Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation have announced the 2025–26 edition of 'Re:assemblages', a programme focused on African and Afro-diasporic archives as sites for artistic inquiry and decolonial practice. Curated by Naima Hassan with contributions from Maryam Kazeem, Ann Marie Peña, and Jonn Gale, the initiative includes international convenings, symposia, fellowships, and micro-publications, anchored by a two-day symposium in Lagos during Lagos Art Week (4–5 November 2025). The programme draws on the Picton Archive at G.A.S.'s Lagos campus and is supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, featuring four curatorial themes: Ecotones, The Short Century, Annotations, and The Living Archive. It also launches the African Arts Libraries Lab (AAL Lab), a pan-African network of libraries and publishers across Lagos, Dakar, Marrakesh, Cairo, Nairobi, Cape Town, and Limbe.
This programme matters because it reframes archival stewardship from a Eurocentric model to a pan-African, decolonial approach, treating archives as living, evolving mediums for storytelling and activism. By connecting artists, librarians, and cultural practitioners across multiple African cities and the diaspora, it addresses critical issues of access, visibility, and authorship in postcolonial knowledge production. The launch of the AAL Lab and the Archive Futures Repository signals a significant infrastructural investment in preserving and activating African art histories, challenging colonial archival practices while fostering new collaborative models for the continent's cultural heritage.