African Artists Resisting Singular Interpretation In Their Practice

EDITORIAL

Artists at Art Basel Hong Kong 2026

With a record of over 91,000 visitors, Art Basel Hong Kong came to a close on March 29. The 13th edition of the fair, which ran for five days at the Convention and Exhibition Centre, featured 240 galleries from 41 countries and territories, and reported steady sales. David Zwirner reported sales with a 2002 painting by South African artist Marlene Dumas, which sold for $3.5 million. Taka Ishii Gallery sold Jade Fadojutimi’s That day she grieved for the life she never had (2026) for approximately £350,000 ($465,000).

The works of these three artists caught our attention:

Jade Fadojutimi

Nigerian painter Jadé Fadojutimi’s work was presented in a group presentation with Taka Ishii Gallery. Her artistic practice revolves around questions about her own identity and her surroundings. By paying attention to the things that interest her, such as Japanese anime, soundtracks, video games, fashion, and the memories and experiences they evoke, she attempts to find clues to construct a sense of oneself. Interrogating herself incessantly about the fluid nature of identity and how her thoughts, emotions and experiences form her, she reflects on herself and releases her own self through the act of painting. Vivid and brilliant colors in a broad range of concentration and transparency fill up the canvas with brushstrokes in various scales, dots, marks, shapes, and textures. An emotional landscape, drifting between figurative and abstract, emerges with full of energy on the canvas.

Jadé Fadojutimi, A Bellyful, 2019, oil and acrylic on canvas, 180 x 160 cm. Image courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery.

Serge Alain Nitegeka

Featured in a group presentation with Pearl Lam Projects was Rwandan artist Serge Alain Nitegeka, whose works engage with memory, migration, and diasporic experience, addressing themes of displacement and belonging. Working with painting and sculpture and committed to his large-scale, site-specific installations, Nitegeka produces works that address issues of identity sparked by forced migration and cultural and political borders. His installations present obstacles that promote participation in the metaphoric experience: they physically bisect three-dimensional space and use the viewer as a further disruptive variable, resulting in a tableau vivant of sorts. Nitegeka’s acute, investigatory aesthetic sense places him within the rich art historical cadre of minimalism and abstraction, while the larger concepts he tackles resonate in the atmosphere of today’s global politics.

Serge Alain Nitegeka, Displaced Peoples in Situ: Studio Study XXVI, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 133.5 x 133.5 cm. Image courtesy of Pearl Lam Projects.

Alimi Adewale

Also featured in a group presentation with Pearl Lam Projects was Nigerian artist Alimi Adewale, whose works explore questions of identity through richly textured figurative paintings that draw on African histories, layered surfaces, and symbolic colour. Adewale employs the mediums of painting, sculpture, and installation to explore urban issues and the lives of everyday people in cities. Some of his work examines the impact of excessive urbanisation, rapid modern development, and the growing global economy on society. His practice combines elements of minimalism and abstraction to evoke the dynamism and intensity of the cosmopolitan environment. Most of his work has a profusion of rich textures and oftentimes an uncommon sculptural finish, whether utilising photography and oil paint or thick lumps of oil mediums. Alimi Adewale mines the endless possibilities of a particular material to introduce an additional dimension into the work: that of time. Imbued with their own mortality, his sculptures cultivate the experiential function of art compared to traditional African sculptures, creating an oeuvre that is distinctly current and as witty as it is macabre.

Alimi Adewale, Ancestral Gaze II, 2025, Acrylic on kilim, 80 x 55 cm. Image courtesy of Pearl Lam Projects.

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Precious Okoyomon at Whitney Biennial 2026

The 82nd edition of the Whitney Biennial is on from March 8 to August 26, 2026. Showing an intergenerational and international group of 56 artists, duos, and collectives using a range of media and artistic strategies to explore interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, infrastructural networks, precarious ecologies, and shared mythologies, the Whitney Biennial 2026 presents works of variable quality.

Precious Okoyomon with their installation Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid (2026), on view in the Whitney Biennial. Image courtesy of Christopher Garcia Valle & ARTnews.

Showing at the Whitney Biennial is Nigerian-American artist Precious Okoyomon with their installation, Everything wants to kill you and you should be afraid. The installation, which opened as part of the biennial on the 25th of March, features 55 suspended creatures with bodies sewn together from taxidermied bird wings and discarded children’s toys salvaged from thrift stores.