Echoes of Pain

Echoes of Pain is a series of portraits about migration and the grief that travels with it. Made in a forest in Switzerland, it places children among the trees, weary and watchful, unsure of the way out, as a picture of the state Mike Kure calls being physically present but emotionally suspended. Kure began the […]

How Lagos Moves

Ugonna-Ora Owoh in a red jacket and red wide-leg trousers on a Lagos kerb, a passer-by blurred in the foreground

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 […]

If This Then That: Sculpture — John Chamberlain → Gonçalo Mabunda

If This Then That: Sculpture — Guzangs comparison featuring John Chamberlain's crushed automobile-steel sculpture alongside Gonçalo Mabunda's throne welded from decommissioned weapons

If you understand why John Chamberlain’s crushed cars matter, you’ll recognize what Gonçalo Mabunda built from the weapons of a war. IF YOU LIKE JOHN CHAMBERLAIN John Chamberlain transformed crushed automobiles into sculpture, showing that industrial scrap could carry the same expressive force as bronze or marble. Rather than erase the material’s past, he preserved […]

Inside the Most Compelling African Pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale

African pavilions at the 2026 Venice Biennale, the 61st International Art Exhibition

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 […]

Ewuresi Archer’s Complicated Love Letter to Ghana

Portrait of Ghanaian artist Ewuresi Archer in her studio

Before the exhibition A Love Letter With Teeth, Ewuresi Archer travelled to Busua, a fishing village in the Western Region of Ghana, where she spent an eight-week residency with Berj Gallery producing the new body of work. Her initial intention was to create works that would celebrate Ghana, a love letter to a country she […]

What the Closure of Tiwani Contemporary Reveals About the African Art Market

Evening view of the Tiwani Contemporary gallery storefront in London, visitors gathered inside among paintings during an exhibition opening

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 […]

If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie → Andile Dyalvane

If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie pot beside an Andile Dyalvane scarified vessel.

If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie → Andile Dyalvane Two potters, fifty years and two continents apart, both treating the surface of the vessel as something to be marked rather than smoothed. IF YOU LIKE LUCIE RIE Vienna-born, London-based. Rie threw alone from a small mews studio for nearly sixty years, raking sgraffito […]

Africa’s Largest World Cup, Mostly Watched From Home

African football fans wave a Ghana flag in the stadium stands at AFCON 2025, photographed ahead of the 2026 World Cup.

Ghanaian fans in the stands at AFCON 2023. Photography by Nana Asomani. The visa regime that will keep most African fans out of the stadiums of the 2026 World Cup is the same one that keeps African artists out of biennials, designers out of Paris fashion weeks, and scholars out of the conferences where their […]