ANTÓNIO OLE | CONVERSA INTERROMPIDA

Born in Luanda in 1951, António Ole is one of the most recognized and critically-acclaimed artists from the African continent. Since beginning his career in the 1970s, Ole has created a broad repertoire of work consisting of photography, painting, large-scale installation and documentary film. After completing his studies in African American culture and cinema at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the American Film Institute, he went on to achieve international acclaim, debuting in 1984 at the Museum of African American Art (MAAA) in Los Angeles. Ole has since exhibited at many museums worldwide, including the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, and the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The artist has showed work at the Havana Biennial in 1986 and 1997, the São Paulo Biennial in 1987 and 1992, the International Exhibition of Seville in 1992, the Johannesburg Biennial in 1995 and 1997, the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, Dakar in 1998, Rencontres de la photographie africaine, Bamako, in 1998 and 2000, and the Venice Biennale in 2003, 2015 and 2017, as well as in several notable traveling exhibitions, such as Simon Njami’s Africa Remix, Contemporary Art of a Continent and Okwui Enwezor’s The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994. Ole now lives and works in the burgeoning city of Luanda, which he draws upon as his primary source of inspiration.