WAAU – World African Artists United, a non-profit association dedicated to promoting contemporary African art and transforming global narratives, proudly participates in ARCOlisboa 2026. As this fruitful partnership continuea to evolve, WAAU engages the public through a dynamic programme that highlightes Afro-Atlantic perspectives and fosters intercultural dialogue.
PROGRAMME HIGHLIGHTS
28 to 31 May 2026 | Pátio 3
Exhibition – World African Artists United
WAAU presents at ARCOlisboa 2026 a presentation exploring Afro Atlantic perspectives through contemporary artistic practices shaped by memory, transformation, and intercultural exchange. Developed in collaboration with ABLAKASSA and THIS IS NOT A WHITE CUBE, the exhibition brings together works that reflect on identity, historical continuity, and the circulation of cultural narratives across territories marked by colonial histories, migration, and diasporic experience.
Positioning the Afro Atlantic as a space of relation, movement, and shared histories, the programme considers how personal and collective narratives are continuously constructed, fragmented, inherited, and reimagined over time. Through distinct visual languages and material approaches, the participating artists engage with questions surrounding visibility, belonging, resilience, and the emotional and social complexities of contemporary existence.
The presentation further reflects on the progressive affirmation of contemporary African and Afro descendant artistic practices within the global art system, foregrounding the role of artists and curatorial platforms in the critical expansion of historiographical and cultural discourse. Moving between material experimentation, poetic reflection, and social inquiry, the works propose alternative readings of memory and contemporaneity while opening space for new epistemologies and forms of encounter.
Conceived as a site of dialogue, the presentation reflects WAAU’s ongoing commitment to fostering meaningful connections between African and Afro descendant artists, institutions, and international audiences.
Artists presented: Aristide Kouamé, Gonçalo Mabunda, Nelo Teixeira, Ricardo Piedade aka Blac Dwelle, Yvanovitch Mbaya.
29 May 2026 | 18:30 – 19:30 | Torreão Nascente
Talk – Decolonial Memory and Artistic Education
Moderator: Ana Balona de Oliveira. Researcher, Lisbon
Speakers: Ângela Ferreira (Artist, Lisbon), Amanda de la Garza (Deputy director of Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid), Cindy Sissokho (Curator and Associate Program Director (Africa & Europe) at KADIST, Lisbon), Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh (Curator and educator, Kumasi).
This roundtable will examine how colonial legacies have been addressed, remembered and contested within artistic education in various contexts in the North and South, including both formal and informal education. Colonial narratives have shaped art histories, museum collections and educational curricula, privileging Eurocentric perspectives, while erasing, marginalizing or fetishizing others, namely those that had been a source of inspiration. At the same time, artists and educators from the Global South and its diasporas have historically claimed as theirs not only pre- and anticolonial knowledges and modernities, but also some Western traditions which have been variously appropriated and transformed, requiring a complex understanding of the aesthetics and politics of influence in various contexts. How has art education critically addressed inherited canons, acknowledging the historical impact of colonialism while highlighting multiple forms of resistance, thus creating space for more plural narratives? How have artists, educators and institutions revisited archives, rewritten histories, and included voices that had long been overlooked? How can artistic education become a truly decolonial, emancipatory and reparatory site for critical reflection, memory and imagination, open to the community, and able to foster actual change?
