CONTESTARTISTS
JM-QAFRI · 7 FEATURED ARTISTS
THE ARTISTS

A curated roster of visual artists working across print, oil, digital media, film, and emerging technologies — recognised and championed by JM-Qafri.

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Amara Osei-Bonsu
GRAND PRIX 2025
Amara Osei-Bonsu
Accra, Ghana
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Leilani Nakamura
GRAND PRIX 2024
Leilani Nakamura
Osaka, Japan
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ARTISTS
Amara Osei-Bonsu
Accra, Ghana · 2025
Amara Osei-Bonsu

Amara's work dissolves the boundary between the ancestral and the digital. Drawing from Akan textile patterns and re-weaving them through algorithmic processes, her pieces interrogate cultural memory in an age of synthetic reproduction.

DigitalMixed Media
Leilani Nakamura
Osaka, Japan · 2024
Leilani Nakamura

Leilani paints silence. Her large-format oils capture the emotional residue of spaces — vacant hotel rooms, train stations at 4am, coastal cliffs after rain. Critics have called her work 'photographic in precision, oceanic in depth.'

OilPhotography
Théo Marchetti
Lyon, France · 2023
Théo Marchetti

Marchetti builds impossible architectures — grand structures that obey their own internal physics. His CGI installations have been exhibited across Paris, Dubai, and São Paulo, challenging viewers to renegotiate their sense of material reality.

3DCGISculpture
Seun Adeyemi
Lagos, Nigeria · 2023
Seun Adeyemi

Seun's lens is forensic. His documentary-style photography and short films capture Lagos in motion — the infrastructure of hustle, the choreography of survival. He was shortlisted for the JM-Qafri Prize in its inaugural year.

PhotographyFilm
Margot Thiébault
Brussels, Belgium · 2024
Margot Thiébault

A printmaker obsessed with repetition and deviation. Margot's editions are never truly identical — each copy accumulates a subtle distortion, building series that read as organisms rather than reproductions.

PrintInstallation
Kioni Waweru
Nairobi, Kenya · 2025
Kioni Waweru

Born and raised in Nairobi, Kioni's massive oil canvases channel the energy of East African street art while speaking the language of classical figuration. Her murals are landmarks; her studio work, intimate revelations.

OilMural
Daisuke Hirota
Tokyo, Japan · 2026
Daisuke Hirota

Daisuke trains machine learning models on his own body of work, then collaborates with the resulting systems to produce entirely new forms. His practice raises urgent questions about authorship, entropy, and aesthetic evolution.

AIDigital
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JM-Qafri champions emerging and established artists across all disciplines. Enter the 2026 Prize and join our growing international community.

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© JM-Qafri · Nairobi · 2026Print · Film · AI · 3D · CGI