Breaking Down Realities reviews the notion of ‘value’: ethical, political, economic, emotional, and environmental, in relation to the infrastructures of coloniality and the flows of global capital, between the African continent and the rest of the world. This exhibition highlights the established research and conditions that each artist refers to, illuminating how this enduring phenomenon is observed by participating artists: Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Hadassa Ngamba, Dawit L. Petros, and Muzae Sesay.
Nifemi Marcus-Bello is a Lagos, Nigeria based industrial designer and artist whose practice is grounded in humility, cultural context, and process-led innovation. Working between commercial and artistic design, he draws on African traditions to create objects that are intuitive, functional, and deeply tied to place. His approach treats design as a living dialogue—responsive, evolving, and informed by real-world interactions. His objects function as archives, reflecting cycles of evolution, scarcity, and abundance. His series, ORÍKÌ (2023–2025), oríkì being traditional Yoruba praise poetry bestowed upon a person, unfolds as critically poetic material experimentations and close collaborations with producer-craftsmen, using locally rooted fabrication methods that reframe material use. ORÍKÌ (2023–2025) simultaneously reveals both the ingenuity and the troubling imbalances of global consumption, transformed into functional objects, they become metaphors for global excess and local resilience, each material features as an Act.
Act 1 Friction Ridge [Bench] centres bronze which stands as a symbol of the past in the context of Nigerian craftsmanship and creative exploration, a homage in particular to the bronze casters of Benin City. Historically and still today, the guildsman of Benin, their intricate artistry and the profound cultural symbolism of the Benin Bronzes, still serves as one of the most iconic examples of material identity on the continent which were looted from the Royal Palace of Benin by British Forces in 1897, sold and distributed across the world to fund colonial expedition. Many of the works are found today in American and European museums, and are the subject of ongoing heritage repatriation discussions. Marcus-Bello reminds us of a time when African societies were not just consumers of design but creators of high value, globally admired work. The techniques used by the Benin bronze casters were refined, intentional, and deeply embedded in cultural rituals and storytelling. Here, bronze is not just a material, it’s a carrier of memory and identity; the stories being felt, sensed and expressed as collaborative interactions between the designer and craftsmen whose rendered fingertips imprint and adorn the crescent-shaped bench.
Act 2 Tales By Moonlight [Screen] out of the series, we present the floor-based lunar circle bearing the fissures of the sand-cast process ,of pouring molten metal into a mould made from sand, highlighting aluminium as a metal representing a complicated present. Much of the aluminium in Nigeria presently comes through in the form of second-hand goods, remnants of overconsumption in the Global North. Discarded appliances, cans, cars, and electronics find new life here, often through informal recycling economies; showcasing simultaneously local ingenuity and adaptability and highlighting the uneven flows of material and capital that continue to define global economic systems. Aluminium becomes a reflection of global excess and local resilience.
Act 3 Whispers Of A Trail [Daybed] features is a bed that features a candleholder that protrudes from the frame of the backrest. Copper is the key material of interest, of which Africa is rich in raw resources, particularly in the border region between Zambia and Democratic Republic of Congo, where the artist spent some of his formative years. Much of this material is exported, but scarcely available in its refined form and at a high premium when it returns. The question that emerged for Marcus-Bello was, “how can we imagine a future in which copper is not just mined, but refined and transformed within the continent? Can we develop systems and infrastructures that allow for material processing, innovation, and ownership? Copper becomes a symbol not just of technological potential-used in electronics, energy systems, and telecommunications—but of economic autonomy and forward-thinking design.”(11)
Hadassa Ngamba is a multidisciplinary artist from Boma and Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the former being a port city historically central to the transatlantic slave trade and the latter for mining and rare earth extraction. Working across drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, digital media, installation, and performance, Ngamba’s peripatetic AI (African Intelligence) research and artistic productions, take their starting points from the colonial cartography of the DRC, and how the actions of mapping have facilitated imperial exploitation. Her work interrogates the foundations of capitalism and confronts the inhumane consequences of an unequal global system. Deeply rooted in personal history, Ngamba challenges these dominant narratives and initiates processes of critical anticipation and investment in African futures.
We have selected works made during stages of her residency in London during 2025.(22) Ngamba travels with her chosen materials: a trunk of ores and minerals which she makes direct use of as her choice of pigment for her paintings on fabric and paper, citing the DR Congo as both material source and psychological terrain⎯ a living archive, “carrying the memory of territories, bodies, and the geopolitical violence that permeates them.”(33) These experiential contrasts imbue and align her perceptions of the comparatively stable, leafy tranquillity of Hampstead, North London and the resurgent conflict in DRC during the period, with the displacement of communities in Goma, Eastern DRC caught in the crossfire between Rwandan and DRC military and militia over territories and resources.(44) Ngamba extended her use of ores and binding techniques to include: aragonite, cobalt-bearing calcite, heterogenite, and pink cobalt salt, critical and rare raw material data yielding distinctively vivid and dense abstractions; correlations of real-time, metaphysical, technological and spiritual intelligences as its visual logic, as seen in the works: Ambivalence and the Colour of Conflict (2025) Archipelago North of London (2025) and The Ore Fragment 1-8 (2025), and eight watercolours from the London Series (2025).
Dawit L. Petros is a visual artist, researcher, and educator based in Montreal. His work examines displaced histories and their contemporary effects of which he has been critically re-reading the entanglements of colonialism and modernity particularly between Horn of Africa and North African countries, Italy, the United States and Canada. Informed by his lived experience as an Eritrean emigrant, his practice explores the historical forces that produce migration, using photography, moving image, sculpture, and sound. These elements are installed through site-responsive strategies that invite reflective engagement with movement, memory, and belonging.
Notably, in London we include Spectral Fragment VIII and IX (2026), which brings into relation buildings, materials, and acts of destruction. To date, the Spectral Fragments series has comprised large-scale, highly reflective panels of smoked grey plexiglass, featuring precision-cut CNC (computer numerical control) etchings of archival photographic documentation evidencing 20th-century colonial advancements in modern technologies, infrastructure, and appropriative activities across land, water, and sky.
The series is materially literal of Petros’ site-responsive strategy: to implicate the viewer’s presence, reflection, and interaction with historical phenomena that haunt present conditions. Spectral Fragment VIII and IX take their starting points from the British Museum’s Sylvia Pankhurst photographic archives. They reference the period of the British Military Administration (BMA) active in Eritrea between 1941 and 1950, depicting the stripping and looting of infrastructure and manufacturing plants that were then relocated to other countries.
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