Eleven Visual Arts Grants for Artistic Collaboration and Dissemination awarded!

28 October 2026
Sub-Saharan Africa Component

The Africa-Europe Partnerships for Culture: Sub-Saharan Africa component is proud to announce eleven recipients for the Visual Arts Grant for Artistic Collaboration and Dissemination. The first of its kind under the AEPC project, the grant funds a team’s full artistic journey, from collaborative concept development through production to public representation and audience development.

The AEPC communications team got to talk to some of the recipients about their project, providing a glimpse on what to expect in the upcoming months. The team also spoke to jury members about their evaluation process.

Recipients and their team included:

• Dipesh Shapriya and Jan van Esch, filmmaker and visual artist working across Tanzania and the Netherlands.
• Aurelio Mofuga, Tanzanian creative technologist working with a team of four members from Creative technology backgrounds.
• Lola Akinmade Åkerström Nigerian visual storyteller working with Sweden based Nigerian artists, Diana Agunbaide-Kolawole and Yemis Wilson
• Emmanuel Odongkara, photographer and filmmaker based in Gulu, Uganda working with filmmaker and actress Eva Gamallo, Moja Programme officer, Julia Limaro and Founder of Moja, Diane Andrade
• Martin Senkubuge and Athenkosi Kwinana, Visual Artists from Uganda and South Africa
• Dembe Sanhá, Audiovisual producer, and sound designers Rui Gaspar and Pedro Marques, Telmo Soares and Manuel Gill and Miguel Ferraz, and visual artist Maria Kowalski.
• Niragire Tresor Professional filmmaker, and visual artists Nizeyimana Yassyn, Djuledji Mucyo, Munyantore Jules and Keza Nadia
• Alice Penda, Kim Dotty Hachmann and Natasha Marzliak, visual artists and curator

Upcoming Project:

Worn Again: Dipesh Shapriya and Jan van Esch The project begins with discarded clothing, but it is ultimately about movement, identity and the ways meaning changes as things and people move from one place to another. A garment can pass through many hands and lives. It can move from a shop to a wardrobe, from one person to another, and from Europe to Tanzania. With each movement, its meaning can change. Something unwanted in one place can become valuable in another. Something anonymous can become personal once it is worn and becomes part of someone’s life. We see this movement of clothing as a way of thinking about people. Clothes can carry traces of where they have been, while taking on new meanings through the people who wear them. In this sense, the garment becomes a metaphor for migration, displacement, belonging and the changing nature of identity. We want to explore these ideas through film, sound, performance and visual art. The project will bring together images and processes from Amsterdam and Dar es Salaam, looking for connections between the two places.

What do you hope audiences will take from the project?
We hope audiences experience a connection between two places that may initially appear very different: Amsterdam and Dar es Salaam.Through the video installations, we want to create a visual dialogue between the two cities, their streets, people, textures, clothing, movements and everyday processes. Rather than simply showing a journey from one place to another, we are interested in finding unexpected visual and human connections between them.

Sculptures of Lights: Aurelio Mofuga The project is about looking at African monuments differently. We often encounter monuments as fixed objects that tell us what or who we are supposed to remember. They are usually made of stone, concrete or bronze and placed in very visible public spaces. But the societies around them continue to change. We want to explore what happens when these monuments become living interfaces for memory and dialogue rather than fixed symbols of history. Through projection, moving image, sound, interactive technology and contemporary artistic interpretation, we bring new layers of stories onto these monuments. We are working across Tanzania, Kenya and Togo, inviting artists to respond to important public monuments in their own contexts.

How does your project speak to strengthening cultural cooperation in Sub-Saharan Africa and/or Europe?
Sculptures of Light is fundamentally a collaboration across African contexts rather than a project that treats Africa as one homogeneous cultural space. We are connecting artists and creative practitioners from Tanzania, Kenya and Togo around a shared question how public monuments shape memory and power while allowing each artist to respond from their own historical and cultural context.

This creates an opportunity to compare different experiences of colonialism, independence, nation-building and public memory without suggesting that they are the same. The collaboration also creates a space for knowledge exchange around projection mapping, interactive technology, research, visual art and public engagement. We see Europe as an important part of this network as well, particularly through partnerships, artistic exchange, technical knowledge and opportunities for African work to circulate internationally on its own terms.

Midsummer through an Afro-Swedish Lens: Lola Akinmade Åkerström The resulting exhibition will reinterpret a revered Northern European cultural tradition through African diasporic perspectives. 

What questions/issues/ideas does your project want to address?
Historically, African traditions have been told through a European lens. This project will be reframing a European cultural heritage (Midsummer) through a contemporary African lens. It promotes cultural diversity and inclusion through underrepresented Afro-Nordic narratives. It encourages intercultural dialogue across European and African contexts. 

Eye Level: Emmanuel Odongkara

This project puts cameras into the hands of around fifteen girls in Gulu and lets them show us their world from where they actually stand. At their height. Not ours. There are two shoots: one inside their school, where they're surrounded by everything familiar, and one out in Gulu town, where they have to look at a place they've known all their lives and suddenly decide what matters in it. Then the work travels, to Madrid and to Murcia. The heart of it is very simple: children are photographed constantly and asked to speak almost never. Eye Level is a space where a girl in Gulu can say exactly what she sees, without anyone tidying it up for her.

Tell us about your creative practice and your career.
I started taking pictures because I wanted a record of my own place that I could recognise. Almost every photograph I grew up seeing of northern Uganda was made by someone passing through, and almost all of it was about what had happened to us rather than who we are. So my work is portraiture and everyday life, made slowly, made here. For the last few years I've worked with MOJA's team, I support a much broader narrative of children in Uganda. I photograph with people, not about them, and I teach as much as I shoot. Eye Level is the natural next step of that road. It's the same instinct, except this time I hand the camera over completely and make space.

Currencies of Skin: Martin Senkubuge Currencies of Skin: Bodies, Space, and the Politics of Visibility looks at how skin —particularly in conditions like vitiligo and albinism — functions as a kind of social and cultural currency, shaping who gets seen, valued, and included. Together we are producing large-scale drawings, mixed-media works, and a site-responsive installation, developed through research in Uganda and South Africa and produced in Milan, culminating in a public exhibition.

What questions/issues/ideas does your project want to address?
We are asking who is allowed to occupy space, how bodies are valued through appearance, and how new visual languages can disrupt inherited hierarchies of perception. Each of us steps into the other's subject matter — Martin engaging with albinism, Athenkosi with vitiligo — to move past single-author narratives of representation. Working across Uganda, South Africa, and Milan also puts African intracontinental exchange in dialogue with how difference is constructed and politicised within a European urban context.

Guardians of the Forest: Dembe Sanhá

Our project aims to understand and revitalize the importance of preserving the cultural and historical values associated with Cantanhez’s rich biodiversity—values that have been eroding year after year, thereby undermining conservation efforts and the achievements in valuing the area that have influenced the Park's environmental health and delayed international recognition of this important national natural heritage.

What questions/issues/ideas does your project want to address?
We aim to address concepts of care, belonging, and reciprocity—recognizing the impact of lived experience and the role of ancestral practices in protecting the natural world and caring for Nature.

Guardians of the Forest: Dembe Sanhá

Our project aims to understand and revitalize the importance of preserving the cultural and historical values associated with Cantanhez’s rich biodiversity—values that have been eroding year after year, thereby undermining conservation efforts and the achievements in valuing the area that have influenced the Park's environmental health and delayed international recognition of this important national natural heritage.

What questions/issues/ideas does your project want to address?
We aim to address concepts of care, belonging, and reciprocity—recognizing the impact of lived experience and the role of ancestral practices in protecting the natural world and caring for Nature. 

Through Their Eyes: Niragire Tresor The project is a photography project about giving people the opportunity to tell their own stories through images. I want to work with children, people with disabilities, and elderly people and create a space where they can express how they see themselves, their lives, and the world around them. For us, this project is not only about taking pictures of people. It is about working with them, listening to them, and giving them the confidence and tools to become storytellers themselves. Many people are often represented by others, but they do not always have the chance to show their own perspective. Through this project, participants will use photography to share their experiences, memories, feelings, and everyday realities. We want to create a collection of photographs that reflects the participants’ own voices and perspectives. The work will be developed through conversations, photography sessions, and reflection, and will later be shared through exhibitions and public presentations. At its heart, Through Their Eyes is about dignity, inclusion, visibility, and self-expression.

How does your project speak to strengthening cultural cooperation in Sub-Saharan Africa/and or Europe?
Through Their Eyes strengthens cultural cooperation by bringing together artists from Rwanda and Germany to work on one shared project. We will exchange ideas, skills, and different ways of seeing while creating the photographs together.

The collaboration will connect African and European artists, communities, and audiences through workshops, exhibitions, and discussions. It is based on mutual learning, equal participation, and building relationships that can continue through future artistic collaborations.

Common Ground for Healing and Sovereignty: Alice Christel Penda The project examines the colonial relationship between Cameroon and Germany as well as its continuing effects on land, economic structures and cultural relations.
Working across photography, video, installation and publication, the team will research the German colonial visual archive of Kamerun and related archival material as part of the project’s historical and critical inquiry. These archival pictures will inform the artistic process in order to create new works throughout the collaboration.

The project centers on the Sovereignty Space, activated in Alice Penda’s residence/studio in Nkongsamba, and grounded in her continuous research endeavor: Building Sovereignty. Rather than introducing an external model, the space builds upon local knowledge and ingenuity. Njangi sisterhood and group reflection gather women, artists, students, fostering discussions, visuals, writings, and items that could contribute to the artistic journey.

The project will produce an African futurist photographic series, a video artwork, installation elements and a trilingual publication. Works in progress will first be shared through a public open studio in Nkongsamba, followed by an exhibition in Berlin at Inselgalerie, accompanied by artist talks, discussions and the publication launch.

Meet the Jury The jury composed of experts, academics, researchers and creatives from Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe.

“I really enjoyed the jurying process. It gave me a unique awareness of the type and quality of creativity emerging across Africa. I was particularly excited by how artists are exploring ideas that feel relevant, fresh and capable of revitalising the continent’s creative landscape,” said Wahu Kiragu

“A few aspects that made evaluations challenging was that applicants had two major issues, that of budgeting and lack of existing collaboration with European partners or even local partners. This made it challenging because a group can have an idea of what they want to achieve but there is no proof of prior collaboration with proposed partners,” said Olive Fodjon

The biggest strength was the quality and diversity of the creative ideas. I saw artists engaging with African realities in very exciting and original ways. There was a strong sense of experimentation, storytelling and cultural relevance, and I came away feeling very optimistic about the creative potential across the continent, the jury points out.

“This evaluation process made me realise that the creative imagination is often ahead of the business infrastructure supporting it. There is exceptional creative work being developed across Africa, but artists can benefit from greater awareness of marketing, audiences, distribution, IP and sustainability,” Kiragu points out.

“These grants are important because they make creative work possible that might otherwise never happen. They give artists resources to experiment, develop ideas and produce ambitious work, while creating opportunities for Africa-Europe exchange and collaboration,” said Kiragu

“However, I think we should increasingly think about grants as launchpads rather than lifelines. There can be an over-reliance on grants as the only way creative work can exist. Artists need support to understand how their work can continue generating value after the grant ends—through audiences, markets, IP, partnerships, licensing and other forms of financing.”

Jury members: Rucera Seethal, Wahu Kiragu, Olive Fodjon Ketsia, Marie Fricout, Lloyda Garrett- Osborn, Christopher Udoh, Osaze Efe, Dr Adam Yeo, Aderemi Adegbite