaLanga (2026); Investec Cape Town Art Fair with RESERVOIR (2026); The space between attempts at BKhz (2025); A tropology between image & imagination for BMW Art Generation at Nirox Sculpture Park (2025); Feminine front by the Austrian Cultural Forum; autopoiesis at Blank Projects (2025); Chapter Two: Identity and Migration at PSM Gallery, Berlin (2025); Thresholds at Southern Guild (2025); Between us and the stars at BKhz (2025), RMB Latitudes Art Fair with RESERVOIR (2025).

In 2024, she participated in Inner Sanctum at Everard Read; Fallow Ground, curated by RESERVOIR for Spaced Out at Gut Kerkow, Germany and Transitions at FNB Art Joburg with BKhz. In 2023, she participated in I Miss Myself The Most at Stevenson Gallery, Johannesburg; FULLHOUSE curated by FEDE at blank; I Hear You, a two-person exhibition with Tzung-Hui Lauren Lee at BKhz Gallery, Johannesburg; Brown Flesh Tales at Son of Langa Art Studio; and INDEX 2023, curated by Nkhensani Mkhari at the RMB Latitudes Art Fair. Earlier exhibitions include If Not Now, Then When (2022) at BKhz Gallery; Identity & Community (2022) at Son of Langa Art Studio; Paper as a Political Medium (2022) at FORMS Gallery; and Towards New Frontiers (2022) at Play Braamfontein, presented by Location Studio Practice. 

Yasmeen Abdalah is a Sudanese visual artist, born in Qatar in 1992 and currently based in Muscat, Oman. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Painting from Sudan University College of Fine and Applied Arts, graduating in 2014.

Working primarily through painting, Yasmeen explores memory, identity, displacement, resilience, and transformation, alongside the emotional and spiritual connections between humanity, nature, and the self. Deeply influenced by poetry, particularly the writings of Mahmoud Darwish, her work unfolds through layered figures, symbolic interiors, rich textures, and intuitive compositions that move between reality and imagination.

Yasmeen approaches the canvas as a space of infinite possibility. Her creative process is meditative and instinctive, allowing figures, forms, and narratives to gradually emerge through layers of colour and texture. Having lived across Qatar, Sudan, and Oman, she draws from diverse cultural environments, bringing together contrasting elements such as light and shadow, nature and interior spaces, and the personal and collective experience.

Through fragmented narratives and dreamlike visual worlds, Yasmeen reflects on the complexities of human experience and the capacity of the human spirit to endure, adapt, and evolve. Her work invites viewers into moments of reflection and connection, revealing the shared emotions and stories that exist beyond geographical and cultural boundaries.

Zara Julius is a transdisciplinary artist and creative researcher based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She works across sound and multimedia installation, printmaking, and social practice, often collaborating with musicians, cultural workers, and educators. Rather than viewing art solely as a finished outcome, Julius approaches making as both a process and a way of thinking through the world. Her practice explores the relationships between archives, spirituality, land, memory, and Southern African sonic epistemologies, asking how we might gather, remember, and imagine otherwise together within contexts shaped by enduring extractivist logics.

Working with materials drawn from colonial archives, liberation histories, and personal memory, Julius carefully reworks these sources through collecting, cutting, layering, and reassembling. In doing so, she creates opportunities to experience the past differently. Her practice is particularly concerned with dramaturgy, the death-life matrix, and the internal workings of the Black sonic, considering how these frameworks can reshape our understanding of time, memory, affect, and history in the face of ongoing unfreedoms and landlessness.

Julius has exhibited widely, including at the Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, the Akademie der Künste (Berlin), the Kunstinstituut Melly (Rotterdam), the Weltmuseum (Vienna), the Wereldmuseum (Amsterdam), and Darat al Funun (Amman). Her academic background in Social Anthropology (BA Hons), Visual and Art History (BSocSci), and Fine Art (MAFA) informs a research-led practice in which artistic production and scholarship are deeply interconnected.