Dawit L. Petros, Spectral Fragment, VIII, 2026, Archival pigment print, CNC etching on smoked gray plexiglass 104 x 129.5 x 10 cm, 41 x 51 x 4 in
Breaking Down Realities reviews the notion of 'value': ethical, political, economic, emotional, and environmental, in relation to the infrastructures of coloniality and the flows of global capital, between the African continent and the rest of the world. This exhibition highlights the established research and conditions that each artist refers to, illuminating how this enduring phenomenon is observed by participating artists: Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Hadassa Ngamba, Dawit L. Petros, and Muzae Sesay.
Nifemi Marcus-Bello is a Lagos, Nigeria based industrial designer and artist whose practice is grounded in humility, cultural context, and process-led innovation. Working between commercial and artistic design, he draws on African traditions to create objects that are intuitive, functional, and deeply tied to place. His approach treats design as a living dialogue—responsive, evolving, and informed by real-world interactions. His objects function as archives, reflecting cycles of evolution, scarcity, and abundance. His series, ORÍKÌ (2023–2025), oríkì being traditional Yoruba praise poetry bestowed upon a person, unfolds as critically poetic material experimentations and close collaborations with producer-craftsmen, using locally rooted fabrication methods that reframe material use. ORÍKÌ (2023–2025) simultaneously reveals both the ingenuity and the troubling imbalances of global consumption, transformed into functional objects, they become metaphors for global excess and local resilience, each material features as an Act.
Act 1 Friction Ridge [Bench] centres bronze which stands as a symbol of the past in the context of Nigerian craftsmanship and creative exploration, a homage in particular to the bronze casters of Benin City. Historically and still today, the guildsman of Benin, their intricate artistry and the profound cultural symbolism of the Benin Bronzes, still serves as one of the most iconic examples of material identity on the continent which were looted from the Royal Palace of Benin by British Forces in 1897, sold and distributed across the world to fund colonial expedition. Many of the works are found today in American and European museums, and are the subject of ongoing heritage repatriation discussions. Marcus-Bello reminds us of a time when African societies were not just consumers of design but creators of high value, globally admired work. The techniques used by the Benin bronze casters were refined, intentional, and deeply embedded in cultural rituals and storytelling. Here, bronze is not just a material, it’s a carrier of memory and identity; the stories being felt, sensed and expressed as collaborative interactions between the designer and craftsmen whose rendered fingertips imprint and adorn the crescent-shaped bench.
Act 2 Tales By Moonlight [Screen] out of the series, we present the floor-based lunar circle bearing the fissures of the sand-cast process ,of pouring molten metal into a mould made from sand, highlighting aluminium as a metal representing a complicated present. Much of the aluminium in Nigeria presently comes through in the form of second-hand goods, remnants of overconsumption in the Global North. Discarded appliances, cans, cars, and electronics find new life here, often through informal recycling economies; showcasing simultaneously local ingenuity and adaptability and highlighting the uneven flows of material and capital that continue to define global economic systems. Aluminium becomes a reflection of global excess and local resilience.
Act 3 Whispers Of A Trail features [Daybed] is a bed that features a candleholder that protrudes from the frame of the backrest. Copper is the key material of interest, of which Africa is rich in raw resources, particularly in the border region between Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo, where the artist spent some of his formative years. Much of this material is exported, but scarcely available in its refined form and at a high premium when it returns. The question that emerged for Marcus-Bello was, "how can we imagine a future in which copper is not just mined, but refined and transformed within the continent? Can we develop systems and infrastructures that allow for material processing, innovation, and ownership? Copper becomes a symbol not just of technological potential-used in electronics, energy systems, and telecommunications—but of economic autonomy and forward-thinking design."
Hadassa Ngamba is a multidisciplinary artist from Boma, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a port city historically central to the transatlantic slave trade and rare earth extraction. Working across drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, digital media, installation, and performance, Ngamba’s peripatetic AI(African Intelligence) research and artistic productions, take their starting points from the colonial cartography of the DRC, and how the actions of mapping have facilitated imperial exploitation. Her work interrogates the foundations of capitalism and confronts the inhumane consequences of an unequal global system. Deeply rooted in personal history, Ngamba challenges these dominant narratives and initiates processes of critical anticipation and investment in African futures.
We have selected works made during stages of her residency in London during 2025. 2 Ngamba travels with her chosen materials: a trunk of ores and minerals which she makes direct use of as her choice of pigment for her paintings on fabric and paper, citing the DRC as both material source and psychological terrain⎯ a living archive, "carrying the memory of territories, bodies, and the geopolitical violence that permeates them.” 3
These experiential contrasts imbue and align her perceptions of the comparatively stable, leafy tranquillity of Hampstead, North London and the resurgent conflict in DRC during the period, with the displacement of communities in Goma, Eastern DRC caught in the crossfire between Rwandan and DRC military and militia over territories and resources. 4 Ngamba extended her use of ores and binding techniques to include: aragonite, cobalt-bearing calcite, heterogenite, and pink cobalt salt, critical and rare raw material data yielding distinctively vivid and dense abstractions; correlations of real-time, metaphysical, technological and spiritual intelligences as its visual logic, as seen in the works: Ambivalence and the Colour of Conflict (2025), Archipelago North of London (2025) and The Ore Fragment 1-8 (2025), and eight watercolours from the London Series (2025).
Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher, and educator based in Montreal. His work examines displaced histories and their contemporary effects of which he has been critically re-reading the entanglements of colonialism and modernity particularly between Horn of Africa and North African countries, Italy, the United States and Canada. Informed by his lived experience as an Eritrean emigrant, his practice explores the historical forces that produce migration, using photography, moving image, sculpture, and sound. These elements are installed through site-responsive strategies that invite reflective engagement with movement, memory, and belonging.
Notably we include in this presentation Spectral Fragment VIII and IX (2026) that in their physical form are literally emblematic of Petros' aforementioned strategy and implicates the viewer's presence and interactivity with the work. Broadly the series Spectral Fragments has predominantly comprised large-scale, highly reflective panes of smoked grey plexiglass, featuring precision cut CNC (computer numerical control) etchings of archival photographic documentation representing land or water-based colonial infrastructures, extracting resources at source. Spectral Fragment VIII and IX focus on material erasure and are based on photographs from the Sylvia Pankhurst photographic archives held at the British Museum, London. They reference the period of the British Military Administration (BMA) active in Eritrea between 1941-1950, and the images depict the stripping and looting of infrastructure and manufacturing plants that were then relocated to other countries in the British Empire. The activity was in contravention of international law, and deliberately weakened Eritrea's resource sovereignty. Petros' treatment of these disappeared and highly valuable infrastructures are to render their presences as ghostly formations.
Recollections (Contrasting Notions 2024/25) are a suite of eight serigraphs exploring popular representations of Eritrean askari; indigenous troops that were recruited into European and more specifically in this context, Italy’s colonial army. The image sources for the work are from propagandist postcards and illustrated magazines which served to consolidate the colonial imaginaries necessary for the creation of Italy's empire. The graphic vertical bands of colour and the numerical designation of each title reference the battalions under which askaris served. Beneath the bands of colour are sections of images extracted from the illustrated postcards. What emerges is an acknowledgment of multiple, paradoxical acts of reading archival ephemera and documentations, and the subjects that they depict.
Muzae Sesay is a visual artist based in Oakland, California, United States, whose studio practice and works for the public realm explore the relationships between space, memory, community, and perceived truth. Using skewed perspectives and flattened planes of colour, he creates paintings of surreal geometric interiors, landscapes, and architectural forms that invite exploration. His work questions the reliability of remembrance and reflects on shared realities through fragmented, perspectival, unstable worlds. By reducing imagery from the physical world into rudimentary forms, Sesay constructs environments bound by harmonious colour and visual tension. Viewers are encouraged to navigate these spaces actively, questioning dimensionality and meaning. His recent work engages with the emotional responses that arise when the rigid laws of physics, architecture, and the built environment are challenged, prompting social reflection and viewer agency.
Sesay's awareness of human and environmental injustice is captured in the work (CCC) Casual Captive Capital (2021), based from photographic documentation of a US detention camp for immigrants. Our perspective from the window of a nearby building is drawn towards the camp. The painting conveys an atmosphere of surveillance and control, oval-like forms suggesting the presence of detainees, the raw reality being that these spaces are crowded, and experientially dehumanising. The US reportedly operates the largest and most profitable incarcerations systems. 5
We also include two works from a new series exploring, "themes of global economic soft power, infrastructure, gentrification, and colonisation, particularly as they are unfolding in Sierra Leone. I approach this subject through the lens of my family and specific infrastructure projects in the region, which carry an unsettling sense of alternative, soft-power colonisation."6 The paintings evoke the ideas of conquest, collection, and the display of worldly goods in cabinets of curiosity, more specifically they amplify the predilection of mining and extraction businessman, Vasile Frank Timiș 7 when asked about the potential money and resources available for extraction, West Africa considered to be an untapped 'jewel box'. African Jewel Box (2026) visualises a quote from Timiș, Black Minerals Ltd (2026) is a take on the London-based West African mineral extraction company African Minerals Limited Timiș founded, that was later purchased by Chinese company, Shandong. 8
Notes
1 Artist statement
2 hosted by Worlding Residency and The Africa Centre
3 Artist statement
4 https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/violence-democratic-republic-congo
5 https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/jails_immigration.html
6 Artist statement
7 https://grokipedia.com/page/Frank_Timiș
8 https://en.people.cn/business/n/2015/0421/c90778-8881310.html
