Europe, a continent of former colonial powers, is gazing at Africa. In 2025, the population of Africa was about 1.5 billion people, and the United Nations projects that, by 2050, it will increase to 2.5 billion.
By the end of this century, the continent will potentially account for 40% of all humanity. This mass of people has a youthful median age of 20, compared to 43 in ageing Europe, an advantage that will be consequential in driving the continent’s take-off.
Although huge disparities in wealth and education persist, Africa achieved an overall GDP growth rate of 4.0% in 2025, above the global rate of 3.5%, while levels of education are equally on the rise. Often perceived as the ‘continent of the future’, Africa is discovering its new power, confidently expressed through its artists.
The bouncers of curatorial expertise have admitted contemporary African art to the club since the 1990s. No longer seen as an ethnographic curiosity peripheral to leading international art hubs, contemporary African art is increasingly included in major museum exhibitions and prominent art world gatherings.
Indeed, the 2026 Venice Biennale was given an African curator, Cameroon-born Koyo Kouoh, who tragically died a few weeks after her appointment. The significance of the appointment of an African woman at the helm of the world’s most prestigious art exhibition is difficult to overstate.
Among these African artists, a generation of internationally trained women artists, such as Julie Mehretu and Simone Leigh, has exploded onto the global art scene.
Reshaping dialogues
African artists are developing practices that reshape dialogues around African identity and history, working not just with traditional materials but equally with modern media, in a way that is post-colonial, tech forward and assertive.
The African presence in Portugal is five centuries old and deep rooted. As early as the mid-16th century, 10% of Lisbon’s population were Africans, and today Portugal numbers nearly half a million people of African descent.
Tatyana Jolivet is a Russian living in Lisbon, with a professional background in humanitarian affairs, including a passage at the Red Cross. In Lisbon, she runs the online Jolie Art Gallery, a humanistic educational project which creates exhibitions and events to promote cultural diversity and tolerant dialogue.
Jolivet has curated ‘Africa in the Spotlight’, an exhibition of seven African artists from three African countries, hosted by the Lisbon Alliance Française.
“It’s impossible to speak of ‘one Africa’. Africa is multiple and demands our attention,” Jolivet reflects. “One thing is certain; we must build bridges.”
Tatyana Jolivet, curator, ‘Africa in the Spotlight’
Five of the seven artists in ‘Africa in the Spotlight’ are from Burkina Faso, a former French colony which today has a vibrant contemporary art scene, but where development of a mature art market has been held back by ongoing political instability fuelled by jihadist insurgency and military coups.
Casimir Bationo, known as CasziB, lives in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso. His work has been fed by a nomadic journey across Africa, Europe and the US, in a search for identity that is simultaneously intimate and universal.
SDZabila is an artist from Angola, a wealthy country with extensive oil and diamond reserves, with a dynamic art scene in the capital, Luanda. Angola is a former Portuguese colony, with a staggeringly low median age of 16. A co-founder of the collective ‘Os Nacionalistas’, SDZabila’s practice embraces engravings, drawings, sculpture, painting and ceramics.
Flore Kaboré is a painter and sculptor born in Ouagadougou and the exhibition’s only woman artist. Kaboré explores identity in a space between tradition and modernity.
Born in São Tomé e Príncipe, the painter Valdemar Dória emigrated as a child to Lisbon. A founding member of Plataforma Cafuka, he has been a several-time exhibitor at the São Tomé Biennial of Art and Culture.
The sculptor Touré Yacouba is the fifth generation of a family of bronze-casters established in Ouagadougou since the early 20th century, whose grandfather participated in the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition. Yacouba works with degrading plastic to practice a complex technique transmitted through the generations of his family that includes wax, clay, donkey droppings and straw. Inspired by contemporary dance, his works express humanity and tension, emphasised by alternations of shadow and light. Yacouba considers Europe the primary market for his work, with France its gateway.
Wilfried de Paul is a painter and muralist born in Ouagadougou with a practice rooted in African symbolism and the traditional paintings of Tiébélé. He is also a musician, performing under the name Wendlamita Kouka, singing and composing a blend of reggae, slam and traditional rhythms.
Ouagadougou-born artist Mahamadi Derme works in bronze.
Significant structural obstacles still exist for many African artists. Local arts infrastructures are frequently under-developed and local collectors few and far between.
Artists who can often choose to live abroad, showing in Western galleries and selling to Western collectors. The new generation driving the evolution of the African art world faces the challenge of creating more robust arts infrastructures, building local audiences, encouraging local collectors and, hopefully, retaining more of Africa’s best contemporary art in its continent of creation.
‘Africa in the Spotlight’ can be viewed at the Lisbon Alliance Française until May 25, International Africa Day, when it will close with an event for children.
Location: Av. Conselheiro Fernando de Sousa, 21-A, 1070-072 Lisboa
Contact: Tatyana Jolivet +33 695 94 1348 (WhatsApp) | [email protected]