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Pawel Althamer
Common Task (Mali), 2008 to present. Film still .

'Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction'

Neill Blomkamp and Various Artists at Arnolfini

'Superpower: Africa in Science Fiction' surveys the recent tendency for artists and filmmakers to apply the forms and concerns of science fiction to narratives situated in the African continent. It considers the complex undercurrents for this occurrence in art today, and posits other and possible realities existing simultaneously, via careful re-orientations of tense; elevating the need for vigilance towards the present and future over a concern for the past.

Africa has had a rare yet distinct place in popular science-fiction, from the opening scenes of Stanley Kubrick's iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey, depicting the mysterious appearance of a black monolith in the cradle of civilization, to the recent success of Neill Blomkamp's debut movie District 9, a multi-layered allegory on South Africa's recent internal and external tensions. Imagining a new space-time to the typical 'third worldist' representations of the African continent, caught in a perpetual state of crisis, the works in Superpower project an alternative landscape of possibilities.

05 May - 01 July

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'Nous'
James Webb and Ninar Esber
at Galerie Imane Fares

This exhibition by Ninar Esber and James Webb introduces different forms of disobedience that tend to thwart the systems of societal domination. The defiance these two artists address towards the underlying censorship within the moral and technologic
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'Someone Else's Country'
Jo Ractliffe
at Peabody Essex Museum

Photographer Jo Ractliffe (b. 1961) has spent the better part of the last decade photographing the effects of the prolonged civil war in Angola (1975-2002), both in the country itself and in her native South Africa. From the capital city of Luanda to
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'Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive'
Santu Mofokeng, Andrew Putter, Pieter Hugo, Sabelo Mlangeni, Zanele Muholi, Candice Breitz and Zwelethu Mthethwa
at The Walther Collection Project Space

Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive A three-part exhibition series on photography from Southern Africa, Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive presents rarely before seen portraits, albums, cartes de visite, a
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