The artists on show operate through hybrid lenses. What does it mean to stretch past imagination and past conceptions? To be malleable and dynamic. And to be open to influence, wherever it comes from. Fadekemi Ogunsanya takes inspiration from multiple sources, including Mughal manuscript painting, Yoruba mythology and West African studio photography. She brings them together in her blue gouache paintings on paper, creating unique frames that emphasise the objecthood of the work.

The exhibition aims to extend the idea of flexibility to the viewer, as a way to encourage movement, and thus, hopefully, freedom. Some artists’ choice to deny the audience context provokes a more flexible reading. Kevin Claiborne for instance, had previously made a version of the text-based WHO CAN CLAIM with a photographic background, rather than the abstracted version on show here. His decision to remove the environment, and to focus on the distortion and contortion of the letters here, was intentional, removing context and prompting the viewer to bring their own meaning to the statement “Who can claim blackness”. With this statement Claiborne also thinks about the elasticity of identity, using text as a medium to demonstrate the way something that often seems so fixed is actually ever–shifting.

Elastic Visions is a show of African artists pushing their artistic mediums to limits and beyond. It is also a recognition of the innovations and the forwardness of African and diaspora artists, in stark contrast to any colonial notions of backwardness. It is a demand of the art historical canon to also stretch, to expand and to acknowledge the dynamism of creation coming out of the African continent and its diaspora.