ARTISTS OF OUR TIME

A group exhibition co-curated by Art Maison Marios x Prazzle Arts, presented by BBA Gallery

“To be contemporary is, in some sense, to be out of time.” — Giorgio Agamben

The phrase “artist of our time” carries both weight and risk. It presumes a consensus on what our time is, who defines it, who represents it, and whose work is allowed to shape it. In a global art landscape still reckoning with historical erasure and structural exclusion, Artistes de Temps turns the phrase into a provocation: What does it mean to champion the living radically, unapologetically, and without delay?

Artistes de Temps runs in parallel with the launch of Culture Kaleidoscope: 100 Artists of Our Time, a new annual art book initiated by Prazzle. Together, the exhibition and publication function not as documentation but as intervention. They ask: Who gets seen? Who gets supported? Who gets remembered? These artists don’t beg for entry into the dominant canon. They build parallel timelines where ancestral memory, radical imagination, and speculative futures converge. They preserve not ashes, but fire.

At a time when retrospectives dominate museum programming and auction houses fetishise the dead, this exhibition is a proposition: What would it look like to invest seriously, structurally in the artists of now? Not as future legends in waiting, but as cultural protagonists already shaping the terrain we stand on.

This exhibition brings together fourteen dynamic artists Israel Padonu, Boluwatife Oyediran, Joseph Aina, Kwaku Osei Owusu Achim, David Komaré, Kofi Awuyah, Daniel Roibal, Sebastian Jauregui, Qhamanade Maswana, Sisqo Ndombe, Komla Letsu Philip, Ousmane Niang, Ishmael Armah, and Matthew Eguavoen whose practices resist easy categorisation. Their work spans continents, mediums, and conceptual frameworks, engaging themes of memory, materiality, Blackness, ecology, migration, and futurity. What binds them is not a common aesthetic, but a shared urgency to reflect and reimagine the present.

This ethos is embodied in the curatorial vision of Marios Djamo Ngassam, founder of Art Maison Marios, a young collector and art consultant building a personal collection of emerging voices with no allegiance to institutional gatekeeping. For Ngassam, collecting is not about historical consensus, but about conviction: about sensing power in the present, and backing it early. His approach rejects the art world’s obsession with posthumous validation and instead treats collecting as an act of care, risk, and cultural stewardship.

“We are not inserting artists into art history. We are rewriting it.”

To curate, to collect, to write about these artists is a deliberate act of visibility before the market anoints them, before institutions historicise them, before their stories are retold by others. The exhibition becomes a living archive, not bound to legacy in the traditional sense, but sustained by care, presence, and proximity.

As museums and markets continue to look backward, Artistes de Temps turns its full attention toward the present messy, shifting, unresolved. To support living artists is not just a cultural act. It is political. It is urgent. It is belief.

Text Written by Ann Austin