We are pleased to announce the final year of Re:assemblages, a three-year programme examining how archives of art and literature from Africa and its global diaspora can be preserved, interpreted, shared, and activated in the present.
In 2026, Re:assemblages is shaped by Rehearsing Horizontality, a curatorial statement and invitation that asks: what does it mean to sustain a programme not through a single centre, but across a constellation of collaborating actors. To rehearse horizontality is to resist the pull of hierarchy in how we convene, commission, and collaborate. It is to consider: how do we convene with, rather than for, others? The proposition is put into practice through four convenings, new publishing, and network meetings hosted by the Foundations in collaboration with the AAL Lab Members and Affiliates Network.
AAL Lab Convening, Ecotonal Readings Convening - Library, Landscape, and Sustainable Futures. 2026. Courtesy of 32° East, G.A.S. Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation.
This year, the programme cycle's four themes — Ecotones, Annotations, The Living Archive and The Short Century — find new articulations in new contexts:
Ecotones — spaces where different ways of living, knowing, and relating to nature and culture meet and reshape one another; under Rehearsing Horizontality, Ecotones continues to locate these threshold spaces across ecological knowledge, cultural practice, and lived experience.
The Living Archive — archives as dynamic, embodied, and iterative, shaped through encounter, memory work, and communal practice; in 2026 it hosts new dialogues between the archives of artists and communities.
Annotations — the small, the absent, and the unfinished: marginalia, footnotes, and fragments within archives; in 2026 it continues to explore writing practices within and against the archive.
The Short Century — how African liberation and independence movements shaped transnational art and publishing between 1945 and 1994; in 2026 it expands to trace overlooked genealogies and transnational connections.
Programme Highlights
AAL Lab Convenings in 2026
The AAL Lab Convening series, Contemporary Art and Archive Practices (CAAP), an international series of public convenings led by Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.). Focused on the borders of contemporary art and archival practice, CAAP unfolds as part of the 2025–26 edition of Re:assemblages.
Kampala | 7 August 2026
Ecotonal Readings: Library, Landscape, and Sustainable Futures Convening
Partners: 32° East
Shaped by Ecotonal Readings explores the library as an ecological threshold: a meeting point where human, architectural, and environmental archives interact. Drawing on ‘ecotones’, a term that describes a transitional zone between distinct ecosystems, Ecotonal Readings illustrates how the 32° East Library and the organisation’s sustainably built campus act as active ‘edges’ where knowledge, materials, and communities intersect. Dr. Anna Adima will lead a presentation on the history of sustainable art practices in the region based on research done in the 32° East library, after which artist and printmaker Kajebe Jacob Joshua will lead a workshop on sustainable print making practice.
London l 18 September 2026
Ilẹ̀ Mọ Wa: The Land Knows Us Convening
Partners: Y.S.F. × UCL East, in partnership with The Bartlett School of Architecture (The BSA)
Opens with the workshop Ecotone as Meeting Ground: West African Healing and Dalit Tapestry, exploring the ecotone as a meeting ground between West African healing practices and Dalit temporal tapestry-making hosted by Jonn Gale and Abhaya Rajani. This is followed by an in-conversation between Dr Janine François and Ama Josephine Budge, moderated by Naima Hassan, framed around Black Sacred Ecologies. The convening is accompanied by a pamphlet of the same title, edited by Funmi Ogunshina and bringing together perspectives from four women residents of the G.A.S. Farm House, past and present, alongside the Farm's matriarch, Alhaja.
New York City | 24 September 2026
Planetary Afterimages: After The Short Century Convening
Takes the afterimage as its conceptual node, asking how the images, films, and archival traces of The Short Century continue to circulate and insist on being signified. The convening opens with drop-in session led by Yusuf Hassan (BlackMass Publishing) reflecting on the zine produced for the convening. The screening will open with contextual remarks situating the After Okwui series, the exhibition The Short Century, and John Akomfrah’s Testament (1988), originally presented as part of The Short Century at MoMA PS1 in 2002, followed by a conversation with Yusuf Hassan and Keli Safia Maksud, chaired by Re:assemblages programme advisor Serubiri Moses.
Virtual | December 2026
Re:assemblages Reflections Convening | Commemorating a 3-Year Cyle
Following the 2025 Re:assemblages Symposium, the Re:assemblages Reflections Convening bringing together network members, fellows, contributors, and partners to reflect on three years of collective experimentation. The virtual convening launches the Archive Futures Repository hosted on G.A.S. Publish, an open-source, hybrid publishing ecosystem, and marks the formal transition of Re:assemblages into the African Arts Libraries Lab (AAL Lab) & Affiliates Network.
The full schedule, contributors and tickets will be announced in September 2026.
Faces of Africa, 2018, inkjet print. Courtesy of Keli Safia Maksud.
New Publishing
A. Digital
Archive Futures Repository: A digital toolkit and publication hosted on G.A.S. Publish, ensuring the programme's outcomes are archived for future engagement.
Archive Futures Essays Series: Hosted on G.A.S. Publish the digital series commissions ten essays across two strands in 2026:
- - Notes on Convenings — a reflection published after each convening; part document, part argument, sitting with the archives, ideas, and unresolved questions each convening presents.
- - Artists as Libraries — pairs senior artists with early-career writers around themes the artist defines, responding to the relative absence of public archives on contemporary African and Afro-diasporic artistic practice.
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B. Print
- - Ilẹ̀ Mọ Wa: The Land Knows Us — print zine launch, 18 September 2026, accompanying the London convening. Printer: We Make It, Berlin. Concept, text and design: Funmi Ogunshina, Catherine Bardi, Samantha Russell, and Naima Hassan.
- - Planetary Afterimages: After The Short Century — print zine launch, 24 September 2026, accompanying the NYC convening. Concept, text and design: BlackMassPublishing (Yusuf Hassan)
- - Annotations in Four Acts — print publication launching November 2026, developed in parallel with Annotations, the first chapter of the Re:assemblages programme at the Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation in 2024. The inaugural publication of the foundation, examines major pan-African cultural festivals, exploring their dual role as both historical events and sites of postcolonial pan-African exchange.
Co-published by Two Queens, Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), this publication is edited by Naima Hassan, Maryam Kazeem and Billy Fowo, with book design by Rose Nordin. Contributors include Adeyosola Adeniran, Osayame Emokpae-Ozoro, Dr Merve Fejzula, Billy Fowo, Naima Hassan, Theophilus Imani, Maryam Kazeem, Liz Kobusinge, Missla Libsekal, Ufuoma Ogbemudje, Justin Randolph Thompson, Ryan Tenney and Dr Uhuru Phalafala.
The publication will be distributed through the co-publishers and selected distribution partners.
Re:assemblages 2025–26 is generously supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art. The programme is curated by Naima Hassan with thematic contributions from Maryam Kazeem, Ann Marie Peña, and Jonn Gale. The programme advisory committee comprises Dr. Bea Gassman de Sousa, Natasha Ginwala, Dr. Rangoato Hlasane, Serubiri Moses, and Dr. Oluwatoyin Zainab Sogbesan.
