About the Artists

Lavett Ballard
b. 1970, East Orange, New Jersey
Lavett Ballard (b. 1970, East Orange, NJ) anchors the presentation with richly layered portraits that fuse historical consciousness and decorative abstraction. Holding dual Bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Art History with a minor in Museum Studies from Rutgers University, and an MFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Ballard brings academic rigor and cultural sensitivity to her practice. Her compositions often incorporate wallpaper-like motifs, gilded surfaces, and symbolic patterning that reference African textiles while engaging Western portrait traditions. Ballard’s national recognition includes her commission by Time Magazine.

Damilare Jamiu Kanyinsola
b. 1994, Lagos Island, Nigeria
Damilare Jamiu Kanyinsola (b. 1994, Lagos Island, Nigeria) grounds the presentation in lived African experience and philosophical reflection. Apprenticed early under Lagos-based artist Muyiwa Williams, Damilare developed a practice deeply informed by his environment and the realities of contemporary Nigeria. Self-described as an African Realist, he centers authentic African narratives through figurative painting that often includes animals—cats and dogs—as symbolic companions. His work reflects a meditative engagement with humanity, spirituality, and Black consciousness. Within the booth, Damilare’s paintings offer an intimate, grounded perspective on African identity, memory, and resilience.

Megan Lewis
b. 1989, Baltimore, Maryland
Megan Lewis (b. 1989, Baltimore, MD) contributes a dynamic, painterly counterpoint through highly physical figurative works that pulse with movement and color. A graduate of Ringling College of Art and Design (BFA, Illustration, 2011), Lewis is both a painter and muralist, known for wielding a palette knife with decisive precision. Her figures are rendered in bold hues and geometric forms, often adorned with layered textiles that draw from African design traditions. Ankara fabrics—some acquired during her travels to Johannesburg, South Africa—are integrated directly into her paintings, collapsing boundaries between surface, pattern, and body.

Source: Galerie Myrtis

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The presentation centers on paintings that explore what it means to remain psychologically and morally present in a world marked by suffering. Informed by Gethsemane, the works paint the residue of suffering through silence, dread, endurance, and the strain of continued witness. Across the presentation, pain appears as something absorbed, carried, and lived with, leaving its weight on the surface.

Working on glazed tarpaulin and cotton duck canvas, Kudi builds his surfaces through liquid metal, ink, enamel, and acrylic. Layering, settling, cracking, and erosion shape each composition, guided by a sustained attention to process, repetition, and restraint. His paintings develop through close observation of material behavior, in which pressure, control, and release remain in active relation.

Set within antique gold frames, the paintings enter into deliberate tension with the European institutional structures that have historically shaped how painting is framed and received. At the same time, Kudi’s practice draws ancestral visual knowledge into conversation with the formal language of international abstraction. This places the work within a broader modernist history shaped through non-Western perspectives, bringing local systems of knowledge into dialogue with abstraction.

Titles such as Pillars of the Firmament, Syllables for a Midnight Vigil, and Hymn to the Heavy Root extend the presentation’s interest in time, transformation, and interior states.

Presented by Adegbola Gallery, a Lagos-based gallery with a program grounded in research, historical continuity, and rigorous curatorial thinking, the booth reflects the gallery’s commitment to artists whose practices are shaped by material intelligence and sustained inquiry.

Source: Adegbola Gallery

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The 2026 edition will take place at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea, positioning the fair in the heart of one of New York’s most vibrant cultural districts. Returning during Art Week New York, 1-54 offers a dynamic platform to discover contemporary art from Africa and its diasporas. Within the energy of the city’s wider art world, we will be bringing together artists, galleries and audiences.

We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting chapter of 1-54 New York in the heart of Chelsea. Stay tuned for more details!

VIP & Press preview:
Wednesday 13 May 2026, 11 am – 7 pm
Thursday 14 May 2026, 11 am – 4 pm

Public opening:
Thursday 14 May 2026, 4 pm – 8 pm

Friday 15 May 2026, 11 am – 7 pm
Saturday 16 May 2026, 11 am – 7 pm
Sunday 17 May 2026, 11 am – 5 pm

Location:
Starrett-Lehigh Building
600 W. 27th St
Manhattan, New York

Source: 1-54

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Grada Kilomba, with a body of work spanning large-scale installations, sculptures, video, and performance, approaches the concepts of memory, trauma, violence, and repetition in a striking yet poetic manner. In the exhibition O Fundo do Mundo (The Bottom of the Earth), the artist envisions a scenography of the future, posing a disturbing and urgent philosophical question that weaves through both her works and their material forms: “What would the bottom of the ocean tell us tomorrow, if it were emptied of water today?”

Kilomba invites us to imagine a futuristic landscape in which the “bottom of the earth” becomes a site of memory. The ocean floor is a repository of geological sedimentations and transformations, but also a repository of routes and traces of human activity—often barbaric and violent—from slavery to colonialism, from multiple wars to climate crises, all the way to the tragic genocides of today. The seabed holds countless corridors of human bodies, revealing nature itself as an archive of human existence.

In her work, the frailty of materials such as glass and nearly see-through fabric contrasts with the resilience of stone and the silent memory of burned and cut wood, which bear the traces of hundreds of years. Traversing and shaping these materials—at times elevated, others more direct—the written, sung, or merely alluded to is another recurring element in Kilomba’s moving and inspiring practice, reflecting both the breadth of her interests and her academic background.

Source: The Albuquerque Foundation

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Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage presents at the Palazzo Grassi a selection of forty-five paintings, including newly created pieces, and over one hundred studies that reveal his dense and vibrant pictorial language, staging figures in rich compositions with remarkable chromatic intensity, at the crossroads of several aesthetic canons. His choice of subject matter and interpretive undertones share the same expressive power. The painter does not shy away from violent and harsh themes, believing that art cannot ignore reality but must instead grapple with it: the consequences of war, corruption and instability in equatorial regions, the migration crisis, the weight of societal judgment, and abuses of power form the backdrop of some of his poignant works.

Based between Kenya and Indonesia, Armitage draws inspiration from a wide range of sources: historical and contemporary news, political demonstrations, literature, cinema, local rituals, colonial and modern architecture, flora and fauna, and global art history. At the heart of his iconography is East Africa, and Kenya in particular, which he explores with both critical, satirical insight and visionary depth. While some scenes are precisely located or situated in time, notably when the artist followed a team of journalists covering the opposition movements and their violent repression during the 2017 elections in Kenya, or when he depicts incidents related to the 2020-21 lockdown, others remain more elusive and universal. This ambiguity leads Armitage into fluid territories.

The exhibition, spread across two levels of the Palazzo Grassi, gradually delves deeper into this exploration of inhabited landscapes and visions. Armitage’s scenesbecome denser, even blurred, leaving room for our own interpretation. When viewing a painting by Michael Armitage, the eye hesitates, skitters and darts away. Several narratives and lines of horizon cohabitate, real and fictional spaces are entangled, and different versions and viewpoints are superposed. Treated with a mix of violence and gentleness, the compositions retain their flamboyance despite their subjects’ harshness. Armitage gives free rein to his visions, creating haunted or even hallucinatory landscapes.

Among his motifs are real and imagined figures, drawn from contemporary African literature as well as Greek mythology, who embody a certain inner state and testify from external conditions. At other times, anonymous individuals are depicted, as in the series on migration, which attempts to represent in large-scale tableaux the perilous journey of migrants across Africa, the often-deadly sea crossing to Europe, and the disillusionment of those who succeed. Drawing on sometimes direct references to scenes from films by the Senegalese director Sembene Ousmane (1923-2007), to characters from the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s novels (1938-2025), or to painting compositions by Francisco de Goya (1746-1828), or by modernist African artists such as Jak Katarikawe (1940- 2018) and Peter Mulindwa (1943-2022) among others, Armitage brilliantly condenses these inspirations into a form of synthesis to create a new language for our time.

The artist’s works are painted with oil on a bark cloth, a traditional bark cloth sourced from Uganda and Indonesia, transgressing the canvas typical in Western tradition. The natural irregularities of the material – holes, creases, and rough textures – directly inform the visual composition. Executed in a distinctive lush and sensuous palette, Armitage’s works are built through a multi-layered process: paint is applied in layers, resulting in evocative, distinctive imagery. The practice of drawing, to which a large room in the exhibition is devoted, reveals the level of attention that the artist pays to details, composition and preparatory studies.

Source: Pinault Collection

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The exhibition is curated by Emma Lavigne, General Director and General Curator of the Pinault Collection, in close collaboration with the artist. The Venetian exhibition offers a renewed and expanded selection conceived specifically for the spaces of Punta della Dogana, through which the artist weaves the narrative threads that give shape to the fictional worlds and stories suggested by her work.

Since gaining recognition in the mid-1980s for her groundbreaking approach to conceptual photography, Lorna Simpson (born in 1960, United States) has consistently and critically examined the mechanisms through which images are constructed. Since the mid-2010s, painting has become a particularly fertile ground for her artistic exploration, extending the core concerns that run through her practice: the erosion and resurgence of memory, the failures of representation, and the instability of narratives. The exhibition brings together significant groups of works from her most emblematic series of this period, including Ice, Special Characters, and Earth and Sky. It spans over twenty years of Simpson’s practice, including a number of paintings created for her participation in the 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, to the debut of several new works made specifically for this exhibition. Defying any singular interpretation, Simpson’s paintings draw viewers into uncertain zones at the edges of the visible.

The exhibition unfolds around three major ensembles. It opens with a first group of dense compositions, populated by enigmatic figures, historical echoes, and political tensions, evoking uprisings and their repression. These works become the stage for inhospitable and unstable environments, traversed by diffuse forces. Further along, a series of Arctic panoramas, recreated from expedition archives, unfold in ranges of nocturnal blues and frosted greys, imbuing these dark landscapes with a suspended, dreamlike quality. At the edge of the Venetian lagoon, they appear to hover between two states – porous to the elements and inhabited by spectral presences ready to dissolve. Finally, a gallery of majestic and enigmatic female figures, presented notably in Tadao Ando’s Cube, confront the viewer with a complexity of identities and the ambiguity of their representation.

For the past fifteen years, collage has played a central role in Simpson’s creative process, reflected in the exhibition in a major forty-part installation. Drawing on a vast visual archive, she turns this practice into a field of experimentation where juxtaposition, slippage and free association transform these images into “source notes” that later inspire many of her compositions. The exhibition highlights the richness of a conceptual and visual language that is abundant and gives great importance to intuition. The artist explores collective memory, stereotypes, and the mechanisms of erasure – all critical lenses through which to revisit over half a century of history. The evocation of states of matter and natural phenomena – water, fire, ice, dust, meteorites, clouds – compose an unstable world, one that invites metamorphosis and suspended temporalities.

Source: Pinault Collection

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Bringing together three decades of Kunbi’s artistic exploration, Shapes of Silence examines silence as a deeply social and political condition. Through layered paintings that merge textiles, abstraction, and assemblage, Kunbi transforms material into narrative—challenging hierarchies of voice, visibility, and power while foregrounding Ethiopia’s rich cultural histories within a global contemporary art context.

Silence as a social practice in Ethiopia often draws its justification from the country’s rich folkloric traditions. Within these traditions, silence holds an ambivalent and paradoxical status, praised as a virtue while simultaneously regarded as a potential misdeed.

The proverb “Silence is gold” frames advised silence as a sign of wisdom and restraint, yet this valuation is tempered by caution. Other expressions warn that “He who does not name his illness finds no cure” or that “By not speaking, one risks exclusion from opportunity”.

Silence thus emerges not as a mere absence, but as a space of restraint, tension, and ethical negotiation. This space is also deeply political, as the right to speak and to interpret is unevenly distributed along entrenched social and political binaries—male over female, center over periphery, sacred over ordinary. Those positioned on the latter side are denied discursive authority, making silence a contested political condition.

In Tegene Kunbi’s work, the political enters through material choice: his practice invites these asymmetries into the pictorial field. His paintings bring together textiles of starkly contrasting provenance and significance, hand-knitted fabrics made by his mother alongside industrial textiles produced for African markets; sacred garments used in religious contexts alongside utilitarian materials designed for mattresses. Drawing on Ethiopia’s cultural diversity, once described by Carlo Conti Rossini as a “museum of peoples”, Kunbi also incorporates weaving traditions from different regions, where clothing and costume have historically marked cultural and political autonomy, forcing these distinct practices into a shared visual field. Each material carries specific histories of labor, belief, and political positioning. When assembled on the pictorial surface, these categories fracture, and painting becomes a site where socially and culturally segregated materials are compelled into proximity and renegotiation.

These questions of silence as a hierarchical and political condition extend to exhibition practice itself. In exhibition spaces, artworks are routinely framed by explanatory texts, labels, captions, and curatorial narratives that claim interpretive authority. Language speaks for the artwork, while the visual and multimodal are rendered silent, reinforcing a hierarchy in which written language becomes the primary site of meaning-making.

Against this backdrop, Kunbi approaches painting as a platform where such regimes of silence are both enacted and unsettled. His works refuse the conception of painting as a passive or purely visual medium; instead, painting functions as a layered archive of labor, memory, and history, operating in a minor key in which silence takes material form and meaning emerges through duration, proximity, and material presence rather than explanation.

The exhibition is also made possible with the support of Primo Marella Gallery, an art gallery based in Milan and Lugano that represents the artist.

The Ethiopia Pavilion will be inaugurated during the preview days of the 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (May 6, 7 and 8, 2026). It will be open to the public from Saturday, May 9 to Sunday, November 22, 2026.

The Ethiopia Pavilion is at Palazzo Bollani, Castello 3647, Venice from 9th May to 22nd November, 2026.

Source: Culturalee

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Marking only the second presentation of The Bahamas at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia following a 13-year hiatus, the Pavilion features the work of two Bahamian artists: the late John Beadle (1964–2024) and Lavar Munroe (b. 1982). Both artists’ practices are grounded in the visual and social traditions of The Bahamas and the broader African diaspora, engaging in themes of collaboration, commemoration, and material transformation. Their intergenerational dialogue forms the conceptual and visual foundation of the Pavilion.

Beadle was a revered figure within The Bahamas’ artistic community and an inspiration to many, including Munroe. He was part of a community of makers who create costumes for Junkanoo, the centuries-old biannual national processional festival, which he described as the cultural bedrock of The Bahamas. Junkanoo informed his commitment to collaborative artmaking and his use of discarded materials such as cardboard. Beadle also incorporated tarp from Haitian sloops abandoned on Bahamian shores. Through these materials and recurring motifs—dysfunctional oars, mobile houses, and concealed cutlasses—he drew attention to people, things, and artistic processes often disregarded.

Munroe has similarly worked at the intersection of Junkanoo and contemporary art. He has produced elaborate sculptures from strips of Junkanoo costumes discarded after use, transforming cardboard that had been twice cast aside. Taking the form of monumentally scaled equestrian figures or life-sized dogs, the material composition of Munroe’s works is often not immediately discernible.

The Bahamas Pavilion also foregrounds Junkanoo’s memorial and spiritual dimensions. When a member of the Junkanoo community passes away, performers gather to honor the deceased. The Pavilion commemorates Beadle through a series of paintings by Munroe depicting a memorial procession, based on photographs by Bahamian photographer Jackson Petit. This work extends Munroe’s broader engagement with spiritual practices developed through recent trips to Tanzania, Senegal, and Zimbabwe. It also features includes distinct sections devoted to Beadle and Munroe and features collaborative works Beadle produced with Antonius Roberts and Stan Burnside as part of the Junkanoo-based Jammin collective. The exhibition further includes a section dedicated to “posthumous collaboration.” Munroe began this practice in 2016 to honor his late father, creating works based on unrealized plans he had to collaborate with him and using materials related to his profession as a parasail operator. For Venice, Munroe will incorporate materials connected to Beadle’s practice, including sail material from Haitian sloops he left in his studio.

Resonating with Biennale Arte 2026’s overarching theme, In Minor Keys, envisioned by the late Koyo Kouoh, which celebrates “artists who work at the boundaries of form and whose practices can be thought of as intricate melodies to be heard both collectively and on their own terms,” Dr. Thompson’s curatorial approach offers a distinctly Bahamian interpretation of this sentiment. The Pavilion highlights Beadle’s and Munroe’s use of discarded materials and collaborative processes to call attention to the hidden, the undervalued, “the minor notes,” in society and in the art world.

The Bahamas Pavilion is organised by The Bahamas in Venice Committee, under the aegis of the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Culture and the Honourable Mario Bowleg, Minister, Youth, Sports, and Culture, with assistance from the Italian Honorary Consul to The Bahamas, Michelangela Vismara. The Committee comprises cultural leaders dedicated to advancing the nation’s artistic legacy: John Cox, Chairman, National Art Gallery of The Bahamas (NAGB), Artistic Director, Baha Mar and Commissioner of The Bahamas Pavilion; Maelynn Ford, Executive Director, NAGB; Amanda Coulson, Former Executive Director, NAGB (2011–2021)and Producer of the Bahamas Pavilion; Jodi Minnis, Curatorial Director, NAGB; and representatives of the Friends of The Arts in The Bahamas (FAB) Foundation.

“Building on the powerful legacy of John Beadle and guided by the vision of Dr. Krista Thompson, The Bahamas’ Pavilion will challenge expectations, spark dialogue, and showcase rigorous material exploration,” stated The Bahamas in Venice Committee.

“Our goal is to create a Biennale blueprint for future Bahamian artists — ensuring The Bahamas maintains a strong and enduring presence on this global stage for years to come.”

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Skira featuring contributions from Dr. Krista Thompson, John Cox, Dr. Christian Campbell, Amanda Coulson and Tandazani Dhlakama.

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ASƎṬṬA BY ARTIST AMINA AGUEZNAY AND CURATOR MERIEM BERRADA
Asǝṭṭa follows a sequence of spatial passages rooted in the notion of the âatba, the threshold as both an architectural and symbolic entity. ‘Threshold, or âatba, is the in-between. More than a cosmological concept, the threshold is how people organize their lives and sustain their practices,’ Moroccan visual artist Amina Agueznay explains to designboom. Trained as an architect in the United States before returning to Morocco to research vernacular practices, Agueznay has long worked at the intersection of spatial thinking and material knowledge, often developing projects through sustained collaborations with artisans.

Within Moroccan contexts, this space mediates between interior and exterior, sacred and profane, private and public. Berrada expands on this spatial condition, noting that ‘it is far more than just a doorway: it is a distinct environment, an area of transition rather than division, an independent architectural and symbolic entity, animated by ancestral rites.’ Inside the Arsenale’s Artiglierie, this idea becomes tangible. The installation operates as what she describes as a ‘transformative threshold (âatba),’ where visitors move through a landscape of transitions rather than fixed zones.

This in-between space also carries a temporal and perceptual dimension. ‘This “in-between” space allows for moments of breath and perspective,’ Berrada continues, drawing parallels to ‘the rhythmic suspensions found in Arabic poetry or the silences that reveal the depth of music.’

WEAVING CRAFTSMANSHIP AS KNOWLEDGE, NOT PRESERVATION
Through this presentation, Asǝṭṭa aims to reframe craftsmanship, not only as heritage to be preserved, but as a form of knowledge production. ‘Knowledge production transcends preservation to become innovation,’ Agueznay shares with us. ‘Innovation involves a deep understanding of matter, the experience of matter and gesture.’

Berrada situates this within a broader cultural context. ‘Craftsmanship is, intrinsically, a living matter… yet this “intelligence of the hands” is not always recognized,’ she explains, pointing to persistent hierarchies between art and craft. For the pavilion, this becomes a critical point of departure. ‘When the theme ”In Minor Keys” was announced, we understood it was a perfect opportunity to bring these discreet, humble, yet rich practices to the forefront,’ she says.

The project brings together 166 Moroccan artisans alongside two Venetian collaborators, each contributing as a creator rather than executor. ‘Each artisan has chosen to give a new, deconstructed impetus to their work,’ Berrada notes, emphasizing that the contemporary dimension of Asǝṭṭa emerges from within the practices themselves. This approach reflects Berrada’s ongoing curatorial interest in how art and craftsmanship intersect as forms of contemporary storytelling across African contexts.

Source: Designboom

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The opening breakfast (by invitation only), on Tuesday 5-6 May 2026, at Hotel Monaco & Grand Canal, Venice, will bring together artists, curators, scholars, collectors, and institutional representatives. This will be followed by the African Art in Venice Forum, a day of talks and moments of encounter and exchange.

“The Forum recognises the lack of African country pavilion representation at the Biennale and therefore creates a space of coming-together for artists, curators and art enthusiasts from Africa and its diasporas dedicated to dialogue and shared inquiry,” says Kate Fellens, Head of International Business Development at Strauss & Co.

The 2026 edition of the Forum is themed around Beyond Visibility: A Method of Inquiry.

“African art is approached not as a closed or segmented field, but as a living and evolving one, shaped by overlapping temporalities, multiple cultural affiliations, and practices that often resist fixed categorisation,” explains Neri Torcello, founder and co-head of African Art in Venice Forum.

The Forum approaches visibility as a scholarly framework, a point of departure rather than an endpoint. At a time when the international art world is increasingly centering narratives from across the globe, this method of inquiry asks what visibility makes possible and how listening to different perspectives enriches our understanding of African art history.

“The National Museum of African Art seeks to serve as an artist-centered platform for discussions about the meanings of ‘Africa’ and ‘art,’” said Kevin D. Dumouchelle, curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. “As such, we could not be more delighted to support the African Art in Venice Forum, which has built a global reputation as a place in which conversations about African creative achievement occur under the eyes of the global art world.”

Working alongside exhibitions and curatorial research, the African Art in Venice Forum extends the conversations initiated within institutional contexts into a broader discourse.

“In doing so, it affirms Beyond Visibility as a method of inquiry—one that values collaboration, sustained dialogue, and mutual listening as essential tools for engaging African art in the present,” concludes Neri Torcello.

Source: African Art in Venice Forum

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