African and Afro-diasporic archives will be celebrated and reinterpreted as part of a major project launching later this year in Lagos, driven by the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare.
The Re:assemblages symposium (4-5 November), taking place at Alliance Française de Lagos, will bring together artists, scholars and publishers “to collectively rethink African and Afro-diasporic archives as living, contested and future-shaping spaces,” says a statement.
The symposium is organised by the non-profit Guest Artists Space Foundation (G.A.S.) and Yinka Shonibare Foundation, which were both founded by Shonibare in 2019. The Lagos event is the second edition of Re: assemblages (2025-26), a two-year programme which “reimagines the role of archives in shaping African and global art histories”, the organisers add.
The two-day event, part of Lagos’s art week, comprises discussions and panels focused on topics such as “The Living Archive: Propositions for collections into the future” and “African Curators Matter”.
Sponsors of the symposium include the Terra Foundation for American Art and the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank).
A key part of the event will be the unveiling of The African Arts Libraries Lab (AAL Lab), a new network linking arts libraries and publishers in Lagos, Dakar, Marrakesh, Cairo, Nairobi, Cape Town, and Limbé in Cameroon.
Naima Hassan, the curator of Re:assemblages, tells The Art Newspaper: “This symposium importantly presents the AAL Lab and Affiliates Network, a laboratory of libraries and archives across Africa, with a corresponding global support network. It brings together artists, curators, archivists, scholars, and publics to reimagine African and Afro-diasporic archives from the mid-twentieth century to the present.
“We ask: how can such archives be animated by performance, annotation, and curatorial experimentation? How can they function as living systems, intersecting with exhibitions, biennales, and art fairs?”
The Re:assemblages initiative was sparked by the Picton Archive, which is housed at the G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos and encompasses the personal library of the the African art scholar John Picton and his wife Sue, a museum ethnographer. This collection of historical, archaeological items presents a new way of looking at African Modernism, contemporary art, and postcolonial knowledge production within the shifting geopolitical and intellectual currents of the 20th century, says the Yinka Shonibare Foundation.
