A guided tour of the exhibition “The Matter of Dreams. Roots of Contemporary African Art”, hosted at the Santa Caterina Museum, to explore one of the most significant chapters in the birth of contemporary art in sub-Saharan Africa.
The path brings together over 120 works by 23 artists from ten African countries, with paintings, sculptures, photographs, and installations created mainly between the 1970s and the 1990s. It is the period when a new generation of African artists develops autonomous languages and begins to assert itself on the international art scene. The exhibition is curated by Enrico Mascelloni, who has built the project based on over forty years of studies and research.
Accompanied by the guide, visitors encounter works that relate identity, memory, tradition, everyday life, and modernity, following the thread evoked by the title of the exhibition: the “matter of dreams.” The path allows one to grasp the heterogeneity of artistic experiences developed in different geographical and cultural contexts, avoiding reading African art as a unitary phenomenon.
