The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair has returned to London for its 14th edition, which has introduced a new section this year focused on African modernism, curated by art historian Nancy Dantas. Titled “West Wind” and inspired by Miriam Makeba’s 1966 anthem for unity, this presentation addresses the gap left by Sotheby’s when it closed its dedicated African modernism department in 2025. The showcase features mid-20th-century masters, like Ibrahim El-Salahi, Bertina Lopes, and Seyni Awa Camara, celebrating a vibrant period of political and aesthetic liberation across the continent and its diaspora. With this, the fair looks to the future while also honoring the past, illuminating the continent’s rich cultural and artistic landscape.
Below, a look at the 10 best booths at 1-54 London, which runs through Sunday at Somerset House.
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Ekene Emeka Maduka at Fabienne Levy
Image Credit: Emi Eleode for ARTnews Fabienne Levy presents seven paintings by Nigerian-born artist Ekene Emeka Maduka, who constructs a nostalgic “memory palace” rooted in her formative years at a Nigerian boarding school, as seen in the oil-on-canvas diptych Presence, Half-remembered (2026), showing three schoolgirls. Developed during a residency in Switzerland, these works serve as a microcosm of society, exploring themes of identity and displacement, and mark her artistic growth across Nigeria, Canada, and Switzerland. Rather than offering a direct autobiography, Maduka’s canvases immerse viewers in her subjects’ memories. The presentation contrasts the human figure with the architecture of a postcolonial modernist compound, positioning the school itself as a central protagonist. By juxtaposing Western literary influences such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Maduka examines the alienating frameworks of neo-colonized education and discipline. The resulting dreamscapes carry a haunting quality that lingers, capturing how context-rich environments endure in the human psyche.
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Holly Rollins at Gillian Jason Gallery
Image Credit: Emi Eleode for ARTnews London-based artist, designer, and interior architect Holly Rollins explores the domestic space as an archive of cultural memory and diasporic knowledge. Her exhibition comprises four sets of works, including lamps, clay photo frames, and two chairs that blur the line between functional sculpture and fine art. At the center of the display is the pink-colored Kaymito Chair (2026), made from 3D-printed recycled plastic. Working under her studio ROLSTUDIO, Rollins reinterprets familiar household forms to stimulate care, intimacy, and intergenerational memory, drawing from Caribbean matrifocal family structures. A key aspect of her philosophy is material experimentation. She combines diverse media, such as clay and memory foam, with modular systems, as seen in her custom lighting pieces positioned on a glass table and pouffe stool. Rollins’s academic research into neuro-architecture and how spatial environments influence identity informs her creation of interactive objects. Ultimately, her layout turns the booth into a landscape where everyday design elements become tangible vessels of inheritance and belonging.
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Damilola Opedun at Yenwa Gallery
Image Credit: Emi Eleode for ARTnews At Yenwa Gallery’s booth, two paintings, The Sacred Between and The Center Between The Noise (both 2026), tell the story of a largely forgotten community. Damilola Opedunhighlights Makoko, a vulnerable waterfront community in Lagos, creating a visual dialogue with Venice’s historic canals. The paintings also document the devastating 2025 government demolitions and land reclamation projects that have displaced Makoko residents. Opedun’s multilayered oil paintings ask whether Makoko can have a future, imaging one where it becomes celebrated worldwide for its art scene and attractions, like Venice. Although the artist has never visited Venice, his works blend lived experiences with imaginative possibilities. Using a palette of blues and browns, these compositions feature a unique, cloudy bird’s-eye perspective that makes viewers feel as though they are surveying the landscape from above or sharing the artist’s vision of what lies on the other side. By intertwining Makoko’s floating structures with iconic Venetian landmarks like Santa Maria della Salute, Opedun uses light and architectural elements to blur geographic boundaries and reflect on how history, wealth, and culture shape how communities are valued.
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Buqaqawuli Nobakada at Affinity Gallery
Image Credit: Emi Eleode for ARTnews Cape Town–based artist Buqaqawuli Nobakada uses her mixed-media practice to look into “mass manifesting” abundance and leisure for Black women. Emcimbini (2026), for example, is a lace-on-canvas painting depicting a vibrant poolside scene with several women lounging on beach chairs and swimming. Having grown up witnessing the socio-economic restrictions and struggles faced by previous generations of women, Nobakada uses her art to project them into aspirational realities. Her canvases become a generational meeting place, allowing women to comfortably inhabit spaces of pleasure and freedom without needing permission. Rather than viewing manifestation as an individual pursuit, the artist frames it as a collective expansion of what is possible. By incorporating delicate lace, Nobakada adds a layer to these ordinary yet historically restricted moments of belonging, extending possibilities into the past and ensuring the women who shaped her experiences are included in these newly imagined futures of joy.
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Medhat Shafik at Errm Art Gallery
Image Credit: Emi Eleode for ARTnews Unveiling a new collection of texturally rich paintings, Egyptian artist Medhat Shafik applies art as a metaphor for the fractures in contemporary society. Working like an archaeologist, he merges pieces together in what he calls “fragments” to help society reconnect with a sense of collective identity amid global conflict. The booth’s centerpiece, a layered collage painting titled Red (2025), introduces the otherworldly into this discussion, as seen via an asteroid hurtling toward Earth in this red-dominated composition. His practice is rooted in mystery and draws inspiration from ancient Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Nile heritages. He builds his canvases from a variety of materials, including natural sand, teabags, and fabrics treated with Indian dyeing techniques. This focus on materiality gives the artwork an organic quality, inviting viewers to look beyond the surface and discover the hidden meanings behind the abstract shapes, revealing a shared human narrative.
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Yvanovitch Mbaya at Ablakassa
Image Credit: Emi Eleode for ARTnews Exploring themes of belonging, memory and cultural identity, Congolese artist Yvanovitch Mbaya’s massive textile showpiece, Untitled (2023), takes center stage in the room. Crafted from recycled denim, a fabric also used to cover trucks transporting commercial goods, Mbaya repurposes this rugged material as an homage to his people. On its surface, anonymous, genderless figures from the Bantu tribe appear. Using coffee and oil paint, he infuses the heavy denim with materials that create varied textures and an earthy presence. Also on view are two works on paper, demonstrating the artist’s multidisciplinary transition between canvas and paper. He also takes inspiration from his academic background in art psychology and his physical journeys across Africa. Mbaya’s installation balances individual memory, capturing how people and their material histories continuously shape one another.
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Mellaney Roberts at Berman Contemporary Gallery
Image Credit: Emi Eleode for ARTnews Mellaney Roberts, a ceramic artist and academic from South Africa, transforms clay, glass, and metal into vessels of remembrance. Originally from Willowmore in the Eastern Cape, Roberts has created three sculptures for the fair, exploring themes of identity, material memory, and land-based narratives. Her latest body of work emerges from a place of mourning following the devastating floods in May 2026, which washed away ancestral lands belonging to marginalized Coloured and Khoi communities in South Africa. To honor this history and repair fractured legacies, Roberts focuses on materiality, sourcing clay, resin, and tree bark collected from her home region. Her standing sculpture, Die Draers (The Bearers), 2026, has a touch of the steampunk aesthetic, integrating copper into the cut and pierced ceramic surfaces. The works function as metaphors for shifting cultural borders and classifications. Roberts’s hybrid forms conjure intergenerational memories, subverting discourses of otherness and challenging the painful feeling of non-belonging.
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Alpha Odhiambo at 16/16
Image Credit: Emi Eleode for ARTnews Self-taught, Nairobi-based artist Alpha Odhiambo presents a technical showcase of a unique painting method he’s spent years perfecting. He works exclusively on industrial vinyl mesh, as seen in his multilayered piece Bodybuilder (2026). Odhiambo meticulously mixes acrylics and solvent paints to achieve a precise viscosity that prevents pigment from seeping through the porous screen. The resulting work balances opacity and translucency, resembling stained-glass windows or shifting holograms. The piece also changes under different lighting conditions, adding to its dynamic nature. Odhiambo is inspired by the imagery from daily life to analyze global political structures and their impact on human livelihoods, with his layered mesh works serving as a mirror to power. He invites viewers to interpret his work and shows how technical precision can become a catalyst for critical societal engagement.
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Souad Abdelrasoul at Gallery Misr
Image Credit: Emi Eleode for ARTnews Artist and art historian Souad Abdelrasoul, who lives and works in Cairo, employs surreal, metamorphosed figures to explore the tension between progressive women and oppressive social and cultural systems. Her large-scale centerpiece painting, A Memory Between Fear and Flowers (2026), depicts a silent psychological confrontation between a contemporary woman and a man in primitive clothing, shaped by the past. He holds a rabbit, symbolizing unanalyzed fears and the masculine authority that society imposes, in which male vulnerability has no room to be expressed, while the woman clutches a miniature mirror image of herself. This reflection serves as an archive of maternal lineage, representing a future loved one, such as her daughter, and generations of inherited resilience. In addition to the main canvas, her exhibition includes six smaller dual-aspect portraits of faces. Together, these works examine how love, silence, and trauma are passed down through generations, creating a visual narrative that encourages women to liberate themselves from fears that weren’t theirs to begin with.
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Kimathi Mafafo at Kristin Hjellegjerde
Image Credit: Courtesy the artist and Kristin Hjellegjerde In a vibrant solo exhibition featuring seven intricate embroidered textile works, South African artist Kimathi Mafafo surveys nature as an embodied experience of female empowerment. Created with both hand and machine stitching, her works employ varied stitches that resemble rich brushstrokes, blending layers of pink, purple, and brown to achieve skin tones. Collaboration is central to Mafafo’s practice: She works closely with women she has trained in her studio, weaving elements of their lives into layered surfaces. This spirit of collective solidarity appears in Clearly, A Flamboyant Alliance: A Flamboyant Collaboration (2023), where overlapping limbs create a hybrid quality, as if the bodies are in motion. Drawing on childhood memories of visiting botanical gardens, Mafafo incorporates lush passion flowers into her tapestries. Her grandmother introduced her to this calming flower for its restorative properties, and it becomes a mystical transmitter of serenity. Mafafo’s sculptural fabrics offer a meditative quality, inviting introspection and nurturing energy that extends well beyond the canvas edges.