African art organisation !Kauru Contemporary African Art teams up with the Johannesburg Art Gallery to present Close, a group exhibition featuring works from artists around Africa and the African diaspora including Uganda, Kenya, the USA and South Africa.

Curated by South African culture and art historian Zingisa Nkosinkulu, Ugandan artist and curator Violet Nantume and Kenyan filmmaker and curator Nyambura M. Waruingi, Close interrogates the differences between female body and male body narratives. Using the element of discomfort as a starting-point, the exhibition seeks to disrupt societal conversations with discomfort becoming a tool to address and break the barrier between narratives. Although the artists featured in the exhibition explore the concept of closeness on a personal and self-reflective level, their artworks nonetheless allude to universal questions and reflect a distrinct world-view that is shaped by the artists’ circumstances.

Artists exhibited in the group exhibition include Kenyan-American author and artist Yaye Kassamali, Ugandan community activist and artist Stacey Gillian Abe whose works challenge misconceptions about gender equality in Uganda, and Cape Town-based feminist, performance and visual artist Lady Skollie who rose to acclaim for her gripping and sometimes controversial works which explore the themes of gender roles, sex, greed and lust in the digital age.