This is my third time at 1 -54 since it was launched in 2013 by Touria El Glaoui, as the pre-eminent international fair dedicated to providing visibility to contemporary art from Africa artists and those in the diaspora. 1-54 holds three editions every year—in London, New York and Marrakech with a pop-up fair in Paris
‘For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.’ – Elie Wiesel, holocaust survivor After the Federal Government of...
나쁜 애도/Bad Lament responds to this injustice through a queer lens on mourning. The exhibition gathers artists working in performance, video, installation, and drawing. Together, they propose grief not as ritual perfection, but as protest; fragmented, messy, necessary.
A 1987 graduate of Film as Fine Art from Central St. Martin's School of Art, Zak Ove worked in film and music, collaborating with bands such as Soul 2 Soul. Fascinated by the new direction of black music, he said he engaged often with the question of “how do I translate the screaming of hip hop music like Public Enemy into something static; how do you make a sculpture scream?”
A successful child is every parent’s dream and Rele was in celebratory mood as it opened the Young Contemporaries Alumni...
On Wednesday November 13, 2019, award winning BBC journalist, Nancy Kacungira writing on twitter via her handle @kacungira tweeted: So...
In Africa, only a glutton feasts alone. That truism has been highlighted in stories and myths across the continent from...
Nigerian art has been missing a critical element, sculpture has been relegated and Rele has opened up a critical conversation
With almost 1,000 book, music, movie, and sundry reviews and essays published over the past four (4) years, we remain resolute in our belief that reviews offer us the first critical engagement with a work of art, books, movies, music, plays etc, because they help shape opinion, excite conversation, and push engagement.As we enter our 5th year, we remain committed to providing a unique space for interrogating our literary and artistic output and providing a handle for the audience and those in the academia to assess these works of literature and art.
Do you eat ice cream? If you do, do you like vanilla flavour? If you do, do you know where...
This year featured a rich mix of artists and galleries, both new to 1-54 and a lot of those making their returns. A diverse range of 160 artists amd 60 exhibitors from across Africa, Brazil and beyond. There were the conventional, the zany and the envelope pushers but what seemed clear was that every iteration of 1-54 Art fair is a referendum on contemporary African art
The works reflect the thoughts process of the émigré but where a less competent artist would have presented gloomy and depressing images we have an exuberance borne out of his choice of colours which manage to save the portraits from depressing the viewer.














