Produced in conjunction with the FotoFest Biennial 2020 exhibition, African Cosmologies: Photography, Time, and the Other brings together 33 artists of African origins from around the globe whose works challenge traditional notions of Blackness and transnational histories in relation to concepts of liberty, rights, and representation.

For nearly forty years, FotoFest has presented and worked with artists, photographers, and thinkers from Japan, Latin America, Korea, China, Russia, and the Arab Region, and it is the first time in the Biennial’s 37-year history that the central exhibition will focus on artists of African origin.
Taking its cues from John Coltrane’s avant-garde jazz oeuvre, wherein formal modernisms of the past are made complex by radical imagination and black-futurity, this presentation of diverse ideas, artistic approaches, and material histories proposes a “cosmological exploration” of Africa and the African diaspora — one that defies easy categorization and spatial and temporal boundaries. Succinctly, it explores the very notions of Africa and Africanness beyond traditional geographic and historical lines.

In their unique practices, the featured artists turn an eye to social, cultural, and political conditions that inform and influence concepts of representation as they pertain to image production and circulation in Africa and beyond. These artists question the ways in which subjectivity is constructed and deconstructed by the camera, and in the process, reveal legacies of resistance by those who defy traditional ideas of sexual, racial, gender-based, and other marginalized identities.
The artists featured in the book include: Faisal Abdu’Allah, Akinbode Akinbiyi, Hélène A. Amouzou, Sammy Baloji, James Barnor, Bruno Boudjelal, Edson Chagas, Ernest Cole, Jamal Cyrus, Jean Depara, Laura El-Tantawy, Samuel Fosso,
Rahima Gambo, Eric Gyamfi, Lyle Ashton Harris, Samson Kambalu, Rotimi Fani-Kayode,  leo with Shobun Baile, Mónica de Miranda, Santu Mofokeng,  Sethembile Msezane, Zanele Muholi, Aïda Muluneh, Eustáquio Neves, Nyaba L. Ouedraogo, Rosana Paulino, Dawit L. Petros, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Aida Silvestri, Lindokuhle Sobekwa, Wilfred Ukpong, Carrie Mae Weems