Ewuresi Archer’s Complicated Love Letter to Ghana
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 […]
After the Applause: Heritage Textiles and the Economics of the Runway Moment
Florentina Agu went back to the wood carving workshops she had visited as a child, and many of the artisans her family had once worked with were dead. The ones still alive were in difficult circumstances. Agu’s father had run a wood carving studio in Nigeria that produced parquet flooring and carved objects for sale […]
At BAKUS ORAYA, Cotton in Its Final State
BAKUS ORAYA is the kind of house that builds its identity by what it leaves out. Since founding the label, Abdoul Manane Bakary has approached fabric as origin rather than ornament, and Coton Brut, the collection he has been refining across multiple shows, has been the long case for that position. The final chapter, presented […]
Huguette Tchiapi’s Debut Begins in Yaoundé
Huguette Tchiapi is continuing an existing convergence, building a fashion brand that brings together the intricacies of her Cameroonian roots and the influence of her British identity. Like most emerging designers, she is deliberate about where her ideas come from. She speaks about influence less as something simply absorbed and more as something that can […]
Nigerian Women Are Dressing Against the Code
Two decades ago, Y2K marked one of the most expressive moments in Nigerian fashion, shaped by the rise of internet culture and the influence of Nollywood. Visibility, then, felt intentional and confident rather than excessive. A version of that sensibility has returned, carried by a generation that dresses for how it wants to feel rather […]
If This. Then That: Ceramics — Lucie Rie → Andile Dyalvane
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
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 […]
Understanding Bògòlanfini: The Malian Textile Written in Mud and Cotton
Bògòlanfini, the mud cloth of Mali, is one of Africa’s oldest living textile traditions. Ugonna-Ora Owoh traces its science, symbolism, and migration — from Bamana villages and the Mali Empire to Chris Seydou’s Paris ateliers and Awa Meïté’s contemporary Bamako-based practice.
The Lusaka Youth Are Building Their Own Scene
The third spaces, pop-ups, and pricing decisions behind a generation’s bid for cultural infrastructure.
Who Trains the Machines That See Africa?
The Sovereign Stack
As AI becomes the infrastructure beneath culture, African creators can no longer