The 10 Must-See African Contemporary Art Exhibitions this Fall 2025 (Africa & Middle-East)
The most anticipated African and Middle Eastern contemporary art exhibitions of 2025 are here. From Nairobi to Casablanca, Cape Town to Addis Ababa, a new season unfolds with bold, unmissable shows exploring migration, spirituality, memory and resilience. This rentrée pulses with vibrant colour, soft textures and intimate storytelling, as artists like Tahir Karmali, Neo Matloga and Sthenjwa Luthuli push the boundaries of belonging, lineage and transcendence. Discover the 10 must-see exhibitions redefining contemporary art across Africa and the Middle East this season.
Hang me Between our Windows, Tahir KARMALI, Circle Art Gallery, until 16 October 2025
Tahir Karmali is generous and prolific in his practice. Across monoprints, dyed silk shirts, steel ribs, and foraged stones, the Nairobi born transforms each rooms his work enters in into a living organism, with elements acting as cell, membrane, or organ. In Hang me Between our Windows, red-oxide prints pulse like blood cells while sculptural shirts hang open as if inviting us inside. The result is a space of vulnerability and groundedness, where intimacy itself becomes an act of resistance to disconnection, extraction, and erasure.
Created through repetitive, meditative gestures—printing, dyeing, bending, draping—Hang Me Between Your Windows reimagines process as replenishment rather than catharsis. The works extend Karmali’s exploration of migration, labor, and belonging while suggesting the possibility that art can reseed the very body from which it grows. Born in Nairobi and based in Brooklyn, Karmali has exhibited widely, including at the 2024 Dak’Art Biennale, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Guggenheim Bilbao and more. His practice continues to bridge the visceral and the poetic—mapping not only where we come from but how we stay connected.
Exile Within, Adiskidan AMBAYE, Addis Fine Art, until 1 November 2025
Adiskidan Ambaye explores spirituality and the tensions of modern life in her exhibition Exile Within. The contemplative paintings use layers of small circles to form amorphous, semi-figurative shapes, evoking movement, depth, and vibrant color. Three complementing sculptures—crafted from fused plywood and driftwood—echo the gestural energy of her canvases, appearing delicately balanced like dancers in motion.
Le Correspondant ne répond plus à cette adresse, OH Gallery, until 8 November 2025
OH Gallery opens the season with عنوان لا, Le Correspondant ne répond plus à cette adresse (The Correspondent No Longer at This Address.) Bringing together Souad ABDELRASOUL (Egypt), Viyé DIBA (Senegal), Abdoulaye KONATE (Mali), Ghassan SALHAB (Lebanon) and Ousmane SOW (Senegal), the exhibition probes the experience of displacement in all its structural violence. Through painting, film and installation, the artists explore the complex dynamics of migration as both bodily and identity-based experience, and as a vector of transformation, memory and resistance. By weaving together diverse geographies, the show highlights how social and political contexts shape migration, exposing tensions between territory and belonging, imposed borders and lived spaces, and questioning postcolonial legacies and systems of domination that continue to organize the circulation of bodies and to shape the imaginaries of exile, return and the impossibility of departure.
Casablanca Imaginiste, Abdelkrim GHATTAS, Loft Art Gallery, until 8 November 2025
Loft Art Gallery presents Casablanca Imaginiste, a solo exhibition of new works by Moroccan painter Abdelkrim Ghattas (b. 1945, Casablanca), opening 9 October 2025 at the gallery’s Casablanca space. Curated by Maud Houssais, the show explores Ghattas’s visionary reimagining of Casablanca as an imaginary Bauhaus city, where memory and imagination converge. A pioneering graduate of the Casablanca Art School, Ghattas draws on personal and collective histories—from his father’s diving port to his aunt’s loom and the Beaux-Arts school—to craft layered, psychogeographic landscapes. His paintings transform the city into a space of memory, invention, and radical possibility, reflecting both real and imagined dimensions.
Casablanca Imaginiste underscores Loft Art Gallery’s commitment to Moroccan, Arab, and African artistic heritage, positioning Ghattas at the forefront of modernism’s evolving narrative. Must see.
Fabric of Our Being, April KAMUNDE, Afriart Gallery, until 8 November 2025
In her latest body of work, Fabric of Our Being—an extension of the ongoing series Rest: The Pursuit of Peace—Kamunde deepens her exploration of the dera. This dress, a recurring motif in her practice, symbolizes rest but also embodies a more complex set of associations. In these new works, Kamunde teases out the nuanced and sometimes contradictory perceptions surrounding the garment.
Traditionally, the dera signifies ease and respite, its loose fit and light fabric evoking comfort. Yet for Kamunde and many women in her life, it also functions as a kind of uniform—practical attire for household chores, working from home, and other daily tasks. At the same time, the dress’s flowing silhouette straddles the line between modesty and sensuality, underscoring the tension between respectability and presentability. The exhibition is curated by Rosie Olang’ Odhiambo and Sharon Neema. Shown for the first time in Nairobi from June to August, it is now returning home to Afriart Gallery until 8 November 2025.
Group Show, Kamyar Bineshtarigh, Southern Guild, until 10 November 2025
The artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, Group Show repeats and refines Bineshtarigh's surface transfer technique in a study of lifted walls and floors from the studios of artists working in South Africa. The immersive mixed-media works give form to his curiosity around artists’ creative processes, with each work carrying layers of history and energy from its original site - the studio.
Je’ni isi isi (Jenisisi), Ebuka Pascal AGUDIEGWU, Ecclectica Gallery, From 4 September 2025
Je’ni isi isi (“go to the beginning” in Igbo) anchors Ebuka Pascal Agudiegwu’s latest exhibition, which reimagines myth, memory and biblical archetypes through lush, allegorical painting. Drawing on Igbo cosmology and the oral tales he first heard as a child, Agudiegwu merges folklore with biblical episodes— Elijah’s chariot of fire, Moses’ serpent staff—stripping them of dogma to reveal universal archetypes. Works like Yearning for Eden and A Match Made in Heaven echo art history’s longing for paradise and spiritual struggle, while reframing them as internal, psychological battles. Clouds morph into beasts, foliage carries narrative weight, and figures hover between worlds. The show invites viewers to see myth not as nostalgia but as a way to understand the present.
Delicate Things and a Place called There, Wunika Mukan, Until 12 October 2025
Delicate things and A place called there offers a tender yet resolute meditation on growth, memory, and the fragile pause before expansion takes form. The exhibition brings together the two distinct practices of Adulphina IMUEDE and Ashiata SHAIBU-SALAMI that, through the vulnerability of their materials, the intimacy of their narratives, and the tenderness of their imagery, reveal the universality of growth— reminding us that we are never alone in our uncertainties.
Unkhangu/Birthmark, Sthenjwa LUTHULI, WHATIFWORLD @Norval Foundation, Until 10 January 2026
WHATIFTHEWORLD presents Umkhangu/Birthmark, a solo exhibition by South African artist Sthenjwa Luthuli at the Norval Foundation in Cape Town, opening 11 September. Luthuli, a self-taught printmaker born in KwaZulu-Natal in 1991, is known for intricately carved wood reliefs and woodcut prints exploring identity, African spiritualism, and cultural traditions. Drawing from patterns, symbolism, and ancestral knowledge, his works reflect on the body as a site of memory, struggle, and transformation. The exhibition’s title, Umkhangu (“birthmark” in isiZulu), evokes ancestral presence and spiritual purpose. Featuring fourteen works from 2010 to today, the show presents Luthuli’s practice as visual storytelling bridging the physical and metaphysical, curated by Tayla Hollamby with the Norval Foundation team.
Tomorrow is Another Day, Neo MATLOGA, STEVENSON Gallery, Until 25 October 2025
STEVENSON presents Tomorrow is Another Day, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Neo Matloga—his first in Johannesburg since 2020. Moving between Johannesburg and his childhood village of Mamaila, Matloga creates “psychological landscapes” capturing intimate, everyday moments that balance love, exasperation, and dignity. Working across painting, collage and monotype printmaking, he explores gesture, scale and materiality to highlight the politics of the body—especially hands—as symbols of labour, comfort and access. Rooted in storytelling, myth and ritual, the exhibition reflects on resilience and the quiet courage embedded in daily life.
Cross Lens, Hassan HAJJAJ x ATAY ATELIER, Jajjah Art Space, Marrakech, from 1 November 2025
Cross Lens, Hassan HAJJAJ x ATAY ATELIER, Jajjah Art Space
Hassan Hajjaj and Atay Atelier are making waves announcing Cross Lens, a dialogue-exhibition between the Dutch Moroccan diaspora and Morocco. From November 1 at Jajjah Art Space, Marrakech. The exhibition spotlights eight emerging artist four from Morocco and four from the Netherlands, each exploring cultural identity through their own perspective. An exhibition supported by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.
Featured artists : Sarah Amrani, Sabrina Charehbili, Jinane Ennasri, Safaa Kotbi Ismail Zaidi, Mounir Raji, Fatima-Zohra Serri, and Dunya Zita.
The Weight of the Unseen, Tibeb SIRAK, Tewasart and Patrons, Until 27 October 2025
Born in Jijiga in 2001, raised in Somalia, and now based in Addis Ababa, Sirak roots his practice in Somali heritage while speaking to shared human experience. Drawing inspiration from textiles, jewellery, and traditional art forms, he translates cultural memory into a distinct visual language. Working with woodcut print and acrylic, Sirak explores the symbolic power of patterns as bridges between past and present, tradition and innovation. His figures embody memory, lineage, and identity, carrying the unseen weight of history. The Weight of the Unseen invites reflection on resilience, inheritance, and the quiet beauty of what endures within us.
