The Cowrie Culture | The Ties That Bind Us

A RE-PRESENTATION OF VISUAL CULTURE AND CREATIVE EXPRESSION BY EMERGING ARTISTS FROM AFRICA AND THE AFRICAN DIASPORA

The online exhibition, The Ties That Bind Us, is the result of an open call announced by The Cowrie Culture for artists from African countries and the African Diaspora. The exhibition title, The Ties That Bind Us, is a recognition and celebration of the ideals, shared aspirations, longings, resilience, creative inspiration, and nuanced cultural representations of blackness reflected in art made in Africa and by the African Diaspora.

Over 300 applications were received and this group of 15 artists based in 10 countries on 4 continents were selected to participate in the online exhibition and corresponding “Artist as Entrepreneur” online course. 

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The Ties That Bind Us exhibition is a celebration of black and brown cultures. It is an exhibition that allows emerging artists from Africa and the African Diaspora to celebrate, critique, and epitomise ideals that reflect their proximal and distal connections to their African ancestry.

Throughout the exhibition, artists present works that acknowledge the significance of identity, blackness, spiritualism, history, socio-politics, youth, and contemporary representations of quotidian life on the Continent, as recognised by the African Diaspora. The online exhibition combines digital art, photography, mixed media, and paintings on canvas to comment on the contemporary culture of the young, emerging artists who made the works.

The Ties That Bind Us exhibition is an audacious attempt to present a collective of fresh, artistic experimentations in visual culture unique to the global, Neo-African and African Diasporic vernacular of artists from Brazil, Dominican Republic, Canada, Ghana, United Kingdom, South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and France.