In May 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, through the lens of archival practice, speculative citation, and interdisciplinary exchange.The intensive forms part of the second chapter of Re:assemblages, a multi-year programme that explores African art libraries as living and future-shaping spaces. 

This year Y.S.F. returns to Lagos with a difference!  We are pleased to offer bookings that includes our Re-assemblages Symposium on 4 - 5 November 2025 during Lagos Art Week. hosted by G.A.S. and Y.S.F., the symposium will convene African and global archivists, artists, curators, and cultural practitioners for a series of conversations, panels, performances and site-specific interventions.  This is followed by a 3- day programme around the wider Lagos art and culture week, incorporating the Art X fair as well as a visit to G.A.S. Foundation.

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 Trip 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, 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.