Fonti Gallery presents the second solo exhibition of the Angolan photographer Kiluanji Kia Henda. The show is a project developed by the artist between Venice and Luanda in the framework of the international residency programme Art Enclosures produced and created by Fondazione Venezia and organized in collaboration with Polymnia and Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice. 
Paulo Flores is a musician, singer and composer. In terms of music in Angola, his voice is unmistakable. His career spans 20 years, he has made 11 records, he has placed his stamp on Angolan music, and he has renovated Angolan culture. His music pays tribute to his homeland, his lyrics put him in the vanguard. His last work is the trilogy “ExCombatentes” (Veterans). The three parts (“Viagem” (Journey), “Sembas” (Semba Music) ande “Ilhas” (Islands) is nothing short of a virtuoso display of talent.
When it comes to being black, they are much more open minded and the struggle for work is taken seriously. They still complain, of course. But the difference is that a black actor in Brazil is a Brazilian, but in Portugal you feel like an immigrant - and how! If we are excluded from all sectors of society, what can we do? But there’s the other side of the coin: what do black actors do to counteract this situation? 
"René Tavares translates lines, dashes, blots, a personal synthesis of his own identity always in process (“unfinished”) set in constant movement in between past and present references".
The last exhibition at Galeria Bozart (Lisbon). 
Mestre Paulo Kapela takes an exceptional position with his life and work within the artworld of Luanda, Angola's booming capital. The artist is a fugitive in his own country, a Mukongo from Uige and came to Luanda in 1996. Today he is a kind of artistic and spiritual master for the younger artist generation, even if he barely speaks Portuguese, but French. He became a role model with his unorthodox way of living and his personal universe, but also with his unique way of art-production through a combination of disparate objects and the creation of new contexts. 
The book has received critical acclaim as a work by an African writing soberly on “such things”, in “journalistic language, backed by rigorous research.” It is a first in terms of its internal discourse, since it provides us “with a view of an African thinker and fighter from an African perspective." 
The concept of nationality is not that important to me. I relate very strongly with territories, that is. And I have a strong relationship with Africa, particularly southern Africa, including where I was born, Mozambique, and South Africa, and this Iberian corner of Europe. If I had to define myself culturally in terms of identity, it is somewhere between these two areas of the world that references to my person are found. 
is craft comes from experience, from much observation, but it’s as if he had been there before. On top of this, he often repeats that there is a cultural sense to making clothes, like a gesture that happens every day but goes back to the very roots of humanity. “It all comes from the divine idea that “Adam sewed leaves and God sewed skins.” Sewing is also cultural. In all families and in all societies we come across those who have this strong cultural element. It’s like learning how to make home-made bread.” 
Can you imagine the Portuguese language at the centre of a learning-at-play exercise in the heart of Angola, where the main character, the protagonist, has no kind of academic training? It’s possible. In fact, in a tale told by the writer Uanhenga Xitu, it happens. 
Living with Raul is like watching a non-stop show. Gestures, speech patterns, facial expressions, his (…) air, he’s a boy on stage all the time. There’s never any shortage of stories when he is around. His charm never lets go of you. In true Angolan fashion, everything came together – the excitement for life, the wide range of views, his instinct for theatre, and the smile instead of the tear. It all converged to create the talent that is Raul Rosário.
This Angolan poet and musician has captivated European audiences, but the journey has been long and hard. In Lisbon, he was able to show us the rich cultural heritage of sounds emerging from Africa which had hitherto been hidden. He drew on his experience and on sounds from Angola and meshed them with the latest sounds being played in Europe. His music speaks of new trends and of being a global citizen. These are some of the secrets behind his original sound. 
...I am skeptical of claims made on behalf of populations, particularly in culturally disenfranchised and economically impoverished locations such as New Orleans or Haiti. I also do think that there can be legitimate concerns about the neo-colonial nature of the worldwide biennial trend, which tends to impose a Western cultural model as mainstream in non-Western locales the artistic practices and cultural heritage of which often belie the notion that contemporary art is a globally shared cultural value. 
Délio Jasse work can be interpreted under the somewhat complex view of the post colonial speeches, in the sense that his images emanate a quality of alterity, which gives them identity. However this simplification can be limiting if it becomes dissonant with the artistic speech where his images belong, obviously. 
José Cabral came to this collective history in a unique way, having trained with his father amateur photographer and filmmaker — he also had a homonymous grandfather, on his father’s side, who was a governor (1910-1938) and who had a park named after him in the old capital Lourenço Marques (Continuadores Park, today). He started in cinematography and he joined his experience as a news photographer to documental programmes of a less urgent nature. Later, he was probably the first to distance himself from the routines of journalism, and he made that challenge very clear with the choice of works in display in the Iluminando Vidas exhibit: instead of war, misery, victims, ruins and promises of reconstruction, that can still be seen yet another face for exoticism, he showed feminine nudes without any ethnographical pretext. 
Gregory Maqoma, South-African dancer and choreographer, uses his origins to build his identity as an artist. The performer came to Luanda to present 'Beautiful Me', a show in which he is the only participant, and that reflects some of his concerns about south-african society and the political power as a whole, around the world 
Subjects like discrimination – by skin color, social position or gender- all found an important place in Ingrid’s work. Gradually she has been focusing on conflict issues and the reasons why we live in violence.
In addition to her interest in subjects like the war and the media she is also very interested in the role of women, their strength and their projection in the world. Regarding that she stats “we can’t run away from our body. At the beginning it was not an easy thing to do but I acquired consciousness that my black woman’s body is, by itself, a statement. Then I started to work on this matter”.
What Mónica de Miranda intends is “to create space so that the migratory and trans–national flows are seen by themselves as a diversified and multifaceted reality as a platform for creative opportunities and a place of transit for personal, social and cultural changes. "At the heart of its strategy is the principle of interculturality, which should involve a gradual and systematic promotion of spaces and processes of positive interaction, a possible generalization of relations of trust, mutual recognition, for discussion, learning and exchange. 
The work presented by Yonamine in this exhibition speaks about the idea of erasure.
Yonamine comes from an erased country, Angola. A country which history, instead of working as a palimpsest – that is, a text over which multiple writings were produced leaving notice of those preceding them – has always worked as an erasing process. History has been erased in the name of a bigger interest. The Portuguese colonial past that Yonamine evokes with a subtle irony in the exhibition's title and in the tobacco boxes series was removed by the sudden decolonization process, which, by its turn, was erased by the war that now is being erased by peace. 
Kiluanji Kia Henda has displayed his art internationally – from Guangzhou to Cape Town, from Nairobi to Venice – which decouples his work from the exclusive legitimacy granted by Western contemporary art capitals. Another unique trait of his trajectory is that so far, his work has not been presented and sanctioned by the “small” world of its former “metropole”, Lisbon. As an Angolan artist, and therefore, from an independent country today and once a Portuguese colony, his art world’s has been extraneous to a set of cultural policies that take Portuguese-as-connection, and which rely on a closed circuit showcasing of art and its artists, traveling between ex-colonies and the ex-metropole. Face to face
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