Valerie Asiimwe Amani is a Tanzanian anti-disciplinary artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores the intersections of story, memory, myth, and belonging. Working across installation, textiles, performance, video, sound, and writing, she draws from oral traditions, feminist thought, spiritual ecologies, and personal histories to consider how knowledge is carried through bodies, language, ritual, and collective memory.
Amani’s work often begins with a story, a memory, a ritual, or a fragment of folklore, using these as ways to think through belonging, history, and the worlds we inherit.
Her writing has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, The Architectural Review, and the Journal of Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Tanzania Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum as part of Boda Boda Lounge with Christian Nyampeta, Zeitz MOCAA, South London Gallery, and Eastside Projects.
She is a recipient of the 2023 Foundwork Art Prize and the 2022 Ingram Prize, and is currently completing a practice-led DPhil in Fine Art at the University of Oxford as a Clarendon Scholar.
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Home has always been a liminal space for me - growing up between multiple African cities made me sensitive to place, language, and body. My work at its core feels through the question of, “What does it mean to be at home in the world?”. In this same world where truth often fades into obscurity, and binaries (of race, gender and other) determine our rights to space, love and time – I offer my art as an interlocutor.
My practice is a shapeshifter, a reflection on the pluralities and multiplicities that emerge from being many things – African, Black, Woman, Queer, Foreigner, Other. Feeling through the humanness that exists between this othering, Otherness emerges not only as an identity, but as an expansive metaphor; a fertile darkness from which new visions of self and society can be born.