Museum exhibitions

Alongside selected new paintings, a multitude of sculptural works are presented, which Dávila combines to produce surprising ensembles of works while conscientiously engaging with the museum’s architectural givens.

Largely derived from investigations and photojournalistic field research in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, this exhibition seeks to investigate how one can engage with trauma as an outsider and also serves as a critique to the world’s indifference and a lack of global visibility to the atrocities in Rwanda at that time.

With the inclusion of a wide range of photographs from official images to family snapshots, this exhibition was the first comprehensive museum survey of photography in Haiti with nearly 350 works.

Histórias afro-atlânticas (Afro-Atlantic Histories) was the second in the “historias” series, taking place across two major venues in São Paulo in 2018 – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The exhibition was motivated by an exploration of parallels and frictions across what Paul Gilroy termed the Black Atlantic, considering the visual cultures of Afro-Atlantic territories – their experiences, creations, patterns of worship and philosophy.

Curated by Gabi Ngcobo and Dr. Yvette Mutumba, A Labour of Love took place at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2017. This show presented 150 of the original 600 works acquired from South Africa by Hans Blum on behalf of the Weltkulturen Museum in 1986. These pieces form a large part of the museum’s contemporary African art collection and were exhibited in South Africa for the first time with this show.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power was first presented at Tate Modern in 2017, travelling to venues in the US for the next two years.  The exhibition text explains the very decisive timeline, with the show opening in 1963, “at the height of the Civil Rights movement and its dreams of integration”.

Art and China after 1989 presented work by 71 key artists and groups active across China and worldwide whose critical provocations aim to forge reality free from ideology, to establish the individual apart from the collective, and to define contemporary Chinese experience in universal terms.

Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, forming part of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative, presented a nuanced reconsideration of contemporary art in Latin America. According to curator Pablo León de la Barra, this extensive show aimed to present “a diversity of creative responses to a rich cultural context shaped by colonialism, civil conflict, economic crisis, social inequality, and repression – as well as by intervals of growth and the emergence of parallel modernities”.

In a powerful research project initiated by Astrup Fearnley Museet, Imagine Brazil showcased Brazilian contemporary art through a compelling curatorial approach. Exhibition curators Gunnar B. Kvaran, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Thierry Raspail invited a group of emergent Brazilian artists to produce new work, and in addition select an older artist who they considered influential, to accompany them in the exhibition.

Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic took place at the Tate Liverpool in 2010 and was ultimately inspired by Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). As the organisers described it, the exhibition identified a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic, connecting Africa, North and South America, The Caribbean and Europe.

The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, was a landmark exhibition exploring the confluence of African culture and independence through art, film, photography, graphics, architecture, music, literature, and theatre. Featuring works by more than 50 artists from 22 countries, the exhibition was notably extensive, occupying the entire three floors of MoMA P.S.1 in New York City.

Cities on the Move was a seminal traveling exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru. The exhibition toured to multiple locations from 1997 to 1999, exploring the cultural influence of East Asia’s meteoric urban development in the late twentieth century through the lens of visual art, architecture, and film.