The Afterlife of Empire brings together artists from across Africa whose work considers the ways histories of empire and colonialism continue to inhabit the present.

The exhibition does not seek a single African narrative. Instead, it brings different histories, places and sensibilities into proximity, asking what survives when political structures change: in the city, in the landscape, in the body, in memory and in the imagination.

The works move between history and the contemporary, between what is inherited and what is being remade. They consider questions of power, race, identity, migration, extraction, belonging and desire, while resisting the idea that these histories can be neatly resolved.

In this sense, the “afterlife” is not simply what remains of empire. It is also the space in which inherited histories are reworked, disrupted and imagined otherwise.

From Johannesburg and Cape Town to Lagos and Cairo, the artists gathered here approach these questions differently. Some confront history directly; others arrive at it through landscape, architecture, the body, memory or the everyday. Together they suggest that the past is neither finished nor fixed, but continues to shape and sometimes distort the ways we inhabit the present.

The exhibition asks not only what empire left behind, but what we might do with what remains.