Culture and Conversation Artists
Hilla Tonny Navok's work focuses on deciphering the abstract-formalistic origins and aesthetic codes of everyday surroundings: public spaces, domestic mass-produced home-decor and everyday commodities. Design is a major reference in her work and a means to address issues like cultural identity, representation, taste and modernism.
Navok is a graduate in excellence of the MFA in Fine Arts program in Bezalel Academy. She received the Kolliner Prize from the Israel Museum of Art (2018), the Givon Prize for Young Artist from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (2011) and the Creative Encouragement Award from Israel's Ministry of Culture (2012), among other awards, and has recently completed a year long residency at Artport, Tel Aviv.
Alfred Conteh was born and raised in a small, southern college town in the U.S. with limited access to museums and other venues to experience fine art and diverse culture. As a child, comic books and cartoons were his main source of inspiration. Conteh's parent’s untiring efforts to educate him and his siblings about history, culture and philosophy were, influencial on his development as a sculpture artist.
In graduate school, Conteh formulated his own visual voice. His experiences as a man, a southerner and an African American all found their way into how he expressed himself.
His free-standing sculptures are completely non-objective studies of color, form and texture. His paintings are colorful, yet dark. Some of his works contain subtle discourse on African American culture. Other works have in-your-face text and imagery that is loud and abrasive. In his work, Alfred Conteh struggles to be a non-conformist.
Chemu Ng'ok is a Kenyan painter who completed a masters in Fine Arts with a focus on painting at Rhodes University in Makhanda South Africa. Studying in South Africa allowed her varied experiences, which included navigating the journey of being an immigrant and "otherness," yet managing to establish a sense of belonging.
In 2014, she held an undergraduate exhibition titled "Social Revolution" with paintings about interpersonal relationships. She believes relationships provide interesting power dynamics that can evolve further into a variety of themes such as politics, romance and riots. She went on to complete a masters exhibition, "Riot," in 2017, which illustrated her personal journey learning how to fight a patriarchal and post-colonial system. This period took place at the same time as protests were happening on universities and globally.
Ng'ok held an exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Fair, "Self Esteem for Girls" in September 2017 focused on creating agency for young African women. It was an affirmation of putting one’s own well-being first in order to advance one’s goals. Since then, the subject of her work has been expanding in relation to politics, intimacy and narratives on identity and power.
