You love me, you love me not

I’m sharing some display pieces from the exhibition You Love Me, You Love Me Not showing now at the Galeria Municipal Almeida Garrett in Porto, Portugal. The exhibition is named after a piece by Kenyan artist, Wangechi Mutu (featured).

You Love Me, You Love Me Not is a major exhibition – over 100 paintings, sculptures, photographs and video by 50 artists from Africa and the diaspora – devoted to works from the Sindika Dokolo collection.

I first came across Dokolo’s work at the New York Forum Africa, a conference in Gabon where he and his wife, the controversial business woman Isabel dos Santos (Africa’s wealthiest woman according to Forbes), also were speakers. Dokolo’s passion for African art was evident then and I’ve since come across his name in the context of e.g. buying back African art that was looted during colonialism and exhibiting African art in Brazil. Dokolo says his ambition is to “constitute over the years the best possible contemporary collection in Africa. Not the most expensive one or the biggest one in volume, but the one that stimulates and enriches the best the African art scene.”

Below is a gallery with some of my favourite pieces from the exhibition. My selection has got an Afropolitan, Blackist (Fela’s theory on blackness), Afro-futuristic, Afro-punk, agitprop, dadaist, black power feel. The collection itself has a broader variety, some of which you can view here.