This March, Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, in partnership with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), announced the call for the pilot edition of the G.A.S. Critical Writing Workshop, an initiative designed to support the professional and critical development of emerging local art writers, researchers, and cultural practitioners. This edition explores critical art writing practices while examining how writing can function as a tool for activism, encouraging readers to ask questions, challenge narratives, and engage more deeply with the social and political contexts that shape contemporary art.

Bootleg Griot is an independent public library initiative dedicated to broadening access to literature and print media. Committed to collecting, preserving, and presenting works by artists, collectives, and writers of African descent, it serves as a resource for cultural continuity and exchange.

Functioning as a living archive of ideas, Bootleg Griot recognizes cultural preservation as essential to understanding and reclaiming ethnic histories, while fostering dialogue and knowledge-sharing within the community.

The Afrosonic Innovation Lab is a team of artists, creatives, and scholars actively engaged in the making of music, sound experimentation, and musicological analysis. We actively seek and cultivate projects globally which involve research creation, performance, publication, field research, and curation. While based in Toronto, we work across a number of sites in Canada and internationally.

African Style Archive (ASA) is a research platform and visual repository dedicated to documenting and preserving African fashion history. By collecting photographs, rare books, and ephemera, ASA connects historic and contemporary narratives of African dress, offering scholars, institutions, and cultural practitioners a vital resource for understanding how style reflects identity, politics, and creativity across the continent and diaspora.

Launched in 2020, the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) is a foundation dedicated to research, technology and art. As a philanthropic institution, JCAF combines academic inquiry, a platform for museum-quality exhibitions and an innovative approach to knowledge creation in the Global South. Our ethos is to advance the appreciation of modern and contemporary art through the production, sharing and preservation of knowledge from the South. Our exhibitions are curated according to a theme and supported by a public programme that includes lectures, talks, performances, workshops and podcasts. We publish a journal that follows a structured research methodology, and our programmes and publications are offered for free to the public. JCAF is a non-collecting foundation. We explore the intersection of art, storytelling and technology to create an integrated and immersive experience for our visitors.

As a future-oriented institution, JCAF engages with leading thinkers, artists, professionals, scholars and the broader public to build a knowledge community. In doing so, we aim to foster meaningful encounters between visitors and artworks, while promoting intellectual exploration and encouraging collective engagement across disciplines.

iwalewabooks is a publishing house for art, discourse and archives. We dedicate our publications to​ aesthetic discourses, the politics of collecting and archiving, and pleasure politics. ​​Creating books is an aesthetic and collective endeavour. In this sense, we are interested in the ecosystem of books - the co-curating and coproducting of print-relating activities. Questions that guide our practice are: How are archives cared for, how do we read, share, exchange? How do we transmit knowledges? How do we inject criticality into commodified spaces in art?

Many volumes are produced in collaboration with cultural workers, artists, collectives, activists and academics, mainly from African countries and the diaspora.

We think, dream, and make along our series: ​
The series “art” presents monographs of contemporary artists whose aesthetic practices spark societal discourses. In the series “discourse”, our authors engender musings about future(s) and reflect on recent debates within the fields of aesthetics, society, the arts and politics.​ Critical engagements with not only museum collections, but also with archives - both material and immaterial - are questioned, challenged and cared for through the series collections.​ Our series "pleasure" celebrates expressions of freedom, love, sex and desire in all imaginable forms.​ The series "scholar" publishes recent academic positions, as well as re-editions of older texts, from subjects such as art, philosophy or spirituality.​ "zines by iwalewabooks" deals with aesthetically and politically urgent matters.
In addition, we publish out-of-band, a series of smaller projects that that would be too good not to be shared.

We are currently based in Johannesburg (South Africa), Lagos (Nigeria) and Frankfurt (Germany), weaving a network of residencies, print production and intellectual/aesthetic conversations between the continents.

LUDI is a catalyst for human(e)-centred, inclusive, liveable, and sustainable urban development across African cities. We mobilise people, knowledge, and systems through advocacy, experimentation, and cross-sector collaboration to strengthen urban governance and advance equitable urban transformation. Our work bridges research, policy, and practice, creating spaces where diverse urban actors can collectively shape more just and resilient cities.
One component of this mission is the LUDI Library. The Library responds to the fragmentation of scholarship and practice-based knowledge on African urbanism and architecture. By curating and centralising key texts, research outputs, and critical resources, it provides a structured and accessible knowledge platform for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. In doing so, it strengthens intellectual continuity, supports evidence-informed decision-making, and deepens critical engagement with the specific spatial, social, and governance dynamics shaping African cities.

The Recovery Plan brings to the AAL Lab Affiliates Network a distinctive model of cultural infrastructure rooted in convening, research activation, and Afro-diasporic knowledge exchange. Based in Florence, the organisation has developed a dynamic practice that connects exhibitions, archival inquiry, public programming, and community-led dialogue, while also exploring scalable approaches to documentation, publishing, and long-term research platforms. Its participation in the network strengthens a shared commitment to transnational collaboration and to building more expansive frameworks for African and Afro-diasporic libraries, archives, and artistic research.

OH Institute emerged from a simple reality: over the years, OH Gallery’s work has consistently exceeded the gallery format. Presenting artworks was never the end goal—our practice has also been about producing knowledge, building critical tools, and strengthening the conditions that allow local scenes to author their own narratives. The demands we encountered, archives at risk, fragmented resources, lack of shared frameworks, limited access to professional tools, made one thing clear: a dedicated public-interest structure was needed.
After three years of preparation, we founded OH INSTITUTE as a public-interest organisation responding to a structural gap: ecosystem-building remains insufficient in the face of current and future challenges, while the frameworks, tools, and methodologies required to strengthen it are still scarce and not widely accessible. OH Institute develops long-term programmes, shared working frameworks, and practical tools, while supporting key stakeholders, including public institutions, in capacity building and cultural sovereignty.
The Institute’s activities are structured around six pillars: research and archives; library and publishing; education and mediation; residencies; skills mapping and referral; and third-party missions focused on support, ecosystem structuring, and capacity transfer.

Last week, we welcomed adeoluwa oluwajoba, a Lagos-based mixed media artist and a recipient of the G.A.S. Fellowship Award 2026, for a residency at G.A.S. Lagos. Working across painting, collage, and photographic printmaking, adeoluwa’s practice examines the transfer and reproduction of images, exploring how visual fragments can be layered to create intricate and often disjointed scenes of bodies and landscapes. His work investigates the shifting relationships between image, meaning, and spatial experience.

G.A.S. Foundation is pleased to welcome Olutomi Kassim, a UK-based academic researcher and interdisciplinary artist, for a residency at G.A.S. Lagos as a recipient of the G.A.S. Fellowship Award 2026. Olutomi’s practice sits at the intersection of scholarly research, performance, and textile-based art, examining how artistic practice can function as a catalyst for civic dialogue and social transformation. Her current work explores the role of cultural production as a form of “soft power” capable of addressing post-colonial governance challenges and encouraging communal reflection on justice, memory, and democratic futures.