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.