The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair opened its 14th London edition at Somerset House, running through Sunday and introducing a new section dedicated to African modernism curated by art historian Nancy Dantas, ARTnews reported.
Titled “West Wind” and inspired by Miriam Makeba’s 1966 anthem for unity, the specialized presentation directly addresses the institutional gap left when Sotheby’s closed its dedicated African modernism department in 2025. The showcase brings together mid-20th-century masters such as Ibrahim El-Salahi, Bertina Lopes, and Seyni Awa Camara, mapping a critical period of political and aesthetic liberation across the continent and its diaspora.
Reshaping the Global Market at Somerset House
The fair’s timely arrival in London highlights a shifting commercial and institutional architecture for African contemporary and modern art.
Among the standout presentations, Fabienne Levy presents seven paintings by Nigerian-born artist Ekene Emeka Maduka. Her oil-on-canvas diptych Presence, Half-remembered (2026) constructs a nostalgic memory palace rooted in her formative years at a Nigerian boarding school. By juxtaposing Western literary influences like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Maduka examines the alienating frameworks of neo-colonized education and discipline.
At Yenwa Gallery, Damilola Opedun confronts urban displacement through two paintings, The Sacred Between and The Center Between The Noise (both 2026). Opedun documents Makoko, a vulnerable waterfront community in Lagos, drawing visual parallels to Venice’s historic canals while addressing the devastating 2025 government demolitions and land reclamation projects that displaced local residents. His multilayered oil paintings envision an alternative future where Makoko is celebrated worldwide for its cultural ecosystem.
Material Memory and Intergenerational Inheritance
South African artist Mellaney Roberts, originating from Willowmore in the Eastern Cape, presents ceramic works that emerge directly from local grief. Her latest creations respond to the devastating floods in May 2026 that washed away ancestral lands belonging to marginalized Coloured and Khoi communities in South Africa. Utilizing clay, resin, tree bark, and copper integrated into pierced ceramic surfaces in her standing sculpture Die Draers (The Bearers) (2026), Roberts constructs metaphors for shifting cultural borders.
Materiality similarly drives the large-scale textile installation by Congolese artist Yvanovitch Mbaya at Ablakassa. Centered on a massive Untitled (2023) showpiece crafted from recycled denim—a fabric typically used to cover commercial transport trucks—Mbaya honors Bantu tribal heritage by incorporating coffee and oil paint to build deep, earthy textures.
| Artist | Gallery | Featured Work / Medium | Core Theme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ekene Emeka Maduka | Fabienne Levy | Presence, Half-remembered (2026), Oil on canvas | Postcolonial boarding school architecture and memory |
| Damilola Opedun | Yenwa Gallery | The Sacred Between (2026), Oil on canvas | Displacement and the vulnerable waterfront of Makoko |
| Mellaney Roberts | Berman Contemporary | Die Draers (The Bearers) (2026), Ceramic, copper, resin | Mourning ancestral land loss after the May 2026 floods |
| Yvanovitch Mbaya | Ablakassa | Untitled (2023), Recycled denim, coffee, oil paint | Bantu identity and material histories of transit |
Challenging Institutional Hierarchies Through Collaborative Practice
Cape Town–based artist Buqaqawuli Nobakada uses her lace-on-canvas painting Emcimbini (2026) to project past generations of Black women into aspirational spaces of leisure, using delicate lace to ensure historical figures are included in newly imagined futures of joy. Similarly, South African artist Kimathi Mafafo works closely with women trained in her studio at Kristin Hjellegjerde, blending hand and machine stitching in works like Clearly, A Flamboyant Alliance: A Flamboyant Collaboration (2023) to survey nature as an embodied experience of female empowerment.
At Errm Art Gallery, Egyptian artist Medhat Shafik applies art as a metaphor for societal fracture, utilizing natural sand, teabags, and Indian-dyed fabrics in his layered collage painting Red (2025) to invoke ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern heritages. Meanwhile, Cairo-based Souad Abdelrasoul examines generational trauma and maternal lineage through surreal figures in her centerpiece, A Memory Between Fear and Flowers (2026), exhibited at Gallery Misr.
Rounding out the fair’s technical innovations, Nairobi-based self-taught artist Alpha Odhiambo presents Bodybuilder (2026) at 16/16, working exclusively on industrial vinyl mesh with meticulously mixed acrylics and solvent paints.
