ARCO Lisboa 2020: Group Show: Januário Jano, Patrick Bongoy, Pedro Pires, Nelo Teixeira, Gonçalo Mabunda, Luís Damião, and René Tavares

For ARCO Art Fair 2020, This Is Not a White Cube presents a project connecting unreleased artworks by 7 contemporary artists from Angola, Mozambique, DRC, São Tomé e Príncipe, and its diaspora, which practice has consisted over the years on research and project development around the notion of memory and identity, tradition and contemporaneity: Januário Jano (79, Angola, United Kingdom); Patrick Bongoy (80, DRC, South Africa); Pedro Pires (78, Angola, Portugal); Nelo Teixeira (75, Angola, Portugal), and Gonçalo Mabunda (75, Mozambique, Portugal); Luís Damião (78, Angola); René Tavares (83, São Tomé, Portugal). Through this project, the gallery aims to generate a dialogue between countries with a colonial and historic affinity which reflects on the concept of decoloniality and seeks to promote a reflection on how contemporary African art has been affirming itself on a global scale. This statement has been verified either through the production of a disruptive discursive position in the context of a postcolonial debate that has remained for decades transversely marked by a certain blind Eurocentrism. A rooted theorization that stems from the processes of occupation and sharing of African territories by the colonizing peoples, which produced a unilateral reading of their influence on the cultural and artistic constitution of the colonized countries. This project developed and curated specifically for Arco Art Fair reflects on the emergence of a critical vision of colonialism and the importance that the African diaspora - personified in these 7 artists - the curatorial projects, researches, and documental studies assume in the production of a renewal of the historical discourse of art in contemporary times.