Born to a Mozambican mother from Maputo and a Portuguese fieldworker father, Bertina Lopes is considered a pioneer of contemporary African painting. Due to her association with the Mozambican Resistance (1954-61), Lopes was forced to leave Mozambique and moved to Rome in 1962. The events reinforced Lopes' sympathy for the weak and oppressed fringes of the population – a subject that would often recur in her art. During this period of her life, cultural nationalism became a large influence for both her artwork and personal ideology. Combining Western influences and African primitivism, her original and explosive use of colour and themes result in unusual abstract constructions, which she often associates with recycled materials to gradually derive her own identity as a painter. Her paintings full of life reflect a double identity that will be the common thread of her work throughout her career.

One of the strongest feminist voices to emerge from Eastern Africa in the past 30 years, Everlyn NICODEMUS is an artist, writer and curator. As an artist, she produces powerful works centred on personal and cultural trauma as well as the role art can play in healing, while her research and curatorial interests focus on the history of Modern African Art. 

Born in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania in 1954, Nicodemus' life has been marked by movement: herself part of a moving diaspora which she documents in her writing and art making. Moving across Europe - to Sweden, France and Belgium before finally settling in the U.K. - her experience of racism and cultural trauma has prompted the creation of a unique body of work encompassing paintings, collaged 'books' and mixed-media assemblages as well as poems, using unusual materials to explore human experience, from metal nettings and sisal to textiles and found objects.