1-54 CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN ART FAIR 2025

THK Gallery’s presentation at 1-54 London 2025 stages this question through the practices of five artists. Their collage, sculpture, painting and beadwork transform the archive into a living site, charged with rarity, resilience, and possibility.

This booth stages openings, showing that memory, material, and history can be reimagined, reactivated, and carried differently, compelling viewers to inherit, unsettle, and dream anew. What does it mean to inherit histories that resist closure? How do fragments of memory, intimate, unstable, and contingent, return in ways that demand ethical reworking and negotiation? The practices of Tshepiso Moropa, Driaan Claassen, Natnael Ashebir, Sahlah Davids, and Duncan Wylie are situated within these interrogations of archival authority, memory, and temporality.

They each explore the archive not as a static repository but as a dynamic site where history, memory, and material converge. Moropa collages images, oral traditions, and dreamscapes into constellations of Black womanhood and ancestral presence, destabilizing conventional narratives and reconstituting the archive as a space that remembers, fractures, and dreams.

Claassen’s sculptural forms, emerging from bronze casting and digital fabrication, inhabit thresholds between order and chaos, matter and consciousness, cultivating liminality.

Ashebir’s practice spans painting, drawing, and photography, mapping the emotional and spatial terrains of urban life. His series’ function as an unorthodox archive, attentive to impermanence and multiplicity of belonging. His works meditate on beauty within imperfection and shifting boundaries between isolation and connection.

Davids mobilizes Cape Muslim craft traditions through beadwork, upholstery, and assemblage to materialize histories of resilience, belonging, and spiritual inheritance. Her practice enacts memory as tender and weighty, foregrounding ethical, affective, and relational dimensions. Each bead, each thread, becomes a tactile invocation of care, a way of remembering that is also an act of becoming.

Wylie’s paintings mirror this search for balance between fragmentation and coherence. Through layered expressionist brushwork and vibrant colour, his work traces tensions between construction and deconstruction, order and chaos, belonging and displacement. Gestures unfold as rupture and repair, evoking psychic terrains of instability and renewal. Together, these practices extend the archive as a living, breathing field of transformation.