El Glaoui, Touria. “Inside Africa’s Thriving Art Scene.” Filmed in August 2017 at TEDGlobal. Video, 07:48. https://www.ted.com/talks/touria_el_glaoui_inside_africa_s_thriving_art_scene?language=en

“Let’s talk about how the narrative of Africa is being told, and who is doing the telling. I want to share with you the selection of work by contemporary artists from Africa and its diaspora. I love this art. I find it beautiful and inspiring and thrilling, and I really hope I am able to pique your interest.”

[Source: Excerpt from introduction].

DW Documentary. “Africa’s Looted Art.” Released in September 2020. Video, 42:26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RXlVr_15JY

Africa’s colonial overlords brutally stripped it of countless cultural treasures. Now, the fate of these items is being hotly debated in Europe and Africa as well. Some say the pieces should be returned, while others have reservations. […] What do the people in the African countries where the pieces originated think about all this? What are the views of researchers, museum directors, artists and curators? What emotions arise when the frequently painful past is stirred up and examined? And how significant is the issue in the context of problems such as poverty, hunger and corruption informer colonies?

[Source: Video description].

CNN. “Art All Across Africa.” Filmed in March2020 as part of the program “Africa Avant-Garde”. Video, 23:06. https://www.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/03/27/contemporary-art-africa-avant-garde.cnn/video/playlists/africa-avant-garde/

In this month’s Africa Avant-Garde, CNN crosses the continent to meet some of the key people behind the resurgent contemporary art scene.

[Source: Video description].

Yusuf, Dele. “ART X Lagos is Raising the Bar for African Art and Culture.” The Africa Report, November 8, 2021.

ART X Lagos is running as a physical fair from November 4-7, while its online version runs from November 4-21. Works of young and veteran artists dot the galleries, each telling a unique story about Africa’s culture and lost identities.

[Source: article abstract].

The Independent. “The Controversy in African Contemporary Art.” The Independent, February 17, 2022. https://www.independent.co.ug/the-controversy-in-african-contemporary-art/

“What is African art and should African diaspora artists enjoy the African artists identity? The term African contemporary art despite its success in global art circles in recent years, has not been without controversy. In the early 1990s and before, the term generated a furor of arguments, including in particular during the1989 triennial symposium gathering of Africanists in the state of Baltimore, USA where mention of the phrase African contemporary art was ‘interpreted as a regrettable intrusion of a tiresome product outside the concerns of serious scholarship’. On other occasions, during the same workshop, the phrase was described as marginal and of irrelevance.”

[Source: Excerpt from the article].

Le Monde. “Arts africains: restituer les œuvres, rétablir les faits.” [“African Arts: Giving Back Artworks, Setting the Record Straight.”] Le Monde, October 23, 2021. https://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2021/10/23/arts-africains-restituer-les-uvres-retablir-les-faits_6099633_3212.html.

This article focuses on the restitution by France to Benin of 26 artworks on November 9^th, 2021. This is not only a political gesture, but also the acknowledgment of the work done by historians over decades of colonial rules and who established many painful truths, whether we like or not.

[Source: Article abstract, translated from French].