Since its establishment in 2017, the Lagos Biennial has staged four editions across three of the city’s most significant monumental sites: the Nigerian Railway Corporation (2017), Independence House (2019), and Tafawa Balewa Square (2021 & 2024). Each edition has transformed these historically charged spaces into sites of artistic production, encounter, and critical reflection.
Building on this legacy, the Lagos Biennial is working towards the establishment of its own permanent pavilion and collection. Conceived in dialogue with the architecture, histories, and ideological legacies of its previous venues, the new space will respond to the evolving demands of a contemporary art institution—rooted in Lagos and oriented towards the future.
Across its first four editions, the Biennial has brought together more than 200 artists from around the world, generating an extraordinary body of ambitious and often large-scale work. The monumentality of many of these projects reflects the exceptional spaces the Biennial has secured through sustained negotiations with public authorities. Opening these post-independence architectural landmarks to artists and the wider public has become central to the Lagos Biennial’s identity and its engagement with the cultural history of the city.
The next chapter consolidates this history into a permanent and sustainable cultural space capable of engaging the urgent conversations shaping contemporary society—around culture, heritage, community, memory, and politics.
At its heart will be the Àkéte Collection, bringing together significant works from previous editions of the Lagos Biennial alongside new acquisitions, donations, and long-term loans from artists, international museums, private collections, and individuals. Envisioned as a major international collection of modern and contemporary art based in Africa, Àkéte will provide a dynamic platform through which artistic histories can be preserved, exhibited, researched, and continually reinterpreted.
The collection forms the foundation of an evolving institution: a versatile cultural space that strengthens Lagos’s position as an international centre for contemporary art and establishes a significant new artistic landmark for the city.
The Àkéte Collection will be unveiled in 2026 through its first major exhibition, presented within the fifth edition of the Lagos Biennial, The Museum of Things Unseen.
