We are pleased to welcome E.N. Mirembe, a Germany-based curator, writer, and researcher, for a four-week residency at G.A.S. Lagos. Their work explores the intersections of literature, curatorial practice, and Black artistic production, with a particular focus on the histories and legacies of African and diasporic literary magazines. Mirembe’s broader inquiry reflects an interest in how these publications have shaped aesthetic production across the African diaspora and how their legacy continues to inform contemporary creative practices.
During their residency, Mirembe hopes to spend significant time to research in the G.A.S. Library and Picton Archive, engaging closely with archival materials from Black Orpheus journals while also preparing for an upcoming Re:assemblages Symposium presentation this November. Through this residency, Mirembe seeks to encounter Lagos not only as a city of art and literature they have long studied from afar but as a lived, face-to-face context for research, writing, and collaboration. They look forward to connecting with artists, writers, and cultural practitioners across Lagos through studio visits, literary networks, and cultural gatherings. Mirembe’s itinerary includes engagement with the Pro Helvetia Writers’ Group, visits to the G.A.S. Farm House in Ikiṣẹ, and a trip to Benin for the opening of The Museum of West African Art (MOWAA.
in the midst, installation view featuring artists Liz Kobusinge & Darlyne Komukama at Afropocene Capsule, Kampala.
What is the current focus of your creative practice?
My current practice centers on research and writing, with a focus on literary magazines of the African diaspora and their histories. I am particularly interested in how these publications have shaped conversations overtime and how their legacies continue to influence contemporary moments of aesthetic production.
Forms of Fray, installation view at The Africa Arts Trust.
What drew you to apply for this residency and how do you think it will inform your wider practice?
Lagos is a city I am deeply familiar with through art and literature but have never visited in person. I’m drawn to her as a living archive, a place that holds multiple, often contradictory narratives of modernity, migration, and imagination. This residency offers a rare chance to meet Lagos face to face, to experience its rhythm, density, and texture beyond the page. I’m curious about how this encounter might shift my understanding of the city as both idea and reality, and how it might inform the ways I think about place, movement, and representation in my wider practice.
Sharjah Biennial writing workshop, April Acts 2025.
Can you give us an insight into how you hope to use the opportunity?
I hope to use this opportunity to really delve deeply into the Black Orpheus journals as part of my ongoing research on literary magazines.
ABOUT E.N. MIREMBE
E.N. Mirembe is a cultural worker who works as a curator, writer, and researcher. Their curatorial practice is founded on an interest in work by Black writers and artists as an experimental ground for conversation, critical fabulation, play, theory, and method. They curated Forms of Fray (The African Arts Trust, 2025), The Geography of Fixed Things (ARAK Collection, 2025), Njabala: An Elegy (Makerere Art Gallery, 2024), and at the limit of dream (Brussels, 2023). Together with Rosie Olang’ Odhiambo they co-curated in transit under another sky, which has had iterations in Kampala, Nairobi, London, and the 2025 Coventry Biennial. Mirembe’s writing is published in Artforum, Africa is a Country, African Arguments, and other outlets.
Photo of E.N. Mirembe. Image courtesy of Ange-Frédéric Koffi.