Joe Blog

The BMW Art Generation
30.08.25NIROX Sculpture ParkR540 Kromdraain RoadKrugersdorp
The BMW Art Generation will return to the NIROX Sculpture Park on 30.08.25A festival, living archive and a gathering of minds The BMW Art Generation brings together leaders in contemporary African culture intergenerational and interdisciplinary conversations and engagements. By situating established practitioners alongside their imminent successors, it builds frameworks for discourse, collectorship, and care. As an intergenerational proposition, it asserts that the future of African art must be imagined, celebrated, and safeguarded on African soil.
Vol. IIIA Tropology Between Image & Imagination
Traditionally, tropology refers to the figurative use of language - metaphor, allegory, symbolism. In the context of this third iteration of The BMW Art Generation we expand this meaning to a framework that holds the images and imaginations of contemporary practitioners from the continent in employing symbols, gestures, forms to communicate layered, often subversive meaning; simultaneously dismantling and building tropologies for reclamation.
Through this framework we navigate articulations of histories, discourses, and imaginaries, engaging with practices with artists who do not merely describe our realities but shape new languages for retelling it. This language unfolds through the image-making that exists in tension with and in service of imagination.
We reflect on the shifting, expanding terrain in which African contemporary art now moves; a space where boundaries blur between public and private, fiction and reality, local specificity and global resonance.
Asserting the image and imagination of contemporary African practitioners as not only contributors to but definers of global discourse. We look to resist the flattening gaze of the realities from the continent instead demanding a recognition of our own conceptual terms around representation and presence. Rather than reinforcing tropes, we seek out tropologies - figures of thought that move beyond an established centre and margin.A framework bringing proposition is set up: allowing us new ways of seeing and imagining our own self authored futures.— conceptualised by Kim KandanThe BMW Art Generation’s Commitment to Joy
Adjacent to the discourse, the conference will be surrounded by a selection of exhibitions, live music, food, coffee and wine stalls parallel to offerings from leaders in Africa’s design and fashion sectors.
Audiences can look forward to:
- A talks programme with international headliners.- A luxury market offering the best in African food, wine, fashion and design.- An open-air live music amphitheatre featuring celebrated African musicians.
Make sure to follow us on Instagram at @bmwartgeneration

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012 880 2635support@tixsa.co.za
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Monday - Friday: 9am - 5pmSaturdays: 10am - 2pmSundays: 10am - 1pmPublic Holidays: 10am - 1pm