• Primo Marella Gallery Milano presents Alternative Practices and Unbound Forms: African Artists Across Recent Biennales, a group exhibition bringing together artists whose practices challenge conventional approaches to material, form and artistic language.
     
    Emerging through recent international biennales, these practices reveal a renewed understanding of material as more than a support: it becomes a structural and expressive language. Textiles, industrial residues, found objects, silicone, embroidery and assembled elements are transformed through processes of knotting, stitching, weaving, layering and accumulation.
     
    The exhibition brings together artists who develop distinct visual vocabularies while sharing an interest in how materials can carry memory, history, gesture and meaning. Their works move between intimate and monumental scales, between inherited traditions and contemporary experimentation, opening new ways of thinking about form, space and artistic production.
  • African Artists Across Recent Biennales
    African Artists Across Recent Biennales

    For decades, African and Afro-descendant artists were largely marginalised within international exhibition systems shaped by Eurocentric perspectives. Recent biennales have marked a significant transformation, with these practices increasingly contributing to contemporary curatorial and artistic discourse.

     

    The artists brought together in this exhibition have participated in recent editions of major international biennales, including the Venice Biennale, where their presence reflects the growing visibility and influence of diverse artistic practices emerging from the African continent.

     

    Rather than presenting a single definition of contemporary African art, the exhibition brings together distinct approaches, materials and methodologies. Their practices demonstrate how contemporary art can emerge from multiple histories, geographies and systems of knowledge.

  • Alternative Practices

    Alternative Practices brings together artists who make material the structural principle of the work.

     

    Moffat Takadiwa transforms plastic, cables and industrial residues into layered surfaces that evoke systems of consumption and circulation. Troy Makaza develops a distinctive language through paint-infused silicone, using its flexibility and density to generate form. Abdoulaye Konaté creates monumental textile compositions through repeated modules, colour and rhythm, while Samuel Nnorom constructs sculptural volumes through knotting, padding and stitching. Joël Andrianomearisoa transforms textiles and lightweight materials into poetic environments in which language, memory and emotion intersect.

     

    Across these practices, material is never neutral: its provenance, physical qualities and processes of transformation become integral to the meaning of the work.

  • Unbound Forms

    Unbound Forms shifts the focus from material itself to the construction and articulation of form.

     

    Esther Mahlangu translates geometric systems rooted in South African visual traditions into sculptural and beaded objects, extending her distinctive language beyond the picture plane. Hako Hankson develops fragmented pictorial forms in which figuration, symbolism and cultural references coexist. Tegene Kunbi incorporates textiles into painting through structures based on bisectors, symmetry and repetition, creating a dialogue between oil and fabric.

     

    Here, experimentation lies in the configuration of the work: forms expand, fragment, overlap and move beyond conventional boundaries, challenging fixed distinctions between painting, sculpture, craft and installation.

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  • Material as Language
    Material as Language

    Across the exhibition, material becomes an active principle of composition. Residual, organic, industrial and textile elements retain traces of their origins while acquiring new meanings through artistic transformation.

     

    Knotting, sewing, weaving, stitching, assembling and layering become repeated gestures through which surfaces are constructed and forms emerge. What might appear initially as a material choice becomes a way of thinking: a process through which memory, labour, history and contemporary experience are made visible.

     

    The works gathered here demonstrate how material can function simultaneously as surface, structure, language and archive.