Cultural Overlays: Visual tensions in African life

This project explores how Western cultural exports, such as Coca-Cola branding or American streetwear, are absorbed and recontextualized within Sub-Saharan African countries. Through found photography and collage, it documents the visual reality of globalization and the unequal flow of global cultural power.

The work is less about critique and more about observation, noticing what happens when objects, symbols, and aesthetics designed for one world land in another and start to take on new meaning. Western brands carry connotations of aspiration, modernity, and economic power, and when they settle into the texture of everyday Sub-Saharan life, visual tensions become visible.

This project uses collage as its primary method because collage is itself an act of recontextualization, taking something from one place and making it mean something new somewhere else. Found images sourced from street photography and local markets are layered to present this juxtaposition between the globally exported and the locally lived.