Koop Projects

Name: Koop Projects
Address: 93 St George's Road, Brighton and Hove, BN21EE, GB
Telephone: +447483163396

A contemporary African art project based in Brighton, Sussex.

Our aim is to spark and foster conversations between African Artists and their creative counterparts here in Brighton and Sussex. Koop Projects was founded in 2022 in Kemptown, Brighton with the intention to start and foster conversations between artists based in Africa and their counterparts in Sussex.

14/05/2026

Congratulations to Senzeni Marasela on her inclusion at the Arsenale for In Minor Keys at the 2026 Venice Biennale with this monumental presentation

These pieces are a chapter from an epic narrative that tells the story of the artist's muse, Theodorah.

Through her vast body of work Senzeni offers a deep, immersive, reflection on memory and identity through the very specific history and geography of Johannesburg's mining industry and the indelible marks it has left on the city's landscapes and people.

📸

12/05/2026

It’s a pleasure to see work by Georgina Maxim included at the 61st Venice Biennale as part of In Minor Keys at the Arsenale.

The work holds themes of loss, memory, and transformation through the deconstruction and reconstruction of clothing, books, text and textiles.

Congratulations

13/07/2025

Baudouin Mouanda has been nominated for the Prix Pictet 2025 award alongside eleven other outstanding artists. Congratulations and to everyone on the shortlist.

The is the world’s leading award for photography and sustainability. It was founded in 2008 by the Pictet Group with the goal of harnessing the power of photography to draw global attention to the critical issue of sustainability.

This year's theme is "Storm" and Baudouin is recognised for his spectacular series Ciel de Saison in which he created tableaux vivants in the waterlogged basement of an abandoned building in Brazzaville, after devastating floods swept through the city. Please find out more about the series in stories and links in bio.

I lose myself for hours when I wander through these photographs, discovering new things each time I look at them: the discretely placed, self-referential film cartridge I hadn't noticed before, a glimmer of surreal dark humour here, a nod to Holbein's Ambassadors there.. Scroll to see some of them.

But this monumental image is the one I return to most often. A heartstopping moment of quiet, after the storm. I still haven't found all of its hidden angles and I truly don't know how he made it... Whether it was a single miraculous fraction of a second that allowed him to capture all those triangular folds in the cloth, the t-shirts, the limbs... Or if it took hours and hours of trial and error to perfect the placement.

Thank you, Baudouin, for your outstanding work and for the trust you placed in us to exhibit it.

The winner of the prize will be announced at the Victoria and Albert Museum in September.

parker__

04/07/2024

Over the last few weeks some unexpectedly sudden and significant personal events have meant that many plans and announcements had to be put on hold.

So we are very very late to tell you that an absolutely beautiful exhibition has been happening in the gallery and is on view until Sunday.

The wonderful South African born, Kemptown based artist Susan Bamford, has been showcasing a collection of exquisite expressions of the sea.

The title of the exhibition - Belonging - could not be more appropriate for this moment. As an immigrant, it is hard to feel that one truly belongs in their adopted country and Susan has often felt a yearning for the dramatic landacapes of South Africa with its crashing oceans, huge skies and vast plains of wildflowers. In the winter of 2024, she began an intense period of painting the landscape on her East Sussex doorstep, exploring themes of loss, longing and acceptance through her work.

The Artist works with mixed media, primarily oil and cold wax to which she applies moulding paste which she sculpts and scrapes to achieve a highly textured effect. Seldom using brushes, she employs spatulas, scrapers and various other tools, leaving traces and marks in the work and imbuing each piece with a powerful energy.

Belonging closes on Sunday 7 July

Image: Beautiful Monster.

28/05/2024

A very special opening this Friday, 31 May: Tales the Land Tells is an exhibition that focuses on the passage of time and the stories we can tell using the land around us. Featuring a delicate collection of work from, Esme Papa - The Seaweed Experiments, Zosia Szymanowska - Place & Passing and Joe Charrington - 'Lay Like The Folds of A Bright Girdle Furled’.

As part of our commitment to supporting our local art community, we have regularly gifted the gallery space in Kemptown to young artists and curators in Brighton and Sussex to help them realise their projects in a commercial setting. We could not be more delighted to have these three wonderful young photographers making a guest appearance with us.

We hope you'll come along to the opening on Friday between 5pm and 8pm.

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17/05/2024

In our Brighton space we are showing the South African artist Peter Mammes' extraordinary rubber drawings alongside Brighton based Brian Britton's interventions on paper.

Mammes spent many months alone in the studio in 2023, inventing a completely unique way of presenting his work. Experimenting with various materials, methods and techniques to transfer his technically complex line drawings into a single piece of polyurethane rubber, the resulting hexagons form a fifteen piece series of artworks made using UV light exposure, 3-D printing, resin moulding, casting and vacuum packing.

Known for his large murals, paintings on canvas and relief sculptures made from cast resin and metal, in recent years Peter has found himself yearning to return to his first love - drawing. Frustrated by what he sees as a diminishing regard for this most fundamental of art forms, he set himself the task of re-inventing his drawings in order to present them to the viewer as completely new objects.

Through his artwork Peter Mammes aims to surpass language barriers posed by the written and spoken word and develop a new, comprehensive way to visually relay complex ideas. His work manifests a universal artistic language that, rather than depict reality, presents concepts and ideas and encourages the viewer to think more broadly.

Shown here:

Lioness
The Kiss
Spirit Of Wonder
Afro Future

Rubber
40cm by 40cm by 2cm
Edition of 5
Series: Hexagons
Signed, verso

16/05/2024

Contemplating The Woman Who Worked On The Sabbath Day by Tshepiso Moropa , This Is A Story About My Family by Yassmin Forte and Between Yrsyerday And Tomorrow by Maheder Haileselassie at Photo London, Somerset House.

We are here til Sunday. Come see us:

Booth 13
Discovery Platform
From 11am
Somerset House

27/04/2024

We look forward to presenting images from Yassmin Forte's profound and personal series "This Is A Story About My Family" at Photo London in May. For this work Forte was a recipient of the 2023 CAP (Contemporary African Photography) prize.

The images are the story of a journey to the Artist's roots, addressing three main themes on the way: her family, the issue of migration and the story of Africans told by Africans.

Forte's parents met on a dance floor in Quelimane, Mozambique when he was stationed there at the height of the Portuguese occupation of Mozambique. With independence in 1975, the Frelimo Party (The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) ordered the Portuguese to leave the country within 24 hours. But her father stayed and fell in love...

Her choice of collage, juxtaposing old family photographs with scenes from modern and current Mozambique, emphasises the mixtures that result from migrations and patterns that repeat themselves throughout history. The work sheds light on the effects of colonialism on the Artist's own family specifically and, by extension, on all African people in a wider context.

We hope to see you at Somerset House, Discovery Platform, stand D13 between the 16th and 19th of May.

Image:
Refexos de Mim
42cm x 59.4cm
Pigment print on Ilford Fine Textured Silk
Edition of 5

20/04/2024

We are very proud to present photographic work from Maheder Haileselassie's 2023 Contemporary African Photography (CAP) prize winning project "Between Yesterday And Tomorrow" at Photo London in May.

For this series, the Ethiopian photographer has been working with three sets of archives: 19th century engravings, sketches and photographs made by European 'travelers'; images from her family album and her own, current, photographic work. The resulting multi-layered images read as an "overlapping metaphor for the compression of time and space in one's own memory".

We will show six evocative explorations of the landscape and architecture of her country. Landscape plays an important part in the making of modern day Ethiopia, reflecting the relationship between political, social and economic contexts that shape the history and memory of its people.

The images offer a unique perspective into an African country that successfully defended itself from colonisation and whose people the artist describes now as "standing at an intersection between a yearning for the past and a longing for the future with profound uncertainty".

We hope you'll come and see these images at our stand D13, Discovery Platform between the 16th and 18th of May.

Thank you to for dedicating issue 121 of the Academy Magazine to the Artist and her work. Click the link in our bio to read the magazine and see all of the images in the series.

And thank you for supporting this collaboration

National Memories III, Shifting Identities, 2023. 40cm x 40cm. Pigment print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, 308gsm.

"The Axum Obelisks are a symbol of pride and a testament to thousands of years of Ethiopia's history. However, during the recent war in Ethiopia, hundreds of residents of the town were brutally executed, hence shifting our memories and outlook forever".

17/04/2024

Theodorah Comes To Johannesburg, 2004 (detail)
Fuji Crystal Archive C-type Matt

We are excited to present rarely seen early photographs alongside new textile work by Senzeni Marasela in May.

In 2023, Marasela received the inaugural K21 Global Art Prize awarded to artists of vision and courage by the Kunstammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen museum in Dusseldorf.

One of South Africa's most significant artists, Marasela's practice cuts across photography, performance, video, prints, and mixed-medium installations involving textiles and embroidery. Her work deals with history, memory and personal narrative, emphasising historical gaps and overlooked figures.

This series of images from her narrative performance project Theodorah Comes To Johannesburg was inspired by the film “Jim comes to Joburg” as well as stories that the artist’s mother told her about the long journeys she took into Johannesburg from her home in the Eastern Cape. Out of these stories, Marasela's alter-ego was born and the yellow dress, given to her by her mother, came to symbolise the women from the rural villages of South Africa who were drawn by the bright lights of Johannesburg. In the photographs, Theodorah is seen, always with her back to the viewer, occupying historic sites of interest and spaces around Johannesburg that would have been illegal for her mother to access during the apartheid regime.

Theodorah and the city of Johannesburg remain the central characters in Marasela's ongoing body of work and we look forward to introducing them to a new audience in May at Somerset House.

Please find us at D13, in the Discovery Platform from 15 to 19 May.

Address

93 St George's Road
Brighton And Hove
BN21EE

Telephone

+447483163396

Website

https://www.koopprojects.com/

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