The Shape of Things to Come brings together six artists whose practices examine how creative expression registers and reshapes a world in flux. Each contributes a distinct approach to material, form, and narrative, offering perspectives that move between personal experience and broader cultural shifts. Their works, though varied in medium and geography, converge around a shared awareness of transformation on how societies change, how histories are retold, and how futures are imagined.
Iman Issa’s sculptural language offers a counterpoint grounded in conceptual clarity. Her reworked interpretations of historical objects – rendered through pared-back forms accompanied by textual descriptions – question how heritage is catalogued and represented. Works such as Expedition of Punt explore the slippage between material fact and cultural interpretation, prompting viewers to consider how histories are assembled and reimagined.
El Anatsui’s sculptural assemblages anchor the exhibition with their vast, malleable surfaces formed from repurposed metal fragments. His compositions, created from items such as bottle caps and cable-wire strips, draw on craft traditions while interrogating global trade and consumption. Through these shimmering structures, everyday remnants are elevated into meditations on mobility, memory, and cross-cultural exchange.
The textile works of Abdoulaye Konaté provide another dimension, shaped by West African traditions in which fabric acts as both material and message.
Through fields of layered colour and precisely cut bands of cloth, he engages with themes of social responsibility and collective resilience. In works like Resistance, textiles become sites of both urgency and renewal.
Adam Pendleton expands these conversations through his Black Dada framework, merging avant-garde experimentation with the politics of Black representation. His text-driven canvases, charged with silkscreened phrases and gestural marks, test the boundary between image and language, opening questions around identity, abstraction, and cultural resistance.
Yinka Shonibare’s sculptural masks, rooted in West African traditions yet shaped by European art historical references, examine the fluid construction of identity in a global context. His hybrid forms disrupt inherited narratives, drawing attention to the entangled histories that inform contemporary life.
Carrie Mae Weems contributes photographs that investigate architecture as a carrier of memory. Her images from West Africa consider how built forms bear the weight of historical trauma while remaining active sites of reflection and connection.
Together, these artists propose that art acts not only as witness but as agent capable of reframing inherited structures and opening imaginative pathways toward what is yet to come.
Location: Efie Gallery, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai
Date: 11 October 2025 until 10 January 2026