Mokia Dinnyuy Manjoh (COOP tutor at DAI since 2024) has received the Thami Mnyele Residency award. He is the third artist invited in 2026 to celebrate the Amsterdam based Thami Mnyele Foundation's 35th anniversary. Each invited artist responds in their own way to the legacy of Thami Mnyele as an artist and activist, or engages with the histories and ongoing impact of colonialism in South Africa. Together, these artistic interventions honour the foundation's ongoing commitment to critical dialogue, social engagement, and artistic exchange, while looking ahead to the future. During his residency, Mokia Dinnyuy Manjoh will focus on his research on Medu Art Ensemble and Thami Mnyele, and what it means to draw from their work and activism in relation to the struggles today. Read more about the foundation and about Mokia.
Mokia: " to those of us motivated to act in solidarity with the pursuits of independence and sovereignty against the forces that seek their negation, whether in the Congo, Cameroon, Palestine, Sudan, or elsewhere - Thami's artistic journey and his words serve as a question we must be able to answer. Not through a direct replication of his actions, but through the principles he upheld as an artist."
Established in 1990, the Thami Mnyele Foundation has been proudly hosting a distinctive three-month artist-in-residence program in Amsterdam since 1992. With a mission to promote meaningful cultural exchange, the foundation connects artists from Africa, the African diaspora, the Netherlands, and Amsterdam, offering a dynamic space for artistic growth and cross-cultural dialogue and fostering a vibrant network of creativity and collaboration.
Open to African artists working across a variety of contemporary visual art forms—including painting, drawing, performance, photography, sculpture, video, film, audio, and multimedia—the residency provides an inspiring and supportive environment and a dedicated space to focus on their practice. Housed in a charming historic school building in the heart of Amsterdam, the Thami Mnyele Foundation studio is thoughtfully designed to encourage artistic reflection, research, cultural dialogue, and dynamic engagement with fellow creatives that enrich artistic practice and foster meaningful connections.
Mokia Dinnyuy Manjoh (b. Bafoussam, 1994) is a writer and cultural worker based between Nicosia, Berlin, and Limbe working across pedagogy, literature, and archival activation. His work draws heavily from the literary and artistic legacies of cultural workers and ensembles who have situated themselves rhetorically, materially and militantly in pursuit of a decolonial vision of the world, often at the cost of their own lives. His work is to imagine and pursue what constitutes African Sovereignties in the 21st century by way of infrastructure building, collective study, art making and insurgent modes of publishing. He is a publisher and organiser with SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and SAVVY Kwata in Cameroon—a library and community space dedicated to the preservation and transmission of knowledges beyond the written form—and he teaches at the Dutch Art Institute. He is also a researcher at the LUCY Lab in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cyprus.