Yonamine, b. 1975
Biography

Yonamine was born in 1975 in Luanda, Angola, and has lived across Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil and the United Kingdom before settling into a practice now based between Lisbon, Luanda and Berlin; he describes himself as a “Luso-Congolese artist.” Self-taught, he emerged in the mid-2000s as an active member of Nacionalistas, an Angolan artist collective, and has since built a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, photography, graffiti, drawing, assemblage, collage, moving image, performance and spoken word.

Yonamine’s work is rooted in the colonial relationship between Portugal and Africa and in the politics and history of Angola and the wider continent, which he approaches through layered, fragmented compositions — urban semiotics, satire and accumulated imagery that mirror what he has called “a random but systematic fragmentation” reflecting contemporary, fractured identities. He has held solo exhibitions at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art in Lisbon and Galerie Michael Janssen in Berlin, and his work is held in institutional collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and the Fundação PLMJ, Lisbon.

He undertook residencies at Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth, Germany (2012) and the Delfina Foundation, London, UK (2018), and has shown at major recurring international platforms including the Venice Biennale (2007), the São Paulo Biennial (2010, 2014), the Sharjah Biennial (2009), the Havana Biennial (2009), the Istanbul Biennial (2017) and successive editions of the Luanda Triennale.

source: Fundação PLMJ; Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art; Irene Laub Gallery