Five Sudanese Women Artists Make Art From Memories of Home
These Sudanese artists are making art from the memories of home. The first is Stefania Indelicato, a jeweller born in Eritrea and raised in Sudan, whose earliest memories of the Souk of Omdurman were spent accompanying her mother in search of meaningful objects. There is Omeima Mudawi-Rowlings, a textile artist who has spent decades in […]
North African Design and Its Geographies
Above: ALTIN, Our AlUla Trilogy, Wadi. Photograph © Lorenzo Arrigoni The Institut du monde arabe has named twenty-six finalists for the fourth edition of its Design Award, across four juried categories, showing at the IMA from 10 to 20 September with the ceremony held the evening before. A Public Prize, new this year, runs across […]
How Lagos Moves
There are two words I’ve long used to describe Lagos: beautiful chaos. They may read like an oxymoron, but they are the closest thing the city has to a definition. To understand Lagos, you must first allow that contradiction to settle in your mind. Only then does the city begin to reveal itself, not as […]
The New Stewards of El Fenn
It requires remarkable restraint to be uncharmed by El Fenn. Hidden behind rosy, sun-drenched walls inside the centuries-old medina, the hotel has long existed as one of Marrakech’s defining creative addresses, where the cedar doors and tadelakt walls feel less like a hotel than a private home opened to the world. From the rooftop, the […]
Why Artists Keep Returning to Grand-Popo
When Joshua Gbengene visited Grand-Popo for the third time in December 2025, he was simply keeping a distance from work. After months of working nonstop on a series of creative projects, including a pop-up and an installation, the multidisciplinary artist travelled to the coastal town in search of somewhere quiet enough to slow down, clear […]
In Mwangola, Gelmira Gourgel Exhibits the Music That Fueled Angola’s Independence
Gelmira Gourgel, an Angolan architectural designer and curator, wants people to see Angola in all its depth, not as the country that rarely enters conversations about Africa, but as a nation whose rich cultural traditions, enduring craftsmanship and creative resilience have long shaped the continent’s artistic imagination. In her own words, it is a politically […]
The Burden of Silence: Why African Men Struggle to Talk About Mental Health
Femi*, a tech analyst based in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, says he grew up being bullied in his boarding school due to his size, which forced him into depression from an early age and interfered with his grades. It got worse until he asked his parents to help him see a therapist. “One day, after […]
At MoMA, a New Exhibition Celebrates West Africa’s Modernist Architectural Legacy
In 1960, 17 African countries gained independence in what became known as the “Year of Africa.” For many of these newly sovereign nations, political freedom was only the beginning. They were confronted with what an independent African nation actually looked like, a question that stretched beyond governance and infrastructure into the continent’s creative life: art, […]
Aṣọ-Òkè: The Cloth We Inherit
I am standing before a portrait in Nigerian Modernism, the survey at Tate Modern. It is Akinola Lasekan’s 1957 oil of Justus D. Akeredolu. Lasekan and Akeredolu were both first-generation Nigerian modernists who once shared a studio in Lagos, and Akeredolu is remembered as the pioneer of Yoruba thorn carving, so the painter here is […]
Inside the Most Compelling African Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale
For a long time, Africa’s presence at the Venice Biennale has felt slightly out of place. Even as African artists helped shape contemporary art globally, the continent itself often seemed pushed to the margins, present but not always fully seen, its stories and forms framed through a Western lens or treated as something separate from […]