Chairman of the committee
Jean Philippe Aka was born in Côte d’Ivoire in 1972. He is the founder of www.africartmarket.today, an online valuation services for fine and decorative African arts. He’s the editor of the yearly Global Africa Art Market Report. In 2012, he was a member of UNESCO’s preselection committee for installing a permanent sculpture commemorating the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. The winner was the Haitian-American architect Rodney Leon, whose proposal The Ark of Return was unveiled at the United Nations in 2015.
He was born in 1982 in Burundi. After the outbreak of the civil war and the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, he arrived in France in 1995. Gaël Faye studied at a business school, obtained a master’s degree in finance and worked in London for two years for an investment fund. He decided to leave London to start a musical and writing career. Influenced by Creole literature as well as by hip hop culture, he released an album in 2010 with the group Milk Coffee & Sugar (revelation Printemps de Bourges). In 2013, he released his first solo album Pili Pili on a butter croissant. Recorded between Bujumbura and Paris, it feeds on diverse musical influences: rap tinged with soul and jazz, semba, Congolese rumba, sebene … In 2016, he released his first novel, Petit Pays, which won many prizes, including the price of the novel Fnac, Audiolib and Goncourt high school students. With the success of his first solo album, he released in 2017 the album Rythmes et Botanique followed by the album Des Fleurs in 2018.
He was born in 1968 in Lagos, Nigeria. He is a singer- songwriter and guitarist. He left Nigeria when he was a teenager for England, he now lives in the United States, having one foot in France and one foot in Nigeria. He has invented a new style: Blufunk, which he reveals with his Blufunk Is A Fact! He then defines Blufunk as a mix of his influences, Fela, Prince, Jimmi Hendrix, Miles Davis …: this mix of funk and acoustic blues carried by the global success of the single Rhythm is love was born. Then, he did a series of albums with African Space Craft and Liquid Sunshine before finally winning the favor of the public and the media with the publication of Black Orpheus.
More recently, he released the Nigerian Wood album, which he inaugurated with a series of surprise concerts in the Paris metro stations.
She was born in 1979 in South Africa. She is an artist, writer, curator who has held various positions in the field of visual arts. She is particularly interested in popular culture and its global relationship with Africa. She writes regularly for the press and catalogs (including in the FIFA catalog in 2010). She has curated numerous projects and was the consultant for Murray & Roberts at the beginning of their collection, Standard Bank Young Artist and SASOL Wax Award. She also held a Chair until 2017 at the Arts & Culture Trust (ACT) in South Africa.
