Building Around Broken Systems
When Godwin Okoruwa, founder and creative director of GDWN, started his gender-fluid label amidst the pandemic in 2020, he had it firmly at the back of his mind that he had to build purely from his instinct. There was no elaborate market analysis or established blueprint for how the brand would grow. His already decade-long […]
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 […]
Can a Piece of Clothing Bring You Home?
For Kimanzi, a Kenyan living in Riverside, California, home fits inside a scarf. When she left Kenya for the United States at 17, she had only two suitcases and a carry-on. Every item she packed meant another had to be left behind. Among the things she refused to leave was a kitenge scarf that had […]
Little Lagos
Little Lagos is a documentary series made on and around Rye Lane in Peckham, south London, by Nigerian photographer Adisa Olashile. Begun on Easter Sunday 2025, it follows the Nigerian community that has made this stretch of the city its own: traders setting out fruit before dawn, families leaving church in agbada and gele, market […]
How DJs Helped Take Afrobeats Global
Trill Xoe, a Lagos-raised DJ and producer who studied in Mauritius and has worked with Native Records, remembers hearing Afrobeats there, thousands of miles from home. Hearing the sound playing loudly from a DJ set felt like more than a surprise. “Just being in a foreign man’s land where they don’t speak English, and just […]
What the BBC’s Documentary Left Out About the Nigerian Civil War
On 1 June 2026, the BBC released a documentary on the Nigerian civil war titled Surviving Biafra: Voices from the Nigerian Civil War, an exploration of the 30-month war fought from July 1967 to January 1970, following the declaration of independence by the secessionist state of Biafra in the eastern part of Nigeria. This secession […]
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 […]
What the Closure of Tiwani Contemporary Reveals About the African Art Market
Tiwani Contemporary has closed after fifteen years operating between London and Lagos, marking the loss of one of the most influential mid-sized galleries working between Africa and the global art market. Founded in 2011 by Maria Varnava under the mentorship of the late Nigerian curator Bisi Silva, who proposed the name — loosely translating to […]
The Machine Can See You. It Still Can’t Pay You.
Somewhere in a court-approved spreadsheet, nearly half a million books have become line items. Whatever a book once was in the making of it, the years of revision and abandonment and recovery before it ever reached a reader, it now exists in that file as an eligible work with a claim status, a payout estimate, […]