Theme 6: Symbiosis

Oumar Ball is a sculpture artist who grew up in Bababé, an area in Mauritania by the edge of the Senegal River marking the border with Senegal. On his artistic journey he states, “My father, the photographer and painter Issa Ball, has been a silent teacher to me. As a child, I watched him develop black-and-white photographs of our daily life, as well as make cheerful paintings. When I grew up, he encouraged me to study painting in Senegal, and this is how painting became my second specialty. Like all children in the world, I loved to play. The vast territory, as I then imagined my village, was my kingdom where I spotted iron wire bent and flattened into shapes resembling lettering, scrap metal, colorful cardboard and plastic, from all of which I made toys. Goats, horses, birds, people, and carts that populated this miniature world amused me.”

Aliou Diack was born in 1987 in Sidi Bougou, in the Mbour region of Dakar, Senegal. He received his artistic training from the National School of Arts in Dakar. His higher education was distinguished by his exploration into the use of nontraditional mediums, those beyond graphite. This led him to harness his fascination for nature, flora, and fauna, incorporating the very material of the natural world into his pieces. Diack’s works maintain a sober quality, representative of a primitive and instinctive universe. He has shown in galleries and exhibitions in London, New York, Lagos and Paris.

Fabrice Monteiro is an Agouda, the descendant of Brazilian slaves with Portuguese names. His background is multicultural: he was born in Belgium, grew up in Benin, and now lives and works in Dakar, Senegal. Monteiro worked as a model for just about a decade before becoming a photographer himself in 2007, after meeting the New York based photographer Alfonse Pagano. Photography came naturally to him. As a professional model, he had developed an awareness of the complexity of composition, lighting and gesture within an image. Now behind the lens, Fabrice Monteiro creates images that sit at the intersection between photojournalism and fashion photography. 

Zé Pereira was born in the city of Mindelo in St. Vicente, Cape Verde in 1964. He is a nature photographer who portrays his country in its most diverse socio-cultural aspects. His works are featured in magazines, books by various authors, CD covers and on various tourist sites; he is also the author of the large-scale scoreboard at the Amilcar Cabral International Airport on the island of Sal. He has a degree in Public Relations from the School of Business and Governance of University of Cape Verde and a certificate in photography. He is also an amateur writer and poet.

Dieudonné Sana Wambeti developed his interest in art at a young age. When he was 14, he apprenticed with Michel Ouabanga, an established artist whose naïve realist style and focus on forests and the natural environment remains a major influence on his work. Wambeti takes his mentors’ style to another level by infusing his interpretation of everyday scenes with traditional myths, folklore and spiritualism, as well as realistic portraits of local people. Wambeti’s paintings celebrate the abundant forest and mineral wealth of his native country.

Barbara Wildenboer is a visual mixed media artist who lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. With gallery representation in Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, Lisbon and Luanda, Barbara is an international artist focused on using her creative practice to dig deeper into the mysterious nature of reality and our beliefs about it.

Barbara completed a BA(Ed) with majors in English literature, psychology and pedagogics at the University of Pretoria in 1996 followed by a Bachelor of visual arts from UNISA in 2003. In 2007 she obtained her Masters in Fine Art with distinction from the Michaelis School of Art at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. From 2009-2016 Barbara worked as the head of the Photography Department at the CityVarsity College of Creative Arts, where she lectured on theory and discourse and the history of photography.

She has been awarded international residencies, such as the UNESCO Aschberg Residency (Jordan, 2006), the Al Mahatta Residency (Palestine, 2009) and the Red De Residencias Artisticas Local (Colombia, 2011), the Rimbun Dahan Artist Residency (Penang, Malaysia, 2013), L’Ateleier Sur Seine (Fontainebleau, France, 2017) and Hannacc (Barcelona, Spain, 2018).