"Can we intervene in the future, in the near future? We certainly can. Not in the sense of determining it, shaping it, prophesying it, or grounding it in utopia or dystopia. But we know that each of us, or all of us together in the daily decisions, acts, episodes, constructed fictions and updates of the reality we produce, is incidentally interfering in the future.”  – António Pinto Ribeiro, 2009     

 Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Mozambican artist Ilídio Candja Candja: O Silêncio Negro em Forma de Chocolate [Black Silence in the Form of Chocolate]. This exhibition features  a series of the artist’s latest large-scale paintings that, while  chromatically vibrant and compositionally poetic, critically investigate  the traces and structural mechanisms used in the perpetuation,  suppression, and silencing of the indigenous populations in the colonial  era on the continent of Africa. Elements of pre-colonial African  sculpture and devices utilized in the subordination of these communities  are [dis]placed across heavily collaged, seismically shifting abstract  backgrounds, laying the foundational bedrock for Candja Candja’s  constellation of revisionist realms.