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.  

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.