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Colour Escapes the Canvas

Bruce Onobrakpeya

Inventing a Script for Images

Bruce Onobrakpeya’s Ibiebe works contain a writing system that looks ancient but was actually invented by the Nigerian artist himself. He developed and refined the script between 1978 and 1986, creating geometric and curving signs informed by Urhobo symbols and the proverbs connected to them, while also responding to Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. In Ibiebe ABC III from 2000, the glyphs sit inside a checkerboard structure, functioning simultaneously as marks that suggest communication and as visual forms.

I like the uncertainty this creates. We instinctively try to read anything arranged like writing, even when we do not possess the key. Onobrakpeya makes that desire to decode part of the experience. The symbols connect to cultural knowledge, yet they also belong to an individual artistic language he deliberately constructed. Writing normally tries to stabilise meaning. Here it opens another possibility: a sign can communicate through rhythm, shape and association before we know exactly what it says.

https://africa.si.edu/collection/object/nmafa_2005-7-1

#BruceOnobrakpeya #NigerianArt #Printmaking #VisualLanguage

Canto ATenore

Four Voices Inside One Circle

Sardinia’s canto a tenore is built from four male voices: bassu, contra, boche and mesu boche. The singers stand close together, while one voice carries poetry or prose and the others construct the surrounding harmony. The deep, guttural sound of bassu and contra gives the music a physical weight that feels very different from conventional choral singing. The tradition developed within Sardinia’s pastoral culture, particularly around Barbagia, and could be heard not only at weddings, religious festivities and carnival but spontaneously in local bars. Its repertoire includes old poetry as well as texts about contemporary subjects such as unemployment, migration and politics.

What interests me is how much the music depends on proximity. Four separate voices have to become one acoustic object, yet each retains a precise role. UNESCO also notes a tension that many living traditions face: taking the music onto stages for visitors can help it survive while changing the intimate context that shaped it. Preservation is rarely as simple as keeping the notes unchanged. Sometimes the room, the people standing around you and the reason for singing are part of the composition too.

https://unesco.cultura.gov.it/en/projects/canto-a-tenore-sardinian-pastoral-songs/

#CantoATenore #SardinianMusic #PolyphonicSinging #ItalianMusic

Afro Cuban Culture

When Percussion Becomes Conversation

Cuban rumba grew in urban neighbourhoods, port areas and communities with strong African cultural roots, particularly in places such as Havana and Matanzas. UNESCO describes it not simply as music or dance but as a combination of chants, gestures, handclapping, percussion and body language. Instruments can include dedicated percussion as well as ordinary objects from domestic or working life. Performers and audiences interact rather than remaining strictly separated, and the practice has traditionally been transmitted through families and neighbourhoods by imitation and participation.

That last part interests me most. In recorded music we are used to thinking of a finished performance travelling toward a passive listener. Rumba works differently. The boundary between performing and responding can become porous. Rhythm is social information. A clap, gesture or sung phrase can invite another action, and the music keeps being reconstructed through that exchange. Maybe some traditions survive precisely because nobody owns the complete performance alone.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/rumba-in-cuba-a-festive-combination-of-music-and-dances-and-all-the-practices-associated-01185

#CubanRumba #CubanMusic #Percussion #AfroCubanCulture

ich.unesco.org Rumba in Cuba, a festive combination of music and dances and all the practices associated - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage The music and movements of rumba in Cuba are mainly associated with African culture but also feature elements from Antillean culture and Spanish flamenco. Historically, rumba in Cuba developed in marginal neighbourhoods of cities in Cuba like Havana and Matanzas, near other ports and shanty towns and grew especially popular in rural areas where communities of African slaves lived. Spreading from t...
Clock Maria Taniguchi’s

Painting Time Without Painting a Clock

Maria Taniguchi’s “brick paintings” are made from thousands of hand-drawn rectangular cells, each individually filled. She began the ongoing body of work in 2008, and individual canvases can require days, weeks or months of repetitive labour. At Singapore Art Museum’s 2026 exhibition Afterimage, these paintings appear alongside sculpture and video, making repetition, material and duration visible across several media. Taniguchi considers the paintings less as isolated objects than as parts of one continuing artwork.

I find that idea more interesting than the apparent grid itself. From a distance the paintings can look systematic, even machine-like. Close attention reveals slight changes created by a human hand repeating a task for an extraordinary amount of time. Nothing in the image represents time directly, yet time is everywhere in it. The surface is almost an accumulation of hours. Instead of depicting duration, Taniguchi makes duration become material.

https://www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/en/art-events/exhibitions/maria-taniguchi-afterimage

#MariaTaniguchi #PhilippineArt #ContemporaryPainting #SingaporeArt

singaporeartmuseum.sg Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage | Singapore Art Museum Maria Taniguchi: Afterimage is the first monographic exhibition of the acclaimed artist presented by a Singaporean institution.
Afrobeat

Afrobeat Was Built as a System

Fela Kuti did not arrive at Afrobeat as a fixed genre waiting to be named. His musical path moved through jazz, highlife and soul, with musicians from West African and Caribbean backgrounds entering his early groups. His official archive places an important turning point in 1968, when he began publicly using the term “Afro Beat” as his music absorbed stronger soul influences. By the early 1970s, long grooves, horns, percussion, call-and-response vocals and political lyrics had become part of a musical language inseparable from his confrontation with Nigerian military power.

What fascinates me is that Afrobeat is difficult to reduce to one signature sound. It works more like a system. Bass, drums, guitars and horns repeat patterns for long periods, allowing tiny changes to become significant. The groove can feel almost immovable while the music remains intensely alive. Political force and dance are not competing functions here. The body is part of how the message travels.

https://felakuti.com/about

#FelaKuti #Afrobeat #NigerianMusic #MusicHistory

Fela Kuti About - Fela Kuti The official website for Fela Kuti: his legacy, catalog, and shop.
Colour

Colour Escapes the Canvas

Estonian painter Kristi Kongi’s Chromatic Drift at Kumu Art Museum refuses to keep colour neatly inside rectangular paintings. Created partly for the museum’s large exhibition hall, the project extends motifs and colour onto floors, walls, windows and outdoor space. Kumu describes colour as central to Kongi’s way of mapping and preserving memories and states of mind. The 2026 exhibition is also significant institutionally: it is the first solo exhibition by an Estonian woman artist in Kumu’s Great Hall.

What interests me is what happens when painting begins treating architecture as part of its surface. A canvas normally ends at its edge. Once colour crosses that boundary, the viewer enters the composition rather than simply standing in front of it. Colour stops behaving like decoration applied to objects and starts organising distance, movement and atmosphere. Perhaps painting becomes spatial not when it imitates three dimensions, but when it changes how we physically move through a room.

https://kumu.ekm.ee/en/syndmus/kristi-kongi-chromatic-drift/

#KristiKongi #EstonianArt #Painting #Colour

Kumu kunstimuuseum Kristi Kongi: Chromatic Drift - Kumu kunstimuuseum The large-scale solo exhibition of the painter Kristi Kongi (1985) offers an immersive spatial experience. In the new works created for this exhibition, colour emerges as the central element, with its fields of meaning unfolding in physical, emotional, and semantic ways.
Contemporary Art

A Nation Drawn While It Was Changing

The National Gallery of Australia’s Bilong Papua New Guinea looked at fifty years of independence through art rather than through a conventional political timeline. Papua New Guinea became independent on 16 September 1975 after periods of British, German and Australian colonial rule. The exhibition placed contemporary works beside cultural forms and showed how artists have addressed independence, ancestral knowledge, Christianity, technology and rapid social change. Figures such as Mathias Kauage and Timothy Akis helped shape a modern visual language that could absorb new materials without abandoning local cultural references.

Papua New Guinea contains extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity. That makes the idea of a single national image complicated from the beginning. What interests me is how artists can participate in creating national identity without making everyone look the same. Art can connect different histories while allowing their differences to remain visible. Perhaps a nation becomes more convincing when its image is allowed to stay unfinished.

https://nga.gov.au/stories-ideas/bilong-papua-new-guinea/

#PapuaNewGuineaArt #PacificArt #ContemporaryArt #CulturalIdentity

Afro Colombian Music

The Marimba Carries More Than Melody

Along Colombia’s South Pacific coast and in Ecuador’s Esmeraldas Province, marimba music, chants and dances form part of Afro-descendant community life. Traditional ensembles combine palm-wood marimbas with drums and rattles made from local materials. In Colombia, different musical settings historically accompany very different moments: the festive currulao, religious arrullos and the mourning traditions of chigualo and alabao. Knowledge has largely been transmitted orally, with younger musicians learning directly from experienced performers.

What interests me is how one musical culture can contain celebration, worship, storytelling and grief without separating them into different artistic worlds. The instrument is not simply performing repertoire. It is part of a network connecting materials, landscape, memory and community. Even as people have moved from rural Pacific communities into cities, UNESCO notes that the music continues to function as a source of belonging. A tradition can move geographically while still carrying the place that shaped its sound.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/marimba-music-traditional-chants-and-dances-from-the-colombia-south-pacific-region-and-esmeraldas-province-of-ecuador-01099

#Marimba #AfroColombianMusic #PacificMusic #TraditionalMusic

ich.unesco.org Marimba music, traditional chants and dances from the Colombia South Pacific region and Esmeraldas Province of Ecuador - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Marimba music and traditional chants and dances are musical expressions integral to the family and community fabric of people of African descent in the Colombian South Pacific region and Esmeraldas Province of Ecuador. Chanted stories and poems are performed by men and women at ritual, religious and festive events as a celebration of life, a form of worship to saints or as a farewell to the deceas...
ARAVARA

Time Is Not Neutral

ARAVARA at the National Gallery of Jamaica is an audiovisual exhibition built around a deceptively difficult subject: time. Curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel and developed with KADIST, it brings together ten works by ten artists and is being presented through several Caribbean locations. The exhibition considers recurrence, repetition and historical layering, asking how promises of progress made in earlier periods continue to shape present realities. At the Kingston presentation, moving image and sound become ways of looking at history without assuming that time simply moves forward in a clean line.

I like that idea because museums themselves often organise history chronologically. One year follows another, giving the impression that the past has been completed. But political ideas, social structures and unfinished promises can return in altered forms. Perhaps history behaves less like a timeline and more like an image repeatedly edited without ever deleting all the previous layers.

National Gallery of Jamaica and KADIST Present ARAVARA: June 28, 2026

#ARAVARA #CaribbeanArt #VideoArt #JamaicaArt

National Gallery of Jamaica National Gallery of Jamaica and KADIST Present ARAVARA: June 28, 2026 The National Gallery of Jamaica (NGJ), in collaboration with KADIST, is pleased to present ARAVARA, an audiovisual exhibition curated by Dominican curator Yina Jiménez Suriel. The exhibition opens …
Gamelan

One Rhythm Made by Many Hands

Gamelan is often described as an Indonesian percussion orchestra, but the word also refers to the collection of instruments itself. Ensembles typically combine hand-forged metal gongs, gong-chimes and metallophones with drums, cymbals and, depending on the tradition, strings and bamboo flutes. UNESCO notes that its music is organised through precise tuning systems, rhythmic structures and performance techniques. Individual instruments can play interlocking patterns that only become complete when heard together. Gamelan remains connected to ceremonies, theatre, festivals and concerts, and archaeological representations of musical ensembles appear on the eighth-century Borobudur temple.

That interlocking principle interests me. In much Western music we easily focus on the individual performer, melody or solo. Gamelan can make musical meaning feel distributed. No single player necessarily owns the rhythm we hear. The pattern exists because several people leave exactly the right spaces for one another.

https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/gamelan-01607

#Gamelan #IndonesianMusic #Percussion #MusicTradition

ich.unesco.org Gamelan - UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Gamelan refers to the traditional Indonesian percussion orchestra and to the set of musical instruments used. Consisting primarily of ornate, percussive instruments made of hand-forged metal, the ensemble typically includes xylophones, gongs, gong-chimes, drums, cymbals, string instruments and bamboo flutes. Gamelan music follows precise rules and techniques regarding tuning, layout, rhythmic and ...
Addis Ababa

When a Landscape Is Felt Physically

Ethiopian painter Tesfaye Bekele uses grass, flowers, leaves and seasonal change as more than landscape subjects. In Moments of Change, shown at Addis Fine Art in Addis Ababa in early 2026, repeated dots and layered lines produced surfaces that could resemble landscapes, aerial maps or constellations. The works were made with acrylic on canvas and textiles, with fabric connecting the paintings to ideas of bodily vulnerability, effort and care. Bekele grew up in Addis Ababa, studied at the Alle School of Fine Arts and Design and later taught there.

What stays with me is the decision to connect changes in nature with the way time is experienced by a body. We normally measure a season with dates, yet we recognise it through temperature, colour, smell, growth and disappearance. A landscape painting can therefore record much more than a place. It can describe what change feels like before we have found words for it.

https://addisfineart.com/exhibitions/136-moments-of-change-tesfaye-bekele/

#TesfayeBekele #EthiopianArt #Painting #AddisAbaba