As the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair returned to London’s Somerset House for its 13th edition, the fair continued to expand its influence as the leading platform for art from Africa and its diaspora. The fair’s name, which references the fifty-four countries that make up the African continent, reflects its commitment to showcasing a diversity of cultures, perspectives, and artistic approaches. This year’s roster of artists navigated the fault lines between visibility and erasure, activism and aesthetics.
With three editions a year – in Marrakesh, London, and New York – the 1-54 Art Fair leads the way in providing visibility to contemporary African art. Here are carefully selected artists for you to keep an eye on from the London edition, which took place October 16-19. Each offers a distinct lens on the contemporary moment, bridging the personal and the political, the local and the global, and reshaping how we experience art today.
Hashim Nasr
A Sudanese artist, Hashim Nasr (b. 1990), brings a minimalist yet deeply charged sensibility to his works. He is currently based in Alexandria, Egypt. Unable to return home since the civil war broke out in 2023, he now dedicates his work to visualising the experience of exile through his trademark surreal, dreamlike images. His recent works navigate the emotional terrain of exile and belonging, reimagining childhood memories through a palette of deep blues, conical forms, and natural motifs that evoke both nostalgia and dream.
Rooted in the turbulence of Sudan’s current political and economic upheavals, Nasr’s practice becomes a means of cultural preservation and self-reclamation—a quiet, surrealist resistance that bridges the intimate and the collective. At the Fair, he was represented by TINTERA Gallery.
Beau Disundi Nzazi
Beau Disundi Nzazi (b. 1993) is a Congolese multidisciplinary artist whose work bridges African history and global economic narratives, with a particular focus on the legacy of codfish. Educated in Interior Architecture in Kinshasa and in fine arts in France and Belgium, Nzazi works across sculpture, drawing, installation, weaving, engraving, and silkscreen, often experimenting with local and unconventional materials—including the self-made “codfish cardboard”.
Represented by AKKA Project at the 1-54 in London, Nzazi’s practice traces the codfish’s journey from its introduction to the Kongo Kingdom by Portuguese traders to its central role in global trade and economic expansion. Using the codfish as both a tangible material and a metaphor, Nzazi investigates the intertwined histories of cultural exchange, economic imperatives, and the emergence of capitalism, highlighting how commodities shape societies and human experience.
Ibrahim Ahmed
Also represented by TINTERA Gallery, Ibrahim Ahmed (b. 1984) spent his childhood between Bahrain and Egypt before moving to the United States at the age of thirteen, where he eventually earned his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Currently based in Cairo, Ahmed works across mixed media, sculpture, and installation to examine the entangled legacies of colonialism, migration, and identity. His work seeks to interrogate the concept of the nation-state and imagined borders.
Ahmed’s use of textiles and found materials reflects a sustained engagement with the movement of people and objects across borders—transforming fabric into both a historical record and a critique of global power. Through acts of cutting, layering, and reassembly, Ahmed reimagines material as a site of resistance, reclaiming narratives often shaped by displacement and inequality.
Vanessa Endeley
Vanessa Endeley (b. 1994) is a London-based visual artist whose background in law and documentary photography informs a deeply introspective practice. Her work merges contemporary art with psychological and emotional inquiry, exploring the complexities of vulnerability, identity, and selfhood.
Through bold brushstrokes, delicate linework, and richly layered colour, Endeley creates paintings that feel both intimate and expansive—spaces where insecurity transforms into strength and self-reflection becomes a form of resistance. Driven by a passion for self-expression, Endeley pursued formal training at the University of the Arts London, refining her technique and voice, and she is currently represented by Affinity Gallery, Lagos.
Amani Lewis
Amani Lewis (b. 1994) is a Baltimore-based artist whose practice centres on layered portraits that interrogate and reimagine representations of Black communities and urban life in mainstream media. Through a dynamic interplay of photography, digital manipulation, and paint, Lewis reclaims narrative authority from systems that have historically simplified, misrepresented, or erased these stories.
Their works are dense, tactile compositions—rich with texture, colour, and rhythm—that evoke the vibrancy, resilience, and complexity of Baltimore’s neighbourhoods. Each piece functions as a site of renewal and reclamation, charged with energy, movement, and a sense of collective memory and healing. At the 1-54, Lewis was represented by Mindy Solomon Gallery.
Laetitia Ky
Laetitia Ky (b. 1994) is an artist known globally for her sculptural hair art and viral self-portraits. Originally from Côte d’Ivoire, she transforms her own body into a site of feminist storytelling. Using her hair as both medium and message, Ky constructs intricate forms—hands, symbols, and faces—that speak to gender politics, beauty standards, and bodily autonomy. Her practice exists at the intersection of performance, photography, and activism, drawing from precolonial African hair traditions while reimagining them within the context of digital culture and social media.
Ky’s work bridges ancestral knowledge and contemporary feminism, reclaiming beauty rituals as acts of resistance and self-definition. Represented by lis10Gallery Paris at 1-54, Ky’s work resonates as both intimate and political, a celebration of creativity rooted in resistance and the female gaze.
Wycliffe Mundopa
Wycliffe Mundopa (b. 1987) is an artist whose work illuminates the often overlooked lives of women in his home town of Harare, Zimbabwe. Mundopa vividly reflects the tensions between tradition and change, and affirms their central role in the nation’s social fabric. An avid student of painting history, Mundopa insists on portraying the lives of his country and contemporaries with the same pathos and grandeur as the Dutch masters, such as Rubens and Rembrandt, positioning himself as a contemporary heir to that tradition. To him, the struggles, triumphs, and everyday dramas of ordinary people in Harare are historically significant and deserve to be depicted with equal reverence and dignity.
On bright, theatrical canvases, Mundopa combines oil paint and fabric collage, his central figures being mothers, caregivers, children, and sex workers who live and work in neighbourhoods across the city. These women are rendered not as symbols of victimhood but as icons of endurance—their bodies and gestures imbued with both humour and heartbreak. Mundopa is represented by First Floor Gallery Harare.
Malaika Temba
Malaika Temba (b. 1996) is a visual artist based in New York. Having grown up across Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the United States, her elaborate textiles honour the diaspora’s female lineage—the essential labourers, caretakers, and nurturers whose work sustains communities yet often goes unrecognised.
Temba’s textile works transform fabric, a medium long stereotyped as feminine and domestic, into a resilient, unyielding art form that confronts questions of labour, the care economy, and global exchange. Her knit, woven, and silkscreen textiles function as both memorial and protest, celebrating women’s labour while exposing the inequities that structure it. Through her practice, women’s overlooked contributions become visible, celebrated, and monumentalized. Temba is represented by Mindy Solomon Gallery.
Tshepiso Moropa
Tshepiso Moropa (b. 1995) is a self-taught collage artist born and based in Johannesburg, South Africa, represented by THK Gallery. With an academic background in psychology, linguistics, and research, Moropa brings a layered intellectual and emotional depth to her practice. Drawing from African historical archives that document Black life and womanhood, she reimagines the archive as a living and evolving space full of possibility.
Working fluidly between digital and analogue collage, her compositions are grounded in the oral traditions of her childhood, weaving together symbolism, repetition, and abstraction to evoke ancestral knowledge and inherited memory.
Violeta Sofia
Violeta Sofia (b. 1979) is a London-based artist of Cameroonian and Equatorial Guinean heritage whose work draws on African cultural traditions while engaging with broader art historical references. Her work seeks to subvert stereotypes and highlight the diverse experiences of women, particularly those of colour. Influenced by old master paintings, Sofia transforms her hands into symbolic canvases.
Her acclaimed Hand Masters series began as a personal response to vitiligo, documenting changes in her skin, and evolved into a meditation on identity, resilience, and the reframing of visible difference as beauty. Through this artistic expression, Sofia strives to showcase the beauty that lies within vitiligo. Her series reminds us that a skin condition can be a testament to resilience, urging viewers to rethink conventional notions of beauty. Sofia’s work has been exhibited internationally and featured in publications such as Vogue Global, Elle Italia, and The Telegraph Magazine. At the 1-54 London, she was represented by Gillian Jason Gallery.
