Tomorrows/Today 2025 Experience, Attempt, Experiment…

What does it mean to embrace an aesthetic of play within the realm of contemporary art practice?

 

Play is both an inherent element of art and a model for the creative process. Just like play, art is itself a practice through which we learn about the world while unlearning its prescribed rules: a realm of exploration and imagination that fosters new ways of feeling, seeing, and doing, as well as the cultivation of new communities, based on shared values and visions.

 

As we seek to counteract the imperative of gamification that pervades today’s big data economy - where play functions as a non-coercive tool for regulation, surveillance, and affective governmentality - we aim to reframe the notion of play: beyond the illusory surface of entertainment, we reclaim play as a space for critical thinking and connection with our other possible selves, an act of disrupting the inertia of thought and action passively shaped by mechanisms of soft power.

 

Thus, we argue that the very foundation of an aesthetic of play lies in its capacity to dismantle structures of power through an urgent desire for experimentation and knowledge, change, and freedom: freedom to question, understand, and transform one’s conditions in the world; freedom to imagine and create new possibilities for a better future, as envisioned in Paulo Freire’s utopian pedagogy.

 

Featuring 12 selected solo show projects by emerging and underrepresented artists - Joy Adeboye (Nigeria, 1998), Asma Ben Aissa (Tunisia, 1992), Agnes Essonti (Spain, 1996), Soukaina Joual (Marocco, 1990), Mareli Lal (South Africa, 1985), Warren Maroon (South Africa, 1985) Georgina Maxim (Zimbabwe, 1980), Mulambo (Brazil, 1995), Anthony Ngoya (France, 1995), Thando Phenyane (South Africa, 1997), Mankebe Seakgoe (South Africa, 1998), Zhenlin Zhang (China, 1998) - TT 2025 reimagines itself as a space for learning and unlearning the rules of the game, while embracing trial and error as a core methodology and as part of the journey.

 

Over the past months, each artist has worked on their individual project with these curatorial premises in mind. While some address the notion of play - as a recreational or competitive activity, or as a performative enactment on a theatrical stage or in life, through the roles we assume in society - others have undertaken different thematic journeys. They have all actively woven elements of play, experimentation, and (un)learning into the body of works presented here: venturing outside their comfort zones, pushing the boundaries of their own practice, and challenging the status quo rooted in personal or societal beliefs that feel too restrictive for their bodies, minds, or souls. Through diverse languages and themes, they all embrace the idea that art, like play, can fuel the desire for transformation and inspire society to believe that change is possible.

 

 

Joy Adeboye (AMG Projects) from Nigeria is carving her own path within the contemporary revival of watercolor techniques - a medium with a history that stretches back to the origins of art itself and that a few contemporary artists, from Carol Rama and Francesco Clemente to Barthélémy Toguo, have reinterpreted as a means of navigating the ambiguous space between reality, the fantastic, and political utopia. Adeboye’s practice extends this lineage while shaping a language of her own. While in her previous works she explored a mystical interplay of color and form to express her own subjectivity and intimate inquietudes, for her solo project in Tomorrows/Today, she has produced a new body of work that delves into the intimate realm of desire and sexuality. Titled Perversion of Quiet Girls, her work draws from both personal experiences and erotic fantasies while also referencing an autobiographical novel written in Paris in 1971 by an anonymous author - likely a woman - a book that was initially banned in the United States until it was ultimately deemed non-obscene and published. Sometimes appearing as collages of different papers or as single compositions, Adeboye’s pink-toned watercolors evoke both the delicacy of petals and the softness of flesh, exploring ambiguous anatomies that subtly recall Georgia O’Keeffe, while offering weightless yet profound reflections on the personal and universal dimensions of eroticism, femininity, and desire. As it challenges the sexual morality imposed by religion and social structures upon women, her wandering, sensual, and poetic journey through the inner self becomes a playful yet courageous statement of freedom and self-emancipation.

 

 

Asma Ben Aissa (Blue Wind Project) from Tunisia specializes in textile art for which she uses recovered fabrics from diverse contexts - ranging from everyday domestic clothing to ceremonial garments - to create large-scale installations, small and delicate sculptural pieces, or canvas-like tapestries, intricately intervened with various sewing and stitching techniques learned from fellow Tunisian women experts in traditional embroidery craftsmanship. In her work, sewing becomes a process that bridges the dual nature of architecture: the space that articulates both indoor and outdoor life, a means of weaving histories together: the experiences of the outside world are processed within the safe space of home, where, through the abstract language of weaving, the artist restlessly re-narrates stories using needle, thread, and fabric. Her works unfold as visual poems, inviting attentive yet quiet contemplation and deciphering. In line with this exploration, Ai Thaer Wal Baten (The Visible and the Invisible), her project for Tomorrows/Today, centers on the architectural element of the window, turned into a symbol of the dialogue between the visible and the invisible, the private and the public sphere. The articulation between the private realm of domestic space and the public dimension of urban life is key in traditional Arabic architecture; in certain Middle Eastern countries, which the artist has explored through travel and artistic residency programs, windows are often kept closed, blocking the flow of light, air...thoughts, and communication, between the outside and the inside - this being a metaphor for how women’s lives have traditionally been confined to the hidden, invisible domestic sphere. Thus, by weaving together imaginaries around windows as symbolic elements, she has produced a new body of work that, while concealed behind the beauty of embroidery, stitching, and sewing, subtly alludes to more personal and social concerns surrounding womanhood.

 

 

Through languages like photography, video, object-assembly and performance, Spanish-Cameroonian artist Agnes Essonti Luque (The Over) explores the domestic sphere and, particularly, the kitchen and the ritual of preparing and consuming food, as cultural practices intertweened with personal memory, social history and community making. For Tomorrows Today, she will present Mother Tongue, a project that transforms her booth into a quasi-kitchen, centering her exploration on the “tongue”, as the muscular organ in the mouth used for tasting, licking, swallowing as well as for articulating speech, and therefore, as a primal site of socio-cultural and decolonial and feminist resistance. Drawing from her Cameroonian origins and the memory of diaspora embedded in her family history, this project continues her Chop Chop Chop performance and video work, which was part of the Spanish Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. It also builds on other projects in which she explores the connection between food, memory, community, and language, In pieces like the serigraphy on cotton fabric work titled Monki no fayn but mama layk am (2023) and the neon sculpture Bush butter i swit fo mboa (2022) she celebrates Pidgin, a mother tongue in her family history, dignified as a living language of resistance and exchange, echoing authors like Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo, amongst others. The project also features pantry shelves displaying recipes, kitchen tools, and real food - including palm wine, palm oil, gari, and glass jars filled with spices - alongside a series of photographs exploring the intersection of food and queer identity: together, all these elements transform the exhibition into a subversive and anti-colonial cabinet, where viewers are invited to taste and share.

 

Soukaina Joual (Spiaggia Libera) from Morocco uses textiles, collage, and installation to reflect on the body’s capacity to transform, transcend, reshape, and reimagine itself, challenging normative narratives around the female anatomy and bodily experience. As the body becomes the central figure and a sign from which to build metaphors, her work addresses social issues of race, gender and sexuality, as well as how these categories are psychically, socially, sexually and representationally produced. Titled Raw Body, her solo project for Tomorrows/Today brings together a series of embroidered textile works that originates from a pure exercise of collage - that is cutting, layering, and assembling different photographic materials centered on the female body as subject, resulting in the construction of new compositions, a synthesis, a new deformed yet somewhat harmonious figure, later transposed onto different fabrics through embroidery. Emerging from a previous project - Em/body/ies - this new body of work includes a series of embroideries on small white doilies that recall the intimacy of the domestic sphere, as well as large scale embroidery works on sheer and light fabrics that resemble curtains gently moving with the passing air. In them, these new, beautiful creatures that seem to pose elegantly despite their oddness, evokes in the viewer a sentiment of loss and confusion, ambiguity and vulnerability, yet also harmony and sensuality.

 

 

Mareli Lal (SMAC Gallery) is a conceptual photographer from South Africa, who exploits the storytelling potential of form, color, and texture in her images, where she juxtaposes and assembles elements from diverse contexts to create dynamic and unexpected tensions. No Men’s Land, her project for Tomorrows/Today, consists of a constellation of lightboxes and dibond-printed photographs that result from her most recent studio experimentation, where human bodies and fabric bodies, equally subjected to manipulation, folding, or stretching, become materials for abstract, still life-like compositions. Lal frames the female body as both subject and territory: an autonomous space where women look at other women, free from the interpellation of the male gaze. The female body is no man’s land, as suggested by the project’s title. Through her lens, women are captured in a refined yet playful fashion and advertising studio photography style - a visual language shaped today by consumer culture. Yet, within these carefully staged compositions, moments of disruption emerge, causing the poses to collapse: bodies appear humorously yet fashionably disordered and fragmented, tangled with clothing or folds of curtain fabric. In some images, the human subject is entirely replaced by sculptural assemblages of draped textiles, rendered in still life as almost post-classical statues displayed on plinths, dominated by plastic and tensioned textures, evoking the same fragmented, displaced body language that runs throughout the series.

 

 

The work of conceptual artist Warren Maroon (Everard Read) draws from both social commentary and biographical elements, particularly his upbringing in the Cape Flats, South Africa, where social life is deeply marked by a sense of precarity, gang violence, and historical stigmas. Through a practice primarily centered on sculpture and installation, Maroon creates emblematic and eclectic pieces by manipulating, assembling, and intervening found objects - which, when transformed and transposed into the aesthetic realm, unleash multiple, powerful, and deeply political metaphors. Titled Between Us, his project for Tomorrows/Today brings together a series of new sculptures that reflect on the notions of borders and boundaries, as well as the dialectics of duality, mirroring, and togetherness. His visual poetics emerge through the assemblage and transformation of objects sourced from different contexts and uses: from windscreens and wall clocks to wooden chairs and Okapi knives. Juxtaposed, reassembled, or intervened upon, these elements generate strong conceptual tensions, often emphasizing the interplay between delicacy and roughness, or beauty and violence. The brutal contradictions of economic injustice are addressed through an attention to the affective dimension of life, as seen in 9 to 5 (2025), where phrases such as "beg, borrow, steal, plunder" and "live, laugh, love, cry" replace the 3, 6, 9, and 12-hour marks on two wall clocks placed side by side. Similarly, Utopia features two seatless wooden chairs facing one another, acting as a cage for two identical cement busts: one elevated by rocks, the other sunken, standing on matchsticks. The poetics of love and sentiment emerge in contrast to the harsh realities of life in works such as 820 000 kms, a Nissan Champ windscreen with a skull etched into black paint overlaid with broken shards of toughened glass, which also bears a white spray-painted text from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou’s book that explores how love of art and literature can help overcome racism and trauma. Another key piece is a wall installation that combines Okapi knives with extended mahogany-stained branch handles, from which white paper roses bloom: as they float against a white background, these sculptures become somehow bittersweet statements that pair violence with tenderness, resilience with fragility.

 

 

Zimbabwean artist Georgina Maxim (Goodman Gallery) is carving her path within the new wave of textile art, employing techniques such as sewing, weaving, and embroidery. For Tomorrows/Today, she presents Winter Wonders, a new series of works inspired by the lives of insects, produced during a winter residency in the rural setting of Village Unhu, an artist-run space she co-founded in Harare. With this project, she continues her engagement with traditional textile techniques known in Shona as dhunge mutunge, a method of quickly assembling materials so they hold together. By dismantling, reshaping, and reassembling second-hand women’s garments, she transforms them into sculptural works that metaphorically revive the memories and narratives embedded in the history of these clothes. Clothes designed for women are particularly interesting to Maxim, as they are not only more complex and heterogeneous in their fabric assemblage and color palettes compared to those designed for men, but they also absorb and embody women’s cultural behaviors: women tend to be more physical in their interactions, paying attention to each other’s clothing, touching, and using garments as part of a language of love and affection. On another level, these works also address the urgent issue of the unsustainability of the global fast fashion industry, which has led to Zimbabwe and other African countries becoming recipients of a booming market for “pre-loved” clothing imports from overseas.

 

 

Mulambö (Reiners Contemporary Art) from Brazil engages with the festive and celebrative character of soccer, carnival, samba and Brazilian music to stress their connection with anti-racist resistance within the Afro-Brazilian communities: these cultural expressions, often capitalised as symbol of Brazilian national identity, have served as sites of both celebration and struggle. Primarily working in painting and sculpture, for Tomorrows/Today he presents O drible, a paixão e a magia (The dribble, the passion and the magic), consisting of a new body of work centered on soccer, a game integrated in the collective imagination as a symbol of hope and social redemption for the lower classes. He explores forms of anti-racist resistance through the lens of the performing body in football - the body of the players as well as the body of the fans. In the latter case, this becomes a tool for self-expression and affiliation to a specific team: body painting, choreographed chants, and ritualized performances, display the fans’ devotion to their teams with profound engagement and passion.Through this reference to the body, the artist also reclaims the intelligence that was historically denied to Black players in the sport. For years, Black athletes in Brazilian soccer were subjected to racist narratives that undermined their intellectual capacity. They were often portrayed as instinctive, untamed, and spontaneous players, lacking technical skill or strategic thinking - that is, an almost animalistic depiction that disregarded their rational and emotional intelligence. By reclaiming this history and challenging these stereotypes, Mulambo’s work celebrates the resilience, ingenuity, and tactical intelligence of Black athletes, repositioning their contributions as central to the evolution of soccer globally. Presented in Cape Town, the project is clearly in resonance with the South African context, the project also recalls when the 2010 World Cup played a pivotal role in transforming this once-colonial sport into a Post-apartheid emblem of political and social liberation.

 

 

French artist of Congolese origin, Anthony Ngoya (Galerie Caroline O’Breen) is currently based in Brussels and Amsterdam. His multimedia practice revolves around the compilation and manipulation of archival image fragments - photographs sourced from historical colonial archives or family albums. He digitally alters these found images and transfers them onto dyed textile strips woven together, wooden panels, or draped textile assemblages, creating hybrid pieces that challenge the boundaries between sculpture, painting, and photography. Under the title Within Them, his solo presentation for Tomorrows/Today includes a newly produced body of work. While his previous fabric pieces were linked to industrial processes, this time he references the domestic sphere, as textiles, wooden materials, and images combine memories gathered from a recent stay at his uncle's home in Congo. Blending with colorful dyeing processes, the manipulated images become an extension of his gaze and attention to both the small and the vast: close-ups and zoomed-in views of human cells, such as spermatozoa, microscopic examinations of plants, and zoomed-out scenes and situations whose contexts remain ambiguous, only subtly evoked. The plastic chair - a lightweight, stackable, mass-produced furniture, both humble and omnipresent in courtyards, street corners, churches, and bars - appear in several of the wood pieces suggesting a metaphor for utility and humbleness, mobility and impermanence that somehow pervade the whole body of works.

 

 

South African architect and painter Thando Phenyane (Eclectica Contemporary) explores the relationship between the Black body and architectural space - what he refers to as "its existence in the non-space” - drawing from personal experience, literature, film, and biblical narratives. Continuing his line of figurative, quasi-surrealist paintings filled with symbolic elements and a palette dominated by shades of grey, his project for Tomorrows/Today is titled Part Black Part Anomaly and presents a series of works where anonymous, shadowy Black figures, both humorous and unsettling in their expressions, interact with animals, monstrous creatures, and symbolic elements, set against white-striped, “Ikhukho”-like backdrops. Phenyane’s depiction of the Black figure within an apparently calm yet subtly disturbing theatrical setting invokes a dimension of play as enactment, where literature becomes a point of reference: his work engages with the historical barbarity of human zoos, as depicted in Zakes Mda’s novel The Zulus of New York, as well as the experience of self-alienation described in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which vividly explores the psychological and existential violence of internalised racism - that is self- assimilation of Black people into whiteness as a means of social acceptance. Thando’s golden masks symbolize a reaction to this legacy, standing as emblems of emancipation and self-awareness.

 

 

Through her drawings, paintings, and mixed-media sculptures - crafted from a variety of materials including charcoal, paint, PVC pipes, beads, wire, and light - South African artist Mankebe Seakgoe (BKhz Gallery) has developed a distinctive visual poetics centered around handwritten text. In her work, writing becomes a non-intelligible sign, an abstract pictorial or sculptural language that only evokes a cursive style of penmanship, in which confused characters are written joined in a flowing manner, yet sometimes erased and re-written. Shaped as language for self-discovery that deliberately avoids figurative representation - hence, photographic or pictorial self-portrait - the work of Seakgoe challenges traditional ways of understanding, communication and expression: none of the words she inscribes are meant to be legible as her signs exist in an ambiguous space - they are a draft that is intentionally unintelligible, a text that needs to remain obscure to be fully clear to its author. Hermetic yet visually striking, her language becomes a metaphor for the metatext itself. Titled The Invisible Man’s Herbarium, her project for Tomorrows / Today brings together a body of works on canvas and on board, as well as sculptural pieces, deeply inspired by literature - one of Seakgoe’s main sources of influence, as she is an avid reader. References to Cain’s Book by Alexander Trocchi - a novel marked by an aware self-reflective gaze on life of a junkie protagonist - and to David Wagoner’s poem Lost, surface in non-explicit ways, as readings that have accompanied the making of this body of work. Collectively, these pieces reflect on the often-bizarre twists of fate in one’s life journey but also on the clarity that comes with living according to one’s truth and values. Seakgoe visualises herself in this experience through the image of a chandelier dancing alone in her studio - a vision materialised in The Invisible Man (2024-2025), a sculpture composed of wire, glass beads, oil paint, crystal beads, and found materials, whose shape evoke the elegance and solitude of a suspended chandelier.

 

 

A recent postgraduate student at the Royal College of Art, Zhenlin Zhang (tHEIR) from China specializes in oil painting. His ethereal, evocative compositions, situated between atmospheric abstraction and opulent figuration, are rendered using a color palette dominated by blues, violets, and reds. His compositions delve into memory and emotion, weaving together imaginaries of both resilience and reverence, while also carving out space for imagination as a practice of image-making. Under the title Mirror Dream, his body of work for Tomorrows/Today constructs a dreamlike narrative around the symbolic figures of the mask and the mirror. A theatrical reenactment of the drama of life, the paintings offer visual metaphors that reflect on the transitory and fragile nature of both beauty and of life. Like fantastical tableaux evoking mythical, otherworldly realms, they appear to be populated by figures depicted only in fragments: they possess a soft texture, gentle shapes, and a sensual materiality. Yet they are too vast, complex and ephemeral to be fully captured or defined, so they dissolve and evolve beyond the frame, allowing us to grasp only glimpses - much like the ever-evolving nature of our own most intimate selves. They appear as metaphors of benevolent mirrors to our souls, yet they also hold the intrigue of enchanted looking glasses that show magnificence and hide a true darkness. While Zhang’s concerns are deeply rooted in biographical and familial experiences, this body of work also engages with his closeness to, and fascination with, Tibetan culture and spirituality. This dimension is emphasized chromatically through the use of deep reddish-brown tones, known as Tibetan red, alongside his unique use of pearlescent oil paints, which create a shimmering glow. Light reflects on the paintings’ surfaces like reflections on water: shifting, never fixed.