Kudzanai Chiurai, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Grada Kilomba and Tabita Rezaire are featured in 'Ubuntu, a lucid dream'. Curated by Marie-Ann Yemsi and comprising five exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo, the exhibition serves as a call for revolt, as well as for wisdom and healing.
The exhibition invites us to enter Ubuntu an as yet undiscovered space within our imagination and our bodies of knowledge. This term, which belongs to the Bantu languages of South Africa, evokes notions of humanity, collectivity and hospitality. The call for a “humanity in reciprocity” that is embedded within Ubuntu thinking constitutes an essential but widely misunderstood notion of African philosophy. In both its philosophical and spiritual dimensions, Ubuntu can be considered as one of the few characteristics of African societies to have survived the six hundred years of slavery, colonialism and imperialism, phenomena that have otherwise destabilised the continent’s societies and undermined traditional undermined traditional frameworks of knowledge transmission. Found in numerous African languages and cultures, Ubuntu thought persists in the conception of the place of the individual within the community, as well as in the links between different peoples. It structures a conscience and a vision of the world based on the interdependence of relation.
