a statement
Home has always been a liminal space for me - growing up between multiple African cities made me sensitive to place, language, and body. My work at its core feels through the question of “What does it mean to be at home in the world?”. In this same world where truth often fades into obscurity, and binaries (of race, gender and other) determine our rights to space, love and time – I offer my art as an interlocutor.
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Working as both witness and portal, I am interested in how our daily experiences exist within the mythic, political and intimate. In my process, the myth is not only folkloric, it represents the slippery nature of right and wrong. The myth of either having to belong somewhere or nowhere at all.
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My practice is a shapeshifter, a reflection on the pluralities and multiplicities that emerge from being many things – African, Black, Woman, Queer, Foreigner, Other. Feeling through the humanness that exists between this othering, Otherness emerges not only as an identity, but as an expansive metaphor; a fertile darkness from which new visions of self and society can be born.
a bio[graphy]
Valerie Asiimwe Amani is a Tanzanian antidisciplinary artist and writer.
Her practice interrogates the ways in which body, language, and myth are used to situate (or isolate) the self within community; with works that bridge the political, domestic and intimate.
She has exhibited internationally including group shows in Lagos, New York, Paris, Cape Town and Leipzig, and solo presentations in London and Dar es Salaam.
Recent shows include solo, In my Dream we spoke another language at Forster Gallery Zanzibar, performance, Bahari Chumvi at ICA London and Boundary Encounters, Modern Art Oxford.
Amani is currently a PhD candidate at The Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University, where she completed a Masters in Fine Art with distinction. She is the recipient of the 2023 Foundwork Art Prize, The 2022 Ingram Prize and the 2021 Ashmolean Museum Vivien Leigh Prize . Her work has been featured in Art Monthly, Hyperallergic amongst others, with a recent contribution to Texte Zur Kunst.
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