While looking at works by Carlos Idun, we have the impression that we have to do with archival photographs from the early second half of the 20^th century. The Ghanaian artist has mastered retro stylistics to perfection. Everything is just right – colors, garments, hairstyles, and interior design send us back to the distant, idealized past. When creating this beautiful, nostalgic fantasy, Idun used melancholy exactly against its anti-utopian nature. The world from his photographs is joyful Ghana – looking towards the future with hope, full of tremendous opportunities, with wide-open horizons. In one of the photographs, on a table gathering smartly dressed family members around, we can see a portrait of Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of independent Ghana. Carlos Idun’s works tell us the potential history of the world, in which the utopian vision of social justice and united Africa developed and promoted by Kwame Nkrumah came true. Or still has a chance to come true.

The triptych Na Lagos Wey Dey? [Which Lagos Are You?] by Stephen Tayo unfolds in the artist’s birthplace – the largest Nigerian metropolis. Lagos is an extremely modern city. It is a hub, where the music, artistic, film, and fashion industries are thriving, but also a place strongly marked by tradition. In his artworks, Tayo combines the symbols inspired by folk costumes, masks, and totems with a completely modern material, such as plastic. Plastic bags, fans, and nets from bazaars, arranged in a new way, turn into symbols of the vanishing tradition. According to the artist, in this way, he ‘documents the struggle between the old and the new taking place on the streets of Lagos.’  

In art, fiction often describes reality more accurately than realism. The series Afrobandits by Matthew Matete revolves in the realm of imagination – it is a fantasy about combining the Kenyan landscape with the aesthetics of the Wild West. In this work, Matate reaches for the motif of the Black Western – present in pop culture for years – to evoke the classic traces of the genre, that is the desire for freedom and the need for male friendship, which in his photographs sometimes balances on the verge of intimacy. ‘Kenyan Cowboys,’ however, are not the unruly, arrogant descendants of white settlers, but fantastic characters captured in romantic frames resembling those from old movies. In this fantasy, the audacity and rebellion of the Afrobandits gain an extraordinarily subtle and melancholic dimension.

Shitanda is an artist whose works almost self-impose the idea of melancholy. They are imbued with this specific kind of sad beauty, which, however difficult it is to define on a verbal level, speaks to us with the universal language of strong emotion, or even affect. The poetic compositions from the series Presence and Absence, in which the dark outlines of figures through the choreography of gestures intertwine with a cat held in arms, are both disturbing and seductive. The creatures in the photographs resemble shadows or ghosts. The details are all the more difficult to decipher, since the artist experiments with various visual techniques: he adds such textures to his photographs as if they were printed on cardboard or an old yellowed sheet of paper, and he extracts reproduction noises in a deliberately lowered quality. Shitanda’s photographs paradoxically blend the weight and density of expression with the subtle matter of what they represent. The effect of the melancholic tangle of beauty and sadness is particularly visible in the work The Chorus, in which Shitanda introduces a figure of a human into the classically melancholic motif of the collection of butterflies. It would be difficult to evoke a more telling symbol of the Baroque anesthetization of mourning than the collection of dead colorful pinned butterflies – stunningly beautiful and yet irretrievably lost as beings.