Five up-and-coming artists from around the world have been paired with a respective mentor, all distinguished artists who collectively represent a range of artistic fields.

Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui, who specialises in visual arts, will be mentoring South African Bronwyn Katz.

His protégé, Katz, also creates sculptures and installations with natural and salvaged materials, including iron ore, bed springs and foam mattresses. Additionally, Katz works with performance and video art, culminating in a body of work that led her to receive Africa’s First National Bank Art Prize, in 2019.

He has chosen to mentor Filipino filmmaker Rafael Manuel, who was awarded the Silver Bear Jury Prize at the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival for his short film Filipiñana.

From the Philippine National Commission for Culture and the Arts, Manuel has also received three awards: the Prince Claus Seed Award for Development and Culture, a Script and Development grant from the Hubert Bals Fund and the Ani ng Dangal (“Harvest of Honours”).

The filmmaker, who splits his time between Amsterdam, London and Manila, is currently working on a feature-length film based on Filipiñana and another movie called Patrimonio.

American jazz singer Dianne Reeves will be mentoring South Korean singer and composer Song Yi Jeon. Reeves, a five-time Grammy Award winner, was the first Creative Chair for Jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and was named a Jazz Master in 2018 by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest honour given to jazz artists by the United States.

Her protégée, Song, is also a jazz singer, known for her hypnotic voice, which has been likened to a wordless instrument.

She has studied at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria, at the Basel Academy of Music, in Switzerland, and at the Berklee College of Music, in Boston, in the US, where she was the inaugural Quincy Jones CJ&E fellow and recipient of the Billboard Endowed Award. In 2018, she released “Movement of Lives”, her first full-length album.

From literature, Senegal-based Ghanaian writer Ayesha Harruna Attah will be mentored by British author Bernardine Evaristo.

Attah has to date published five novels – Harmattan Rain (2009), Saturday’s Shadows (2015), The Hundred Wells of Salaga (2018), The Deep Blue Between (2020) and Zainab Takes New York (2022) – that challenge preconceptions about African social norms through historical fiction. She was a finalist in the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and was shortlisted for the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize.

Evaristo, her mentor, has written poetry, short fiction, essays and drama, and has penned 10 books exploring the African diaspora. When her novel Girl, Woman, Other won the prestigious Booker Prize in 2019, Evaristo became the first black woman and black British author to receive the award.

She also holds the position of president of the Royal Society of Literature, becoming the first writer of colour to do so in 200 years.

And finally, from architecture, Anne Lacaton has chosen to mentor Lebanese-Armenian Arine Aprahamian.

Known for her emphasis on sustainability, Lacaton’s designs have been recognised internationally, and she and her partner, Jean-Philippe Vassal, were jointly awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2021. Having established Lacaton & Vassal in 1987, the French duo went on to design numerous cultural and academic institutions, public spaces and private and social housing projects in Europe.

Similarly, Lacaton’s protégé, Aprahamian, also advocates for sustainability and innovation in architecture. Together with partner Adrian Müller, Aprahamian founded the architecture and design studio Müller Aprahamian in 2018.

Since then, the studio has worked on projects and proposals in Beirut in Lebanon, London and Yerevan in Armenia, and they also have launched an in-house research and development project that partners with local industries to examine the traditional use of clay and develop domestic alternatives for architectural materials.

With the new cycle of the Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, Rolex continues to demonstrate its long-term commitment to perpetuating artistic heritage and supporting emerging artists.

The protégés join a global artistic community, and their relationships and creative collaborations with their mentors over the next two years are set to make an invaluable contribution to the arts.

This article is presented in collaboration with Rolex.