Re:assemblages 2025-26

The 2025–26 edition of Re:assemblages marks a dynamic new phase in fostering collaboration and experimentation across African and Afro-diasporic art libraries and their publishing ecologies. This ambitious multi-year programme reimagines the stewardship and activation of transnational archives of art and literature that have emerged since African independence, culminating in a constellation of international convenings, symposia, micro-publications, and a research intensive. Building on its opening chapter in 2024, Annotations, which aimed to counter-map pan-African festivals through close readings of conflicting records and ephemera, including state collections, artist accounts, and delegate testimonies, this new edition deepens and expands the programme’s critical enquiries.

Developed in response to the Picton Archive at the G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos, which holds a significant portion of the personal library of Emeritus Professor of African Art John Picton and Sue Picton, the programme draws on the Picton Archive's rich resources spanning African and international art, history, archaeology, architecture, and anthropology. The archive offers a vital entry point for rethinking African modernisms, contemporary art, and postcolonial knowledge production within the shifting geopolitical and intellectual currents of the 20th century.

Re:assemblages further expands this enquiry by exploring the evolving editorial and artistic landscapes of African and Afro-diasporic libraries, archives, initiatives and independent publishers. It forges vital connections between artists, publishers, and research institutions across Africa, aiming to establish new archival practices and research encounters that are distinct from those of the university and museum.

The programme is curated by Naima Hassan, with contributions from Maryam Kazeem, Ann Marie Peña, and Jonn Gale, and funding from the Terra Foundation of American Art. The programme advisory committee comprises Dr. Beatrix Gassman de Sousa, Natasha Ginwala, Dr. Rangoato Hlasane, Patrick Mudekereza, Serubiri Moses, and Dr. Oluwatoyin Zainab Sogbesan.

Read the Re:assemblages 2025-26 Programme Concept

Re:assemblages Symposium 2025

Central to the Re:assemblages programme is a two-day symposium, set to take place in Lagos, Nigeria, on 4–5 November 2025 during Lagos Art Week. Hosted by G.A.S. and Y.S.F., the symposium will convene archivists, artists, curators, and cultural practitioners for a series of conversations, panels, and site-specific interventions, all organised around four central themes.

The first, Ecotones, explores spaces where different ways of living, knowing, and relating to nature and culture converge and influence one another. The Short Century invites a reappraisal of the role of African liberation and independence movements in shaping transnational art and publishing between 1945 and 1994. Annotations draws on experimental literary strategies to investigate alternative approaches to reading history. Finally, The Living Archive emphasises embodied, artist-led archival methods that prioritise community, memory, and ongoing transformation.

Tickets for the symposium will be available to purchase in September 2025.

The Short Century Intensive

The Short Century Intensive is a hybrid research fellowship initiated by G.A.S. that will bring together five U.S.-based fellows between July and November 2025, culminating in a week-long gathering in Lagos during Lagos Art Week. Anchored in the broader framework of The Short Century, the intensive invites fellows to explore overlooked narratives and transnational archival traces of African liberation and independence movements spanning the period from 1945 to 1994.

Framing this historical moment as a compressed yet generative period in the 20th century, the intensive approaches it as a formative ecotonal space—an in-between zone where shifting networks, collaborations, and tensions gave rise to new ecologies of African and Afro-diasporic relation. Throughout the week, fellows will engage across artistic registers, working with and against the archive to excavate overlooked genealogies, trace transnational connections, and rehearse speculative forms of citation and annotation. At its core, the intensive asks: what forms of relation are possible within the archives of the compressed 20th century?

African Arts Libraries Lab (AAL Lab)

The African Arts Libraries Lab (AAL Lab) is a new network convened by G.A.S. and Y.S.F. that unites a dynamic group of African arts libraries and publishers across cities including Lagos, Dakar, Marrakesh, Cairo, Nairobi, Cape Town, Limbe, and beyond, to engage critical questions on publishing practices, libraries, and archives in Africa. Museums and institutions in Europe and North America will be invited to participate in collective experimentation with AAL Lab members, encouraging new ways of networking, preserving, and activating African and Afro-diasporic library collections across multilocational sites.

Through the African Arts Libraries Affiliates Network, the Lab extends to arts libraries, publishers, and research institutions worldwide that hold significant African and Afro-diasporic collections, inviting them to support African-led infrastructures through knowledge exchange, co-curation, joint research, and capacity-building. The network nurtures a global community that amplifies African and Afro-diasporic art collections while promoting inclusive access and sustainable preservation.

AAL Lab Convenings

The AAL Lab Convenings, under the title Contemporary Art and Archive Practices in Context, are a series of public events hosted by AAL Lab members across multiple locations to share research, foster dialogue, and amplify African archival voices. Drawing from Re:assemblages 2025–26’s conceptual themes, Ecotones, The Short Century, Annotations and The Living Archive, each convening will feature reflections from the inaugural cohort of the African Arts Libraries Lab (AAL Lab) and wider public, encouraging collaboration, new research methodologies, and critical interventions.

Each convening will culminate in a micro-publication that documents its outcomes, advancing new approaches to archival storytelling and knowledge sharing. The convenings will also contribute to the Archive Futures Repository, a living digital resource offering tools that support evolving models of archival stewardship and activation.