Featuring El Anatsui, Iman Issa, Abdoulaye Konaté, Adam Pendleton, Yinka Shonibare and Carrie Mae Weems
Installation view of ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ at Efie Gallery, Dubai, 2025. Courtesy of Efie Gallery.
Now open at Efie Gallery in Dubai, ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ brings together a formidable group of international artists whose work reimagines how we see, feel, and understand the world around us. Curated by Japan-based American curator Dexter Wimberly, the exhibition features El Anatsui, Iman Issa, Abdoulaye Konaté, Adam Pendleton, Yinka Shonibare, and Carrie Mae Weems, artists whose practices have helped define the course of contemporary art over the past three decades.
Running from 11 October 2025 to 10 January 2026, the exhibition reflects on how creativity endures in an age of uncertainty and transformation. It considers how artists across geographies and generations continue to expand the possibilities of their chosen materials, revealing the evolving relationship between humanity, technology, and the natural world.
According to curator Dexter Wimberly, “At the heart of this exhibition lies the belief that art can reflect the complexities of a rapidly changing world. These artists push the boundaries of their mediums, using bold colour, unexpected textures and unconventional materials to capture the transformations shaping contemporary society.”
Material, Memory and the Measure of Change
Among the highlights is a major new work by El Anatsui, 5.63° N, 0.00° E (2025), a monumental tapestry composed of thousands of aluminium bottle caps. The coordinates refer to Tema, Ghana, the artist’s birthplace and the location of his studio, positioned directly on the Greenwich Meridian. Anatsui’s practice, rooted in repurposing discarded materials, transforms remnants of consumer culture into shimmering abstractions that recall trade routes, migration, and environmental change. His work embodies the exhibition’s spirit of transformation, translating waste into a meditation on renewal and resilience.
Iman Issa’s sculptural and conceptual practice questions how objects acquire meaning. Her ongoing Heritage Studies series takes inspiration from museum collections, reimagining historical artefacts as minimalist abstractions accompanied by poetic fragments of text. Through careful juxtaposition of form and language, Issa examines how history is preserved, altered, and sometimes misinterpreted through acts of display and collection.
In Abdoulaye Konaté’s vast textile works, cloth becomes a medium of both cultural reflection and political commentary. His nine-metre installation Resistance (2025) interlaces symbolic colour and pattern to evoke the interconnected challenges of climate change, social conflict, and spiritual endurance. Drawing from the traditions of Malian textile-making, Konaté transforms fabric into a monumental surface that vibrates with movement and collective memory.
Language, Structure and Contemporary Experience
Adam Pendleton contributes recent paintings from his Black Dada and WE ARE NOT series. His layered compositions combine text, mark, and gesture in rhythmic arrangements that blur the boundaries between writing and abstraction. Pendleton’s works are both visual and linguistic, evoking the improvisational logic of jazz and the dissonant tempo of political discourse. Through repetition and erasure, he builds new systems of meaning that reflect the instability of modern communication.
For Yinka Shonibare CBE, hybridity is a defining principle. His Hybrid Mask series merges the visual traditions of West African masks with European sculptural and art historical forms. Constructed in wood, brass, and Dutch wax fabrics, these masks address colonial entanglements and the circulation of symbols across cultures. Shonibare’s work examines identity as both constructed and performative, revealing how histories of exchange continue to shape contemporary subjectivity.
Carrie Mae Weems brings a contemplative counterpoint with her photographs from the Africa series. Taken in Ghana, Senegal, and Mali, these works explore how power, gender, and colonial memory are inscribed within architecture and landscape. Combining text and image, Weems invites viewers to consider how physical spaces hold traces of lived experience and inherited trauma. Her work underscores the exhibition’s central question: how do we continue to build, remember, and imagine after rupture?
An Exhibition About Transformation
Through these diverse practices, ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ examines how art engages with flux, uncertainty, and possibility. Each artist employs material transformation as a form of inquiry, whether by weaving, cutting, collaging, or reconstructing, to articulate how creativity functions as both a mirror and a catalyst for change.
Wimberly’s curatorial approach invites dialogue rather than declaration. The exhibition does not offer a single narrative but a constellation of perspectives that together imagine the contours of an emerging future. “This exhibition celebrates the mastery of its featured artists while reaffirming art’s role as a tool for insight and change,” he notes. In a world increasingly shaped by technology and instability, ‘The Shape of Things to Come’ proposes that art remains one of the few arenas where complexity can be embraced rather than simplified.
Efie Gallery and the Global Conversation
Founded by Valentina, Kwame, and Kobi Mintah, Efie Gallery continues to play an essential role in connecting artistic practices from Africa and the diaspora with audiences in the Middle East and beyond. Since its establishment in 2021, the Dubai-based gallery has hosted landmark exhibitions and collaborations that encourage cross-cultural exchange. “Efie,” meaning home in Twi, reflects the gallery’s philosophy of creating spaces of belonging and conversation through art.
Curator Dexter Wimberly, known for his international curatorial practice, brings a cross-disciplinary approach to the exhibition. His previous projects have been presented at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and BODE in Berlin. His work consistently explores how contemporary artists respond to the urgencies of the world while expanding the dialogue between local and global contexts.
‘The Shape of Things to Come’ is on view at Efie Gallery, Warehouse 61, Alserkal Avenue, Al Quoz Industrial Area 1, Dubai, UAE, through 10 January 2026. For more information, visit www.efiegallery.com
