Afrofuturism

About

Afrofuturism is less a style than a way of thinking across music, literature, film and visual art. The critic Mark Dery named it in 1993, but its roots go back to the jazz composer Sun Ra, who from the 1950s presented himself as a visitor from Saturn, and to the science fiction of Samuel R. Delany and Octavia E. Butler. In the 1990s the Detroit electronic duo Drexciya imagined an undersea nation descended from Africans lost during the Atlantic crossing, reopening history through speculation.

Visual artists use costume, collage, textiles and video to similar ends. Wangechi Mutu assembles hybrid female figures from magazine cuttings, ink and paint. Kapwani Kiwanga has delivered lectures in the role of a researcher from the future. Gerald Machona has made a spacesuit from decommissioned Zimbabwean banknotes, and Xenobia Bailey crochets vivid cosmic mandalas. Look for outer space, invented technologies and ancestors recast as travellers.