Curators Announced for Lagos Biennial 2026

What lies hidden in the shadows of our museum spaces? Whose stories are silenced, and whose voices are amplified? If we were to build a museum from scratch, unbounded by structural inequities, what form would it take?

Titled The Museum of Things Unseen, the Lagos Biennial 2026 offers a speculative response to these questions. This conceptual museum brings together a collection of works to address the contextual, philosophical, and political forces that shape practices of cultural circulations and museology.

The Museum of Things Unseen aims to bring together and exhibit rarely or never-before-seen artworks, examining the factors (including an imbalanced global art canon shaped by cultural bias, financial power, political influence, curatorial priorities, and conservation concerns) that contribute to their “unseenness.” The intention is to open up the current bounding structures of these artworks and inquire into the invisible labour, evolving identities, and concealed market forces shaping our cultural landscape. Contemporary artists will be invited to reinterpret and reimagine the works on display, questioning the invisibility of these works, rewriting the narratives within the context of a speculative museum, and offering new perspectives that illuminate the unseen dimensions of these pieces.

In addition to this speculative, open and dynamic inquiry into cultural objects and flows, the 5th edition of the Lagos Biennial marks the inauguration of the Àkéte Collection, a diverse array of art objects from across the world and a pioneering public international art collection in Africa. The Àkéte Collection will critically examine the universal art canon, collecting works through donations and loans from museums, foundations, and private collections worldwide to ensure unprecedented physical access to these pieces.

Hence, The Museum of Things Unseen is an open paradox: aspiring for inclusivity in an exclusionary field, being speculative yet concrete, unsettling yet earnest, ephemeral yet consequential. By bringing artworks to Lagos and recontextualising them within the affective infrastructural dimensions of the city, the Biennial aspires to weave diverse and layered histories into a new relational temporal zone.

Chinyere Obieze, Furen Dai, and Sam Hopkins have been appointed as co-curators for this edition of the Lagos Biennial by the Artistic Director, Folakunle Oshun. The curators will engage critically and dialogically with museums, institutions, and artists, co-developing The Museum of Things Unseen for the 2026 edition of the Lagos Biennial.

An international colloquium will accompany the biennial events, convening academics and museum specialists from across the world to discuss heritage circulations, restitution, and the concept of the universal museum.

-The curatorial team

Furen Dai

Furen Dai (b. Changsha) is an artist whose work explores the origins of language and how categorization structures and systems function within a broader social and political context. Anchored in sculpture, her practice challenges these very notions and expands across film, publishing, drawing, fresco painting and photography, taking into account the exploration of material, display, lighting, architecture, and text. She is the co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Art New York, a pioneering artist-led organization dedicated to publishing and the advancement of artist’s books.

Recent exhibitions and commissions include Offworlds at YveYang gallery, the New England Triennial, Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, the National Art Center, Tokyo, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston. She is currently preparing her solo exhibition at the Broodthaers Society of America. Dai has received fellowships at MacDowell, the Center for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin, International Studio and Curatorial Programs, and Art OMI. Her work has been featured in Artforum, LEAP Magazine, The New York Review, Boston Globe, and Boston Art Review. She has also contributed her own writing to Asia Art Archive and Best!: Letters from Asian Americans in the Arts published by Paper Monument.

Dai holds an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and a BA in Russian Language and Literature from Beijing Foreign Studies University. She is currently a lecturer at Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York and previously worked as the Director of Programs and Collections at Asia Art Archive in America.

Chinyere Obieze

Chinyere Obieze is a curator and cultural producer who investigates the material negotiations of knowledge systems across nature, culture, and economy. Their curatorial practice interrogates how these interconnected forces shape and inform artistic production, with a focus on fostering critical thinking, new critical practices and inclusivity in contemporary art spaces.

Her work actively engages with artists to co-create spaces of dialogue and empowerment, challenging conventional narratives while opening new avenues for cultural and artistic expression. She is currently building frameworks to understand Africa’s evolving presence in digital environments.

Obieze designed and produced Butterfly Conversations with Parresia Publishers. They are curating Klub der Weishet KDW at the Didi Museum. They also served as a curatorial assistant for Lagos Biennial 2024: Refuge. Currently, they are working on Kedu Lagos, an upcoming exhibition set to take place at The Old Nigerian Printing Press.

Sam Hopkins

Sam Hopkins is an artist, researcher, and educator whose work navigates the intersections of media, narrative and collaboration, exploring how representations are constructed within different socio-political contexts.

Sam’s projects frequently engage with specific communities to co-produce counter-narratives that resonate both inside and outside institutional spaces. His recent inquires into issues of restitution and artistic research are shaped by questions of positionality. Central to this approach is his idea of a Networked Practice—which emphasises the expertise produced across different geographies, bodies, and minds. Networked Practice explores the potential of collaborative communities, such as Slum TV, and the International Inventories Programme (IIP), to interrogate, reveal and reshape power dynamics and to enable new forms of representation.

Sam has exhibited in international biennales such as Lagos, Dakar, Poznan, and Moscow, at institutions like the Dortmunder U, Kunsthaus Bregenz and galleries like the Goodman Gallery and Richard Taittinger. His work is held in collections including the Smithsonian, Gedenkstätte Buchenwald, and the Abteiberg Museum. In addition to his artistic practice, Sam is invested in education, currently working as Assistant Professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. His teaching aspires to foster critical thinking, a collaborative sensibility and interdisciplinary exploration.