Concrete Skeletons

About the exhibition
What are the sites that African architecture must navigate today? How can these sites speak not only about contemporary architectural production but also of the wider socio-political relations that underpin it?

This exhibition explores modernising African Metropolises and their future through various experimental media including sculpture, photography, and moving image—expressed through the works of African artists from across the continent. It builds upon Limbo AccrA’s work of occupying unfinished property developments in Accra, Ghana with exhibitions and other artistic responses to the changes taking place in African cities.

For context, we know that many African cities are experiencing high rates of modernisation. Property bubbles and escalating real estate prices are a defining feature of global cities, and cities across African countries are no exception. Luxury shopping malls and concrete apartment blocks are replacing older, more traditional neighbourhoods throughout big cities. As a systematic bi-product of these new city scapes, naked structures of property developments are often left uncompleted as the testimonies to frozen capital, caught in a state of limbo. It is a place of transition, waiting, and not knowing—or, in other words, a liminal. That’s where the transformation takes place: a time between the “what was” and the “next.”

About the curators
Limbo AccrA is a spatial art platform intiated by Dominique Petit-Frère and Emil Grip. The aim of Limbo is to establish both a trans-local and trans-continental dialogue of “Space” by interweaving and connecting new site-specific, socially engaged art projects into the existing infrastructure of uncompleted property developments, offering a large and flexible outlet for experimentation in public art and culture programming.