Exhibitions

Ugo Ahiakwo: After the Dance is still on view at Rele in Lagos, Nigeria until November 15, 2025

Ahiakwo’s practice is defined by a dialogue with materials, in which discarded vehicle parts and industrial fragments are transformed into sculptural forms that oscillate between resilience and fragility. Bent metal, polished surfaces, and rusted scars bear the marks of violence and repair, becoming metaphors for the fault lines and redemptive possibilities of human intimacy. After the Dance takes its title from Marvin Gaye’s song and Jan Gaye’s memoir, which recounts how a relationship that began in beauty and passion unraveled into abuse and turmoil. After the Dance expands on themes of intimacy, fracture, and redemption that have shaped Ugo’s evolving practice. Here, Ahiakwo turns to love itself as subject matter, not only as tenderness and bloom, but also as a volatile terrain where passion can quickly unravel into control, manipulation, or violence.

Kuamen: Creep to the mic like a phantom is still on view at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix in London, United Kingdom until November 28, 2025

A poet, rapper, and multidisciplinary artist, Kuamen explores Black life and Afro-diasporic existence from the Parisian suburbs to the streets of Los Angeles. His work seeks to highlight Black contributions across diasporic spaces and denounce persisting forms of injustice. Through a variety of cultural references, he questions the notions of identity, territory, integration, and acculturation. Titled after lyrics from Dr Dre’s 1992 track Nuthin’ but a ‘G’ Thang, featuring Snoop Dogg, the artist says, creeping to the mic can suggest a smooth but confident approach: like sliding in, unnoticed but with full control; while phantom conveys a quiet and mysterious ghostly presence, unseen but sensed. Likewise, this introduction to the London art scene acts as a symbolic return. It is a smooth but commending moment.

Unity in Diversity: Pan-African Art Practices of Collective Care is still on view at M.Bassy in Hamburg, Germany until December 6, 2025

The exhibition project Unity in Diversity: Pan-African Art Practices of Collective Care explores the connection between the Pan-African movement and art as a means to explore African and diasporic identities and heterogeneities and to pave the way for a decolonial future. To this end, artistic positions, initiatives and voices are invited to engage with Pan-Africanist values of community, alliance, colonial resistance, collective economies, hospitality, indigenous knowledge preservation, shared environmental and resource protection, and spiritual consciousness. The participating artists & speakers approach Pan-Africanism as a conceptual space that hosts collective and shared visions of a sustainable future that affects the well-being not only of the African continent but of the entire planet.

Festivals

Black Muse Art Festival will take place at Angels & Muse in Benin City, Nigeria from November 8-12, 2025

Nigerian artist and writer Victor Ehikhamenor launches the inaugural Black Muse Art Festival, a five-day celebration of African art, literature, culture, and community taking place in Benin City, Edo State. Since founding Angels and Muse, Ehikhamenor has championed platforms that empower and offer residencies to artists, curators, writers, and cultural practitioners, while nurturing dialogue across disciplines. The Black Muse Art Festival is his most ambitious philanthropic undertaking to date: a dynamic gathering of artists, writers, curators, and cultural practitioners, dedicated to positioning African art as a catalyst for conservation, memory, and collective renewal in his hometown, Benin City. Inspired by Wole Soyinka’s play A Dance of the Forests, the festival theme is titled Let the Forest Dance. This theme positions art and literature as a lens for conservation, community, and cultural continuity.

Conferences

Re:assemblages Symposium will be hosted by Alliance Française de Lagos in Nigeria from November 4-5, 2025

Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.) are launching the inaugural Re:assemblages Symposium, which is taking place during Lagos Art Week. The symposium launches the second phase of Re:assemblages (2025–26), a two-year programme reimagining the role of archives in shaping African and global art histories. Developed in response to the Picton Archive—a collection of rare African-published journals, magazines, and manuscripts held at G.A.S.—the programme reframes archives not as static repositories, but as dynamic infrastructures for research, cultural production, and exchange. A second symposium, scheduled for autumn 2026, will extend these conversations by developing a toolkit of adaptive archival practices.