Last Image Show

An international young artists exhibition exploring the theme of 'Silence'

Curated by Gadi Ramadhani in collaboration with Emergent Art Space,

the Last Image Show has brought together, from 21 countries, the works of 33 artists

reflecting on varied and diverse experiences of 'silence' and sharing them through their art,

in a cross cultural dialogue that has both highlighted stories we have in common

and opened our eyes to new and unexpected ones.

The Last Image Show was a live exhibition in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in September 2018.

This is the online version of that exhibition.

Aaron Samuel Mulenga

Zambia

By reimagining images that depict biblical characters and stories in a way that
includes people of color, where they have not been before, I intend to destabilize
the Eurocentric narrative that is prevalent in Christian images.

Through art I speak about my faith, culture and identity, especially when
using themes and a visual language that blend the African culture
with historic Christian imagery.

Aisha Jemila Daniels

Qatar

The countries members of Gulf Cooperation Council (Persian Gulf region),
once in cooperation with each other and governed by Islam,
which promotes peace and understanding, no longer work in unison
after cutting off diplomatic relations with Qatar. 

Wanting to provoke thought, I visualize an alternate reality where the Sheikh,
or King, is a woman. Under an idealized female leadership there
is portrayed a unified Gulf Cooperation Council.

Asmaa Elmongi

Egypt

Fear of isolation, neglect, and exclusion. Fear of being ridiculed, of success and conflict. Fear of controlling,
labeling, and attacking. Fear of racist structures. I have been introduced to all those
contexts of fear as a result of different forms of silence.

Through my mind map, I present here the types of silence that I have experienced throughout my life.
My shapes represent different forces that we fear, and lead us to the violence that
caused our silence in its various forms, pedagogically, socially, and violently.

Raka Panda

India

I capture the daily life around me, therefore you can see time, space, common things,
crowds of people and objects, all sheltered in my canvas. Quietly all the painful,
struggling faces try to get shape and form.

But amidst the chaos, the characters are mute, their feelings never expressed.
Surrounded by the noise, they live in silence.

Elizabeth Emmanuel

Tanzania

There is strength and freedom in stillness. When we learned to meditate in quietness,
we could hear ourselves more, our bodies and surroundings. We started to discover
a path to liberation. While shadows were emanating and fading, something deeply rooted
within us was blossoming, that which became our most valuable asset and strongest foundation.

Despite the outer disruptions, we rise because our strength lies in stillness and, in our silence,
we move mountains. We are and will always be – beautiful, faithful, proud, strong, wise and one.

Ojima Abalaka

Nigeria

The characters in these illustrations experience silence in a moment of reflection,
devoid of any interruptions and external influences. They are still and contemplative.

 The moment invites the viewer into their world, and to imagine the world
as it happens in their heads. And the viewer is also invited to a moment of reflection.

Josephine Kuuire

Ghana

In the Dagara community, amongst the people of Ghana, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast,
women perform rituals in order to build their masculine energy. It is believed that both
women and men must work on balancing their sexual energies. 

Yet people who are ‘different’ are misrepresented, stigmatized, thought of being possessed
by evil spirits. They are not recognized as ‘human beings’ even though these ways
of existing are deeply rooted in our culture.

There are other forms of existing within the body other than just ‘male’ or ‘female’.

Roanna Tella 

Nigeria

Conflicting emotions are portrayed here.

A place of curiosity fueled by anger:
why certain people do what they do and act how they act,
where they have been and what has happened along the way.

Nabisenke Teddy

Uganda

“Ozaaladdi?’’ ..... “When are you giving birth?”

Giving birth when I want. Please, society don’t dictate,
I will give birth when ready. Why are you so concerned about
my not giving birth? Are you willing to look after my offspring?

You say I am growing older, and no children.
Sure they will come when I am ready. Why are you so bothered anyway?
Give me space, give me time, give me speech, and give me freedom.

Isha Bawiskar

India

Yumzhana Radnaeva

Russian Federation

I paint Buryat girls, because Buryat identity is changing fast.

Ages ago Buryats were Mongols, living a nomadic life, but those days have passed.

I paint the ideas, women and kids, who were born in a very strange time:
the middle time between steppe nomads and modern people.

Adikinyi Otsomo Kondo

Kenya

Silence isn’t necessarily about lack of speech but mostly about lack of expression.
Lack of being able to connect and communicate either with one’s inner voice
or with the actual being of others.

At the same time, silence is connecting with the inner voice, tuning into
the frequency of the dwelling voices, not understood easily in a world of much noise.

Therefore, is silence the enemy, or the friend?

Odur Ronald

Uganda

My visual impressions attempt to portray the alarming aggression
through which artists in our society are silenced when expressing their grievances.

I was inspired by a Ugandan activist Stella Nyanzi, who uses poetic expression
to speak her mind on issues that are oppressive in her surroundings.

Women like her are not recognized as heroines. They are suppressed and silenced.

Daniel Kossman

Germany

Situated in the far east of Berlin, Hellersdorf is known for its dull high-rise
housing blocks, its greyness, its social problems and its xenophobia.

Dozens of untold stories lurk behind the glossy windows of Hellersdorf.
Untold stories, unheard voices, unseen problems that resonate into
a dangerous silence, a silence so loud that one needs to level up
the volume of one’s headphones in order to not hear it.

Juliana Alvarado

Mexico

‘Nómbralas’ are cafeterias on the roadsides of Northeastern Mexico. Their names
evoke the names or nicknames of women that disappear everyday in this country,
where the sociocultural condition of being a woman is dangerous.

Every day there are silenced women, suffering from what is known as
‘structural gender violence’.

These buildings are isolated, precarious and even hopeless,
just as the situations in which most of the femicides end.

Mantu Singh

India

The paintings are an assemblage of real and surreal spaces and objects
on which I am dependent because of the physical disability of my limbs. 

They are figurative representations of medical science, camouflaged
in social and cultural spaces. They combine space and time,
present with memories, emotions and social problems,
where the memory is invariable but time and space vary.

Jayeti Bhattacharya

India

‘Silence’ I feel is the appropriate state when one needs to connect to one’s space of existence.

In the passage of time, walking through memory lane, sometimes I shiver thinking that time is grasping us
and our relations with the person next to us, even with the space around us, but we as individuals
are silently accepting all the norms and moving away with time.

Sebastian Charles Mnjindo

Tanzania

A painting of a school of fish that represents the silence and the reality of our daily life.

Jennifer Msekwa

Tanzania

A woman and her baby, where the baby represents the challenges we face, and the feathers stand for all the comments and opinions, negative and positive, that people carry about, silently.

Joanne Kasse

Tanzania

 Women wearing colourful African fashion clothes

Precious Seronga

Tanzania

“We teach girls to cater to the fragile egos of men…We teach girls shame
- close your legs, cover yourself! We make them feel as though by being born
female they’re already guilty of something… And we don’t teach boys the same? ...”
(Chimamanda Adichie)

My works are my response to the cultural expectations I have grown up in.
They are my response to being silenced.

Rukundo Jean Baptiste

Rwanda

MUKOROGO (Body bleaching)

The disease of body bleaching in Africa, in particular in my country. People using
bleaching cosmetics in other to change their natural African identity, in order to look different.

If this were my LAST IMAGE, this is what I should talk about.

Caitlin Mkhasibe

South Africa

Aeronautical Map is an abstract aerial view of the earth, a commentary on the hierarchy
where human ‘development’ is placed over our relationship to the earth.

We see socio-political issues in art as having more importance than concern for our environment.
We forget that without the earth, there are no humans and therefore no ‘issues’ to discuss.

Ammar Faiz

Pakistan

Local/Folk/Regional Games in the outskirts of Lahore

An investigation into the origins and evolution of local/folk games of Lahore,
such as Gharmas / Kamas Ghori, Chug Chug, Body Body, Bandar Qila, Pito Gol Garam,
which are now almost absent from public memory. These games were chosen due to my interest in the fact
that they have undefined, shifting origins and rules, since they have always been transmitted orally.

Dengke Chen

China / US

The sounds of silence.

Who's in control? The dictator who is controlling and censoring the media,
and building a wall of silence? The corporate hands controlling the police and the public?
The developer's excavator destroying historical places? The consumers ignoring the consequences
and by-products of industrialization such as air pollution and global warming?

Olamidetaiwo Olasunmade

Nigeria

Culture sets us free, yet keeps us bound.

We hide behind our pains, behind our tears,
behind our unspoken fears, for we are silenced in the midst of this conspiracy.

This work is a visual representation of issues we face and are surrounded by,
yet we are unable to speak of.

Kolapo Obadiah Olorunyemi

Nigeria

You choose who you are on social media, either your identity or a Hidentity.

The implementation of internet filters and anonymity are closely related, but whereas filters are applied
in a stringent and pervasive censorship, the possibility of being able to look out on an anonymous network
becomes, first and foremost, a matter of exercising a fundamental right of liberty of expression,
avoidance of censorship, liberal promotion and circulation of thought.

Eze Marigoretti Chinenye

Nigeria

In my Igbo culture, the traditional philosophy holds communication in high regard,
but the representations of womanhood in Igbo proverbs are mainly negative:
women are portrayed as being senseless, morally debased, devilish, childish,
and weak, only the aged women are being respected.

These circumstances have convinced many women to become silent, submitting to whatever
they are referred to. They can do nothing but to remain silent and endure without aggression.

Gladys Kalichini

Zambia

Exploring the erasure of women’s narratives from Zambian history, women’s stories
being marginalized and erased from historical accounts of important events, as in the case of
Julia Chikamoneka and Alice Lenshina, women held in the collective memory of Zambian history.

‘Erasing erasure’ evokes the undoing of the process of death (a metaphor for erasure),
and of crystallizing people and events in time.

Chelsea Coon

United States of America

The artist laid under a plastic sheet for an eight hour duration performance.
Through subtle movements over intervals of time, she learned how to exist in this space.

She examines the body as a site for potential, and asserts the probability
for it to be as expansive as the universe itself.

Kristina Rutar

Slovenia

Ambiguity of the form.

The sculpture breathes an unique dichotomy between the space of shelter and
the space of unlimited freedom.

The forms are growing and breaking free.
They come to life in front of the viewer through the created tension between these
conflicting poles. It seems as if the abstract forms will soon rip out of their limited space
and fully live somewhere else, away from the viewer's eyes.

Raquel Algaba

Spain

My work mirrors the human mind. The unspeakable, or what we don’t say.

The figures are playing hide and seek between structures. Just like what our mind does with images
– everything seems to be blurred and suddenly collapses into small gaps,
or we are being presented with forms we cannot recognize.

Konrad Peszko

Poland

A representation of action in a framed community and limitation of freedom.

Birds in autumn form huge flocks where their behavior and action is synchronized,
The birds behave as part of bigger organism.

The video shows starlings draw geometric patterns on the sky. Their movement is repeated
as a solid linear geometric structure which soon becomes a form of prison.

Emergent Art Space expresses its gratitude to the curator Gadi Ramadhani,

to Alliance Française that hosted the live exhibition in Dar es Salaam,

to all the people who helped in many small and big ways to make this event possible,

and to the artists who believed in this experience and shared their art.