Art, Cinema, and the Digital Future — Seen Through Simon Rieber

By David Robert
In the shifting landscape of contemporary culture-where the screen has become both canvas and stage-African artists are increasingly reimagining how tradition can live within digital futures. Among them, Tanzanian artist, writer, and storyteller Simon Rieber (born Simon Cosmas in Dar es Salaam, 1994) has traced an unusually global trajectory. His work operates at the crossroads of technology and heritage, constantly testing how East African storytelling might inhabit-and reshape-the circuits of global visibility.
Mapping a Global Footprint
Rieber's artistic itinerary reads unlike most of his Tanzanian contemporaries. Over the last decade, his solo exhibitions have reached audiences far beyond East Africa: at Seoul Museum of Art (2018), UFO Gallery in Berkeley (2019), Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco (2019), Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv (2020), and Camberwell College of Arts in London (2020).
Critics observing these shows often emphasized his capacity to braid together the rhythm of African oral traditions with the grammar of digital aesthetics. The effect, they noted, was an art that felt simultaneously grounded in Tanzanian lifeworlds yet transnational in its reach-suggesting that African storytelling was not an exotic supplement to global culture but a central thread within it.
His presence in group shows carried similar weight. Made by Tanzanian in Mombasa (2021) placed him among voices asserting East African perspectives in contemporary art. Later that year, his inclusion in Project 30: Look At Me at Moscow's Garage Museum of Contemporary Art framed his practice within wider debates on identity, surveillance, and visibility in the digital age.
Film as Expanded Narrative
Unlike many visual artists, Rieber has not confined himself to gallery spaces. His entry into cinema reveals a deep commitment to narrative as something that travels across mediums. In Canada, he collaborated with director Vic Sarin on The Boy From Geita, a documentary confronting the social stigmas surrounding albinism in Tanzania. He later contributed to the visual development of Ron's Gone Wrong (2021), an animated feature exploring friendship and technology and Xalé (2022) Senegalese thriller film directed by Moussa Sene Absa.
The year 2023 marked a further step when Rieber joined Holy, a youth-centered drama featuring Ross Lynch and Peyton List.
Unlike his earlier behind-the-scenes work, this project positioned him closer to the heart of storytelling-bridging African and Western perspectives in a narrative that threaded together spirituality, identity, and youth culture.
Writing as a Parallel Practice
If digital art and cinema form one axis of his career, literature is another. His novel King Masigonde: Guardian of Chikoropola reconstructs a Maasai-inspired epic, dramatizing questions of kinship, power, and guardianship in a mythic register. Other works, such as Safari Ya Irene and Beautiful Monster, experiment with allegory and voice in ways that extend oral storytelling traditions into new narrative spaces.
Here, too, the ambition is twofold: to preserve cultural memory while negotiating how such memory might travel through international literary circuits. In this sense, his novels are not separate from his digital art-they are parallel canvases in which the same questions are being asked.
Tradition Recast Through the Digital
Rieber has often described himself as a "digital griot"-a twenty-first-century version of the storyteller who, in many African societies, carried the responsibility of keeping histories alive. This self-conception helps explain why his work resonates both within and beyond Africa. The digital tools he employs-3D modeling, visual effects, or interactive screens-do not replace tradition; they reformat it.
This is why his exhibitions, films, and novels resist being neatly categorized. They are not simply Tanzanian art exported abroad, nor Western art absorbed into African contexts. They are ongoing dialogues where the boundaries of origin, medium, and audience are deliberately blurred.
A Cosmopolitan Yet Grounded Voice
What emerges from Rieber's career is a vision of African creativity unbound by geography. His presence in Seoul, San Francisco, Kyiv, London, and Mombasa illustrates a cosmopolitanism that is not an erasure of roots but an extension of them. For Rieber, Tanzanian experience is not provincial-it is expansive, capable of conversing with diverse artistic traditions and reshaping them in return.
In this sense, his trajectory exemplifies a wider generational shift: African artists no longer see themselves as entering global conversations belatedly or peripherally. Instead, they are redefining the very terms of those conversations.
As debates intensify about the ethics of digital culture, the politics of visibility, and the globalization of storytelling, Rieber's work offers a case study in how African voices are not merely participating in these debates but actively shaping them. His art suggests that the future of culture-digital or otherwise-will not be written from the centers outward but from a multiplicity of places, with Dar es Salaam as much in the conversation as San Francisco or Seoul.