In June 2025, Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, in partnership with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), launched The Short Century Intensive, a fellowship designed to support artistic and scholarly inquiry into the cultural and political histories of the mid to late 20th century. As the second chapter of Re:assemblages, a dynamic, multi-year programme designed to foster collaboration and experimentation across postcolonial art archives and library collections, the intensive is anchored by Okwui Enwezor’s seminal 2001-2002 exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, which examined the intersections of art and politics during a period of intense struggle and transformation across Africa. Taking this archive as a provocation, the intensive asks: what forms of relation, refusal, and repair remain possible in the afterlives of this compressed century?

We are delighted to invite you to join the Yinka Shonibare Foundation’s Lagos Patron Tour 2025—a truly exceptional opportunity to experience the vibrant cultural landscape of Lagos through an exclusive, curated journey that brings together art, dialogue, and global connection

West Africa’s emerging GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) is forging new pathways for preserving, producing, and reinterpreting African heritage and contemporary knowledge. Lagos, as a leading cultural capital, is at the heart of this momentum.

Yinka Shonibare Foundation’s Re:assemblages Symposium and Lagos Tour serve as a new platform for institutional dialogue, co-creation, and collaboration, advancing the future of West African cultural infrastructure. Delegates gain privileged access to Lagos’s layered artistic and archival ecosystems, engaging directly with the people, places, and practices shaping African arts and memory institutions.

Participation is a high-impact institutional investment in capacity-building, international collaboration, and knowledge exchange. Delegates are expected to return with actionable insights and strategic outcomes, extending the value of their experience through internal dissemination and long-term institutional application.

The 20th century can be read as a formative ecotonal space—an unsettled, generative borderland where networks fractured and reformed, collaborations ignited, and tensions gave way to new modes of relation. Within this compressed terrain, distinct ecologies of African and Afro-diasporic thought and practice took shape, producing postcolonial libraries and archives that carried with them emergent aesthetic and epistemic registers—unfinished, insurgent, and alive with possibility.  

In June 2025, G.A.S. Foundation in partnership with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.) announced the 2025–26 edition of Re:assemblages, a dynamic, multi-year programme designed to foster collaboration and experimentation across postcolonial art archives and library collections. This ambitious initiative reimagines the stewardship and activation of African and Afro-diasporic art archives, and will result in a rich constellation of international convenings, symposia, micro-publications, and a research intensive.

From June 19th to 21st, 2025, G.A.S. Lagos hosted AfterImages, an exhibition of moving image installations and accompanying screenings interrogating the coloniality of archival film. Curated by Monangambee, AfterImages was presented as the culminating exhibition of Art Exchange: Moving Image, a curatorial professional development programme delivered by LUX, Yinka Shonibare Foundation, and Guest Artists Space Foundation, with support from the British Council. Focusing on Cameroonian cinema and broader film traditions from the Global South, the featured works used experimental and archival techniques to reflect on what remains after colonialism and how memory, history, and absence are expressed through film.

From June 9th to 13th, 2025, G.A.S. Lagos hosted the inaugural edition of the Ìmòra Arts Intensive, a week-long programme designed to equip early-career visual artists with the tools, knowledge, and mentorship needed to strengthen their professional practice. Through a series of dynamic and insightful sessions, participants explored topics such as artistic research, project development, commercial representation, negotiation, and strategies for presenting their work. Each day brought together the 10 selected cohort and experienced facilitators, ranging from curators and cultural workers to writers, artists, and creative entrepreneurs, for hands-on learning, critical reflection, and peer exchange. 

Dr Tinashe Mushakavanhu, a Zimbabwean writer, scholar, and curator, joins G.A.S. Lagos for a six-week residency as the 2025 curatorial recipient of the G.A.S. Fellowship Award supported by Deutsche Bank. His expansive practice spans printmaking, installation, curating, research, and literature, with a strong focus on the intersections of African literary histories, archives, and visual culture. At the core of his approach is an interest in how fiction can function as a tool for critical inquiry, activating narratives, reworking found materials, and challenging dominant cultural and institutional frameworks.