We are delighted to present the latest achievements from our G.A.S. Foundation alumni, whose visionary practices continue to shape contemporary art globally. From prestigious appointments and innovative residencies to compelling exhibitions and commissions, our alumni exemplify critical engagement, interdisciplinary exploration, and meaningful cultural interventions. Their diverse approaches, rooted in queer-feminist methodologies, decolonial frameworks, ecological consciousness, and diasporic narratives, underline the Foundation's commitment to nurturing artistic voices that challenge boundaries and reimagine collective futures. Join us in celebrating their exceptional contributions to contemporary discourse and cultural transformation.
Miriam Bettin Appointed Director of the Mönchehaus Museum, Goslar
We are proud to share that 2022 G.A.S. Foundation alumna, Miriam Bettin, has been appointed Director of the Mönchehaus Museum in Goslar, Germany. A distinguished institution at the nexus of contemporary art and critical cultural discourse, the museum is home to the internationally renowned Kaiserring award, whose past laureates include Isaac Julien, Cindy Sherman, and Wolfgang Tillmans. Miriam brings a curatorial vision rooted in queer-feminist and decolonial methodologies, aligning with the museum’s commitment to fostering dialogue across temporal, geographic, and ideological boundaries. In her words, the Mönchehaus will evolve under her direction as a polyphonic platform for (un)learning, democratic education, and reimagined forms of collective life.
Miriam Bettin. Photographed by Albrecht Fuchs, Cologne.
Kosisochukwu Nnebe Returns to Lagos Expanding Cassava-Based Counter-Archive with Canada Council Grant
We are thrilled to share that G.A.S. Foundation alumna Kosisochukwu Nnebe has received a prestigious Research and Creation Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts in support of her ongoing project at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Her research expands upon work initiated during her residencies, first at G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos and the WOPHA Foundation in Miami, exploring the use of foodways as subaltern counter-archives to interrogate and resist colonial historiography. Focusing particularly on cassava, a crop with complex transatlantic entanglements, her current project explores the use of the Nigerian indigo-dyeing technique adire eleko, which uses cassava paste as a resist. Her interventions reimagine adire as both material and epistemic practice, proposing techniques like “reverse adire” that inscribe photographic and pigment-based narratives onto cloth. Through this, cassava becomes not just motif but method: a medium for recalling the Columbian exchange from the perspective of the Arawak and Taino peoples, and for tracing how Indigenous knowledges persist through gendered, embodied craft traditions. Her ongoing work, Out of Many, One People, extends these material inquiries into broader questions of racial capitalism and financial circulation between the Global North and South, drawing visual and conceptual parallels between indigo-dyed cloth and POS systems across Lagos.
Photograph courtesy of Kosisochukwu Nnebe.
Tobi Onabolu Expands Cross-Disciplinary Practice Across Film, Installation, and Ecological Art
G.A.S. Foundation alumnus Tobi Onabolu continues to expand his multidisciplinary practice through a series of significant international engagements. His artist retreat, Finding Etherea, has been selected as one of eight initiatives across the continent for the Goethe-Institut’s Residency Re-Sourced programme, which supports sustainable and community-rooted creative spaces in Africa. Tobi's short film, Danse Macabre, shot in Benin prior to his 2022 G.A.S. residency, has been featured in various exhibitions. After private showings at Borna Soglo Gallery in Cotonou and Untitled in Lagos, the film, which reflects on ritual, grief, and embodiment, will be screened at the 46th Durban International Film Festival on 18 Jul at Ballito Junction, and on 25 Jul at Suncoast 6, Durban, South Africa. Danse Macabre has also been shortlisted for the 2025 Aesthetica Art Prize, and will be exhibited at York Art Gallery from September to January. From 15 August till 12 October, 2025, Tobi will be part of From the Ground Up, a group exhibition at Galleri Image in Aarhus, exploring ecological knowledge and cultural memory, alongside artists including fellow G.A.S. alumna Laeila Adjovi.
Film still, Danse Macabre, 2022 courtesy of Tobi Onabolu.
Gaia Ozwyn's Debut Solo Exhibition at LBF Contemporary, London
Following her participation in the RCA BLK x Yinka Shonibare Foundation residency at G.A.S. Foundation in Lagos earlier this year, multidisciplinary artist Gaia Ozwyn opens her debut solo exhibition Incantations to a Vague Borderland at LBF Contemporary in London from 22 May till 19 June 2025. Drawing on her Caribbean-British heritage and her prior career in medicine, Ozwyn crafts a deeply personal yet otherworldly spatial narrative, merging sculpture and painting to interrogate liminality, solitude, and diasporic otherness. The installation conjures a sensorial and conceptual terrain where belonging is transient and intimacy reverberates through absence. Accompanied by an essay from writer Matthew James Holman, the exhibition marks a significant milestone in Ozwyn’s evolving practice, one rooted in poetic world-building and interdisciplinary transformation.
Installation view, Incantations to a Vague Borderland, LBF Contemporary London. Photograph courtesy of LBF Contemporary.
G.A.S. Foundation Alumni Commissioned for Artangel’s Earth Rising
Ofem Ubi, Evan Ifekoya, and Leo Robinson, three alumni of G.A.S. Foundation, have been commissioned for Earth Rising: Volume I, an ambitious new project by Artangel. Set to launch globally across streaming platforms on 20 June 2025, the project assembles new audio works that reflect on human resilience, intimacy, and creativity in a time of planetary uncertainty. Earth Rising takes conceptual inspiration from the Voyager Golden Record, reframing its speculative mission through grounded, affective transmissions from the present. Ubi, Ifekoya, and Robinson contribute alongside a wide-ranging cohort of international artists and writers, affirming G.A.S. Foundation’s transnational ethos and commitment to collaborative futurities. This commission extends the reach of alumni practices into new cosmological registers, rooted in sound and poetic resistance.
G.A.S. Alumni (L-R): Ofem Ubi, Evan Ifekoya, Leo Robinson.