Artists: Dawit L. Petros - Muzae Sesay - Nifemi Marcus-Bello - Hadassa Ngamba

Breaking Down Realities reviews the notion of 'value': ethical, political, economic, emotional, and environmental, in relation to the infrastructures of coloniality and the flows of global capital, between the African continent and the rest of the world. This exhibition highlights the established research and conditions that each artist refers to, illuminating how this enduring phenomenon is observed by participating artists: Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Hadassa Ngamba, Dawit L. Petros, and Muzae Sesay.

Nifemi Marcus-Bello is a Lagos, Nigeria based industrial designer and artist whose practice is grounded in humility, cultural context, and process-led innovation. Working between commercial and artistic design, he draws on African traditions to create objects that are intuitive, functional, and deeply tied to place. His approach treats design as a living dialogue—responsive, evolving, and informed by real-world interactions. His objects function as archives, reflecting cycles of evolution, scarcity, and abundance. His series, ORÍKÌ (2023–2025), oríkì being traditional Yoruba praise poetry bestowed upon a person, unfolds as critically poetic material experimentations and close collaborations with producer-craftsmen, using locally rooted fabrication methods that reframe material use. ORÍKÌ (2023–2025) simultaneously reveals both the ingenuity and the troubling imbalances of global consumption, transformed into functional objects, they become metaphors for global excess and local resilience, each material features as an Act.

Hadassa Ngamba is a multidisciplinary artist from Boma and Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the former a port city historically central to the transatlantic slave trade and the latter for mining and rare earth extraction. Working across drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, digital media, installation, and performance, Ngamba’s peripatetic AI (African Intelligence) research and artistic productions, take their starting points from the colonial cartography of the DRC, and how the actions of mapping have facilitated imperial exploitation. Her work interrogates the foundations of capitalism and confronts the inhumane consequences of an unequal global system. Deeply rooted in personal history, Ngamba challenges these dominant narratives and initiates processes of critical anticipation and investment in African futures.

Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher, and educator based in Montreal. His work examines displaced histories and their contemporary effects of which he has been critically re-reading the entanglements of colonialism and modernity particularly between Horn of Africa and North African countries, Italy, the United States and Canada. Informed by his lived experience as an Eritrean emigrant, his practice explores the historical forces that produce migration, using photography, moving image, sculpture, and sound. These elements are installed through site-responsive strategies that invite reflective engagement with movement, memory, and belonging.

Muzae Sesay is a visual artist based in Oakland, California, United States, whose studio practice and works for the public realm explore the relationships between space, memory, community, and perceived truth. Using skewed perspectives and flattened planes of colour, he creates paintings of surreal geometric interiors, landscapes, and architectural forms that invite exploration. His work questions the reliability of remembrance and reflects on shared realities through fragmented, perspectival, unstable worlds. By reducing imagery from the physical world into rudimentary forms, Sesay constructs environments bound by harmonious colour and visual tension. Viewers are encouraged to navigate these spaces actively, questioning dimensionality and meaning. His recent work engages with the emotional responses that arise when the rigid laws of physics, architecture, and the built environment are challenged, prompting social reflection and viewer agency.