Valerie Amani

Valerie Asiimwe Amani is a Tanzanian interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her practice interrogates the ways in which body, language, place and perceived reality are used to situate (or isolate) the self within community. She has exhibited internationally including group shows in Lagos, Paris, Cape Town and Leipzig with recent shows being a solo performance at South London Gallery in collaboration with the Roberts Institute of Art as well as a solo exhibition at Alliance Française, Dar es Salaam.

Amani holds a MFA from The Ruskin School of Art and is the recipient of the 2021 Ashmolean Museum Vivien Leigh Prize for a work on paper. She is a winner for the 2022 Ingram Art Prize and received commendation for the 2022 Dentons Award. She has been featured in Art Monthly, Hyperallergic and BBC amongst others.

Amani has given various talks on Art and Activism including SOAS, University of London with The Royal African society. She is also an art writer focusing on emerging African artists, on Emergent Art Space.

Artist Statement

My work is often informed by the grey boundaries between the political, domestic and the intimate - the ways in which image sharing and language has shifted our perception of each other and reality. I am interested in the aesthetics of the truth, how the truth can subjectively reconstruct and regenerate itself through systems of belief; and what consequence these systems have on virtual and physical bodies within and out of community - how do we continue to exist amongst fractured realities of past and present.

Often incorporating folklore, history and conversation into my work, I am driven by the counter narrative - considering the implications of displacement, mistranslation and the complexities of existing in multiplicity - what exists in the cracks, the unsaid and implied in forming our sense of belonging.

Working across multiple mediums, I approach the materials and output not only in an artistic sense, but also in a metaphysical sense in the medium's capacity to hold a narrative or the spirit of the work.