OpenArtExchange x African Food Festival
Popup Exhibition in Rotterdam Museumpark
This year, OpenArtExchange is proud to participate in the African Food Festival (AFF), an annual celebration of African culture through food, music, art, games, and community. Held at Rotterdam's Museumpark, the festival offers a vibrant programme of authentic African cuisine, live music and dance performances, inspiring art, and interactive workshops.
As part of the festival, OpenArtExchange will present a pop-up exhibition featuring a curated selection of works by seven contemporary African artists from our collection. Showcasing artists from across Africa and its diaspora, the exhibition, rather than presenting a single narrative, embraces plurality. The works on view offer different ways of seeing, questioning, and interpreting the world. The artists explore ideas of identity, community, environment, memory, and belonging. Together, they challenge fixed perceptions of contemporary African art, revealing a field defined not by one aesthetic or perspective, but by its richness, complexity, and constant evolution.
The artists work across a wide range of materials and approaches. Discarded rubber tyres and phone keyboards are transformed into works that speak to urban life, consumption, and cultural continuity. Abstract compositions invite reflection on our place within the universe, while collage and painting engage with histories, politics, and lived experience.
Come visit us at the African Food Festival, and discover our collection in a unique setting!
Opening Times AFF:
18 - 19 July: 13:00 - 20.00 h
More information: African Food Festival
Cannot be there at the African Food Festival? Come visit our sneak preview at the gallery on July 17th from 17:00!
Participating artists
Benjamin Deguenon
(1982, Benin)
Deguenon is an autodidact artist whose practice includes sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, and ceramics. Through a self-invented urban mythology, his work is populated by hybrid creatures, symbols, and imagined figures that emerge from the street, the city, and everyday life. His practice reflects on connection, transformation, spirituality, and the dialogue between human beings, nature, and the changing world around them.
Casca
(1976, Angola/Portugal/UK)
Casca is a self-taught painter and sculptor born in Lisbon into an artistic family with Angolan roots. His paintings, drawings, collages, and sculptures are deeply influenced by the masks, symbolism, and ancient stories of indigenous Angolan cultures, particularly the Chokwe people. Combining these references with a contemporary visual language, his work explores cultural memory, identity, and the exchange between tradition and modern society
Marcel Kpoho
(1988, Benin)
Kpoho is a self-taught painter and sculptor from Porto-Novo whose work is rooted in Vodoun spirituality, Fon heritage, and the cultural history of Southern Benin. Working primarily with recycled rubber tyres, he creates masks and sculptures that explore human duality, transformation, ecology, and the relationship between mankind and nature. His raw and powerful visual language gives discarded materials a second life, while reflecting on both the darker and more hopeful aspects of human identity.
Serge Diama
(1988, DRC)
Serge Diama, also known as Serge Diakota Mabilama, is a visual artist who currently lives and works in the USA. Working across painting, collage, drawing, engraving, photography, installation, and performance, he is known for an experimental practice that brings together strong images, lines, forms, and a distinctly Congolese sense of colour and expression. His work explores identity, society, hierarchy, and the realities we create, often combining surreal figures and layered symbolism to question contemporary African societies.
Mounou Désiré Koffi
(1994, Ivory Coast)
Koffi is an emerging visual artist whose practice combines painting, textile, and recycled mobile phone materials. After graduating in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Abidjan, he began integrating discarded mobile keypads into his works as a way to reflect on technological evolution, environmental pollution, and urban life. His works often depict cityscapes and human silhouettes, transforming waste into layered compositions that speak about society, identity, and the challenges of contemporary life.
Tho Simoes
(1973, Angola/Brazil)
Tho Simoes is a contemporary visual artist and street artist working across painting, spray paint, photography, film, installation, and performance. Educated at the National Institute of Art and Culture in Luanda, he has become one of Angola’s leading artists in the field of street art and public mural projects. His practice moves between urban culture, social observation, and collective expression, using a dynamic visual language to connect art with public space and everyday life.
Richard Laté Lawson-Body
(1986, Togo)
Lawson- Body is a Togolese visual artist, poet, and calligrapher based in Lomé. His practice brings together abstraction, calligraphic gesture, and poetic expression, resulting in works that move between image, rhythm, and language. Through layered compositions and expressive forms, he reflects on society, human experience, and the power of signs and symbols as carriers of meaning.