Immigrant Experience: Breathing in Brooklyn

"When I'm in Brooklyn, at least in certain parts of it, I feel no one can walk up to me and demand to know what I'm doing here," declares Teju Cole in an essay accompanying Kings County, an exhibition on at Stevenson Cape Town.

Cole, an award-winning writer who grew up in Lagos in Nigeria but now lives in the New York borough, feels an intense sense of freedom and belonging there that he finds nowhere else. This is perhaps because many of Brooklyn's 2.5 million residents are immigrants. In this porous, open neighbourhood, the burdens of identity and history are less heavy.

Kings County, an old name for Brooklyn, features the work of four artists who have spent time living or working there. The exhibition suggests, with considerable subtlety and power, that Brooklyn is as much an idea as it is a place. While prevailing perceptions of the borough are often preoccupied with hipsters or crime, the reality is deeper, richer and more complicated. Brooklyn offers a blank canvas for immigrants, where the past can be transcended and new futures and identities imagined.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya is half-Ugandan, half-American, born in California. His Studio Work, part representation and part recreation of his studio, challenges the concept of exhibited art as something complete, final and definite. Scattered among notepaper and printouts and an empty mug in the room-sized installation are portraits of Sepuya and his friends (many of them Brooklyn residents), offering a sensual and intimate immersion into this artist's creative and social world and illustrating how the two overlap.

In another room are enormous portraits by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a Nigerian who completed a masters in fine art at Yale. She has used acrylic, coloured pencils and photographic transfers of cultural iconography (such as magazines) to offer a colourful and personal texturing of Brooklyn life.

Kenyan Wangechi Mutu, another Yale graduate, has been based in New York since the mid-1990s. Her animation, The End of Eating Everything , is a sumptuously crafted, vividly surreal video, capturing a selfish, congealed humanity hellbent on its own destruction.

Botswana-born Meleko Mokgosi has lived in the US since 2003. On two sets of canvas panels, he has reproduced the text captions that were placed alongside African artworks in two exhibitions, both held at US museums. The works offer an unexpected, invigorating dialogue with the captions, challenging the way African art is explained by foreign institutions.

Inspired by a place where possibility is rife, and where making and re-making is rampant, Kings County exhorts us to focus on what's in front of us: the work itself.

• Kings County runs until November 22 at Stevenson Cape Town, stevenson.info