Through conversations with curator Eleri Fanshawe and artist Zana Masombuka, Africans Column reflects on an exhibition that explored how contemporary African and diasporic artists are reimagining inheritance, identity, and cultural memory.
When Inheriting the Future opened at October Gallery in London in April 2026, it arrived as more than a group exhibition. It served as the opening chapter of the gallery’s ambitious season dedicated entirely to Contemporary African Art—a programme that would continue throughout the year with exhibitions by artists from across Africa and its global diaspora.
Bringing together South African artist Zana Masombuka, Congolese painter Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, French Afro-Brazilian artist Alexis Peskine, and Senegalese photographer Djibril Dramé, the exhibition examined the ways heritage is inherited, transformed, challenged, and reimagined across generations. Through photography, painting, sculpture, and mixed-media works, the exhibition explored how artists navigate the complex intersections of ancestry, spirituality, colonial histories, migration, and contemporary identity.
Although the exhibition concluded in May, its questions remain remarkably urgent.
What does it mean to inherit culture in a rapidly changing world?
How do artists carry ancestral knowledge into the future without reducing tradition to something static?
Can heritage be understood not as something preserved intact, but as something continually evolving?
To explore these questions further, Africans Column spoke with curator Eleri Fanshawe and exhibiting artist Zana Masombuka about the ideas that shaped the exhibition and the ways contemporary African artists are redefining inheritance for a new generation.
Curating Heritage as a Living Process
For curator Eleri Fanshawe, Inheriting the Future began with an interest in artists who are making a significant impact within contemporary African and diasporic art while engaging deeply with questions of identity and transformation.
“The exhibition began through thinking about artists making a distinct impact within Contemporary African and diasporic art today,” Fanshawe explains. “As I developed the project, connections emerged between the practices of Zana Masombuka, Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga, Alexis Peskine, and Djibril Dramé.”
While the four artists work across different mediums and cultural contexts, Fanshawe identified a shared concern running through their practices: the understanding that identity is never fixed.
“Each artist approaches identity as layered and evolving—shaped by history, cultural tradition, spirituality, migration, and contemporary material culture. While their practices are materially distinct, they navigate shared questions around inheritance, selfhood, and transformation from deeply personal perspectives.”
This notion of inheritance as an active process rather than a static condition became the conceptual backbone of the exhibition.
Rather than presenting heritage as something that is simply passed down unchanged, the exhibition proposed that cultural inheritance is continually negotiated and reinvented. Through vastly different visual languages, each artist demonstrated how inherited histories remain alive precisely because they continue to evolve.
For Fanshawe, this tension between preservation and transformation was essential.
“Heritage and tradition are often understood as static, yet culture is always evolving. Each artist draws from inherited histories while actively reinterpreting them within contemporary life.”
The exhibition revealed this through multiple perspectives. In Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga’s paintings, colonial histories became inseparable from contemporary systems of extraction and exploitation. Alexis Peskine’s sculptural portraits examined the construction of Black diasporic identity through material processes rooted in memory and healing. Djibril Dramé’s photographs documented the Baye Fall community while simultaneously reflecting on belonging and cultural continuity across generations. Meanwhile, Zana Masombuka’s works navigated the intersections of ancestral knowledge, spirituality, and personal lineage.
Beyond a Singular Narrative of African Identity
One of the exhibition’s greatest strengths was its refusal to collapse diverse experiences into a single narrative about Africa or African identity.
Contemporary African art is often expected to perform representational labour—to speak for continents, cultures, or histories. Yet Inheriting the Future resisted such simplifications.
Instead, Fanshawe approached the exhibition as a space where different histories could coexist while retaining their specificity.
“As a curator working with international artists, I approach each practice with sensitivity to its specific cultural and personal context,” she says. “While thematic connections exist across the exhibition, it was important that each artist retained their own voice and space within it.”
Rather than forcing uniformity, the exhibition invited audiences to identify resonances while recognising differences.
“Rather than collapsing these works into a singular narrative, I wanted the exhibition to create a framework through which audiences could trace resonances between them while recognising the differences in their histories, perspectives, and material approaches.”
That curatorial decision feels particularly significant at a moment when African art is increasingly visible globally yet often flattened into broad categories that overlook local histories, individual experiences, and cultural specificity.
Zana Masombuka and the Practice of Deep Listening
Among the exhibition’s most compelling contributions were the new works by South African artist Zana Masombuka from her series Akhulumile Amabhudango: Scenes from Dreams – Journeys with the Kosabo. Drawing upon Ndebele culture, spirituality, and family history, the works explored kingship, ancestral guidance, and the relationship between physical and spiritual worlds.
For Masombuka, however, these themes emerge through a process that begins not with representation but with listening.
“The anchoring principle of my practice involves deep listening,” she explains. “This approach keeps my practice lucid and allows for the different elements that shape my work to blend into one another. Through this melding a new energy emerges which informs the visual language of the work.”
This commitment to listening—whether to memory, ancestry, landscape, or intuition—creates a practice that moves fluidly between multiple dimensions of experience.
Within Inheriting the Future, this became especially visible through works inspired by her late maternal grandfather, Bishop Makhuwana Piet Mahlangu, whose spiritual legacy serves as a central point of departure.
Yet Masombuka describes this relationship not as remembrance in a conventional sense.
Instead, it is an ongoing dialogue.
“Re-membering with my late grandfather spiritually has given me a much larger and more complex context for my practice as an artist,” she says. “It has allowed many concepts which I have held onto, to stretch beyond what I might have thought was possible.”
Inheritance, she explains, is not fixed.
“Concepts such as inheritance have become lucid, unfixed and unbounded by time. There’s an embodied aliveness to them that is constantly being created and retrieved in the eternal now.”
Her understanding of inheritance stands in contrast to traditional notions of heritage as preservation. Instead, she proposes inheritance as an active and living force—something continually recreated through relationships between past, present, and future.
The Body as Archive
Masombuka’s photographic practice is notable for positioning herself simultaneously as artist and subject.
Throughout her work, her body becomes a site through which histories, memories, and spiritual encounters are negotiated.
Asked about this act of self-positioning, Masombuka describes it as both methodological and philosophical.
“My body is an important part of this process. It allows what I’m seeking, and what is seeking me, to live in my body as a form of a research model.”
Rather than treating identity as an abstract concept, she understands it as embodied knowledge.
“Identity, inheritance and belonging are embodied and lived.”
This perspective offers a powerful challenge to dominant frameworks of knowledge production that prioritise distance and objectivity. Instead, Masombuka positions lived experience, intuition, spirituality, and embodiment as legitimate and necessary forms of inquiry.
The result is work that feels simultaneously intimate and expansive—grounded in personal history while speaking to broader questions about continuity, belonging, and cultural survival.
Reimagining Tradition
Throughout the exhibition, tradition appeared not as something frozen in the past but as something continually reshaped through contemporary experience.
Masombuka’s use of Ndebele dress, beadwork, colour, symbolism, and landscape exemplifies this approach.
“The work in itself is a form of repair and remembering,” she explains.
“It is deeply connected to the spiritual essence that has informed the evolution of the Ndebele culture for centuries.”
For her, objects and symbols are not ends in themselves but entry points into deeper forms of reflection.
“They act as pathways and entry points to the contemplation of something much deeper in memory and the physical and spiritual landscape of my practice.”
This understanding aligns closely with the exhibition’s broader argument: that culture survives not through rigid preservation but through adaptation, reinterpretation, and renewal.
When asked what it means to inherit culture while reshaping it for the present, Masombuka offers perhaps the most succinct articulation of the exhibition’s central premise.
“To inherit culture while reshaping it for the present is doing what my foremothers and forefathers have done throughout time.”
“I’m adding to the infinite tapestry of the ways of knowing and being that I have inherited.”
“It ensures wholeness and continuity to the evolution of not just a culture, but a people.”
A Future Built from Many Histories
As contemporary African and diasporic artists continue to gain global recognition, exhibitions like Inheriting the Future demonstrate the importance of moving beyond simplistic narratives of identity and representation.
What emerged from October Gallery’s exhibition was not a singular story about African heritage but a constellation of approaches to memory, ancestry, spirituality, resilience, and transformation.
Whether through Kamuanga’s reflections on colonial extraction, Peskine’s explorations of diasporic identity, Dramé’s intimate portrayals of community, or Masombuka’s investigations into ancestral knowledge, the exhibition revealed inheritance as something active rather than passive—something continually remade through lived experience.
Ultimately, Inheriting the Future argued that culture is not simply handed down unchanged from one generation to the next. It is negotiated, questioned, expanded, and reimagined.
In a world increasingly shaped by migration, technological change, and global interconnectedness, that may be the exhibition’s most enduring contribution: the recognition that the future is not separate from inheritance, but one of the ways inheritance continues to live.
