Introduction
The epistemic map of contemporary art has long been drawn in the Global North. The institutional, pedagogical, and curatorial work of Olabisi (Bisi) Obafunke Silva (1962–2019) set out to redraw it from Lagos. Her interventions extended curating beyond exhibition-making into an intellectual practice that shaped the historiography and broader discourse of contemporary art from Africa.Footnote 1 Through the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA Lagos) and Àsìkò Art School, Silva developed a critical infrastructure demonstrating how creative practice generates intellectual authority directly from the continent. This work addresses a central concern in African studies: who generates knowledge about Africa, from where, and under what conditions? By positioning curatorship as a mode of theory-making, this study examines how Silva’s interventions create an intellectual infrastructure through which authority is constructed and negotiated.
Researchers have increasingly challenged the dominance of Northern art-historical frameworks that have historically structured the field (Enwezor Reference Enwezor, Enwezor and Condee2008; Oguibe Reference Oguibe2004; Okeke-Agulu Reference Okeke-Agulu2015). Such scholarship critiques how the African continent has been marginalized through externally imposed academic categories that detach artistic production from its own intellectual contexts. As Ruth Simbao and her colleagues argue, “Africa is like an absent landlord in most dialogues and discourses relating to her own arts” (Simbao et al. Reference Simbao, Miko and Eyitayo Tolulope2017, 13). While these interventions foreground African perspectives, the interpretation of the field often remains tied to curatorial networks in the Global North. Sylvester Ogbechie (Reference Ogbechie2010), for example, critiques globally mobile curators like Okwui Enwezor as “culture brokers” whose methods and frameworks prioritize international art capitals over locally grounded institutional development. Building on this, Rikki Wemega-Kwawu (Reference Wemega-Kwawu2012) argues that a sustained emphasis on diaspora artists contributes to the underrepresentation of practitioners working on the continent. Despite growing critiques of Northern dominance in African art history, the field remains largely shaped by Global North curatorial networks and diaspora-focused perspectives, leaving locally grounded artists, institutions, and knowledge systems on the continent underrepresented.
What has received less attention are Africa-based infrastructures as sites of knowledge production and intellectual validation, and it is here that this study intervenes. Focusing on Silva’s practice in Lagos, it explores how her work responded to what Simon Njami (Reference Njami1998) described as the “aphonia of Africa,” the silencing of African artistic voices through Northern gatekeeping. Silva emerged within a broader movement in which Global South practitioners sought to challenge this external mediation through research-driven and locally grounded methodologies (Pinther et al. Reference Pinther, Fischer and Nzewi2015). Unlike transnational models prioritizing global circulation, Silva treated Lagos as a generative epistemic site. However, centering the continent reveals a paradox. Despite relocating her work to Africa, Silva’s endeavors remained structurally entangled in global systems of funding and validation. Her practice was therefore relational, shaped through ongoing negotiation with peripheral networks. This reframes intellectual production as an interaction between local agency and global interdependence rather than a simple form of autonomy.
The study builds on this paradox to shift focus from representation alone toward the structures through which artistic knowledge is authorized. It draws on the “epistemologies of the South” theorized by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Maria Paula Meneses (Reference de Sousa Santos and Meneses2019) to examine how Silva’s practice challenged Northern universalism. For de Sousa Santos and Meneses, Northern knowledge systems do not represent universal truths but rather historically specific and violent ways of knowing linked to colonial expansion which systematically suppressed and invalidated non-Western epistemologies. De Sousa Santos terms this division the “abyssal line”: a structure that renders Southern knowledge invisible, inferior, or simply inexistent from the Northern perspective. Simbao’s (Reference Simbao2017) concept of “strategic Southernness” serves as a central theoretical framework, providing a lens through which to analyze her deliberate positioning of the Global South not as a peripheral space, but as a site of epistemic authority and cultural legitimacy. Simbao et al. (Reference Simbao, Miko and Eyitayo Tolulope2017) operationalize Alan Davies’s (Reference Davies1985) concept of “looking sideways” to highlight the act of bypassing Northern hubs, a methodological shift that replaces the search for vertical validation from global centers with lateral comparisons between practitioners in similar postcolonial contexts. Yet this tension reflects Simbao et al.’s (Reference Simbao, Miko and Eyitayo Tolulope2017) broader caution that sideways exchanges remain perpetually entangled within global systems of power. Davies’s concept nonetheless provides the basis for the nonhierarchical orientation that emerges in Silva’s practice. The work of Dzekashu MacViban (Reference MacViban, Kamerun and Namibia2019) extends this analysis further, insisting that the decolonization of knowledge is not an abstract goal but is rooted in the material conditions of production. MacViban notes that what is at stake is not only where knowledge emanates from, but how it is shaped and sustained within the very structures that define its authority.
This commitment to the continent was shared by Silva’s peers such as Koyo Kouoh and Gabi Ngcobo, who also established independent spaces, in Senegal and South Africa to bypass Northern mediation. These women are part of a broader movement at the turn of the millennium, whereby practitioners adopted a decolonial and feminist orientation to the study and practice of contemporary art from Africa. What made Silva unique was her prioritization of structural permanence over the transient visibility of itinerant biennials or international art fairs. She anchored her work in the long-term development of CCA Lagos, an independent nonprofit physical institution dedicated to archival research and innovative curatorship, as well as the mobile Àsìkò Art School with its robust pedagogical program. By integrating institutional, pedagogical, and curatorial development, Silva established a distinct model of epistemic infrastructure where the field of contemporary art became a site of knowledge generation with a lasting influence on the continent’s intellectual and artistic landscape.
Fieldwork conducted in Lagos in 2019 grounds the qualitative case study methodology, which centers a single practitioner to achieve the analytical depth required to read Silva’s work as a coherent intellectual project. This included site visits and interviews with practitioners in Silva’s networks, providing first-hand insight into the local institutional structures she developed. These primary findings are triangulated with video interviews conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic and a close analysis of published and unpublished sources, including archival documents and curatorial essays. In instances where participants requested anonymity, they have been given a pseudonym to protect their identity while still recording the context of the encounter. By synthesizing field-based research with diverse archival sources, this study offers an extended analysis of her practice as a sustained form of theoretical production.
From London to Lagos: Reorienting Curatorial Epistemologies
The formation of Silva’s curatorial practice must be understood in relation to the conditions that shaped the reception and understanding of contemporary art production from Africa in late twentieth-century Europe. She was born in Lagos in 1962 and relocated to London as a teenager. Her subsequent studies in languages and art history at the University of Dijon marked a formative engagement with art from Africa that sharpened her awareness of its historiographical and contemporary discourse. This exposed Silva to the disjunction between African cultural production on the continent and what she discovered was its marginal position in the UK. These early experiences were foundational in shaping a curatorial perspective attuned to questions of representation and displacement.
As a young woman Silva applied to the Royal College of Art (RCA) to study Visual Arts Administration: Curating and Commissioning Contemporary Art. This served as a critical encounter with the systemic limits of formal art historical training in the UK. During the interview process she encountered the striking absence of engagement with African and African diasporic perspectives in the curriculum, an omission that reinforced the “aphonia” of the field. This experience coincided with the early stages of the so-called “global turn” in art history, a period characterized by a shift toward a more expansive, transnational conception of art history (Casid and D’Souza Reference Casid and D’Souza2014; Enwezor Reference Enwezor, Enwezor and Condee2008). Cotter (Reference Cotter2002) observes the limitations of the time, noting that “nobody knew or wanted to know about modern and contemporary art from Africa until the exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (1989) began to put contemporary African artwork on the postmodern map.” Facing these institutional barriers firsthand deepened Silva’s resolve to transform the field and shaped her approach to challenging the epistemic map through Africa-based curatorial practice.
Embedded in the artistic networks of London in the late 1990s, Silva was engaging with interlocutors like Chili Hawes at the October Gallery and Gilane Tawadros at the Institute of International Visual Arts (iniva). These pioneering women were running specialized sites that addressed the underrepresentation of cultural and artistic production from the Global South and were part of an intellectual milieu that included theorists and practitioners such as Stuart Hall and Rasheed Araeen. Silva and her peers were concerned with contesting institutional gatekeeping, which had historically muted or mediated diverse creative practices. They conceptualized curating as an intellectual and political practice through which to challenge authorship and institutional power. While these networks provided the decolonial frameworks that underpinned her later work, they also exposed the limits of a diasporic lens. Silva decided to seek out a locally grounded, Africa-based location as a primary site of authority to bypass structures of mediation in the Global North.
Silva’s permanent relocation to Lagos in 2002 therefore allowed her to translate her London-based framework into a local, Nigerian context. At the turn of the century the art sceneFootnote 2 mirrored the wider sociopolitical landscape that had been fractured by decades of military repression and institutional neglect (Falola and Heaton Reference Falola and Heaton2008). Under repressive conditions prominent intellectuals and artists faced censorship or exile, for example Wole Soyinka and Fela Anikulapo Kuti. In 2002 the impetus for cultural rebuilding shifted toward independent practitioners. Silva’s presence in this landscape marked her decisive effort to reposition the continent as a primary site of intellectual activity. Unlike the “culture brokers” (Ogbechie Reference Ogbechie2010) who prioritized transnational diasporic circulation, she focused on developing the institutional conditions needed to sustain artistic and academic work locally. As N’Goné Fall recalls, while many remained “outsiders,” Silva’s training at the RCA allowed her to bridge a critical professional gap and deploy formal curatorial methodologies to address local structural needs.Footnote 3
This commitment to institutional stability materialized early on through one of Silva’s first initiatives, when she established the Institute of Visual Arts and Culture (IVAC) in 2002. Designed to foster critical discourse and professional development, IVAC functioned as a direct intervention to address the absence of sustained Africa-based artistic inquiry. Through IVAC Silva set up initiatives like the Year 2000 lecture series, mobilizing her international networks to facilitate direct engagement between global scholars and Nigerian practitioners. In this way, IVAC did more than facilitate exchange. It began to construct the epistemic infrastructure necessary for durable intellectual production by generating and circulating knowledge on its own terms. This work laid the foundations for CCA Lagos.
Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos: Institution Building as Epistemic Practice
Silva founded CCA Lagos as a permanent extension of IVAC in 2007. This created a dedicated space for research, exhibition, and critical engagement (Figure 1). Located in the university district of Yaba, the Centre operates as an epistemic infrastructure through which ideas are produced, researched, and debated. CCA Lagos is a generative space which avoids the institutional filters of the Global North. This transition, from the itinerant projects of IVAC to a fixed physical site, allowed Silva to reconceptualize the curatorial institution as a space for research and pedagogy rather than display alone. At the heart of Silva’s vision for CCA Lagos lay its extensive archival collection and an open-resource library of over fifteen thousand volumes, anchored by her own personal collection.Footnote 4 By treating the archive as a living resource for inquiry rather than a static repository, Silva aligned her practice with epistemologies of the South, bypassing Northern academic hierarchies to validate African practice through its own institutional frameworks.
CCA Lagos prior to its redevelopment (2012). Photo by Richard McCoy.
The emergence of CCA Lagos was part of a wider constellation of independent initiatives across Africa which sought to reconfigure the geography of contemporary art (Pinther et al. Reference Pinther, Fischer and Nzewi2015). These platforms, ranging from permanent centers like RAW Material Company to periodic events like Dak’Art, both in Senegal, enacted a strategic Southernness by redistributing authority and enabling new nodes of discourse to emerge on continental terms. Drawing on Pan-African traditions of exchange such as FESMAN (1966) and FESTAC (1977),Footnote 5 Silva grounded the Centre in a relational infrastructure of scholarly and creative inquiry. Within this ecology, the exhibition functions as just one node among multiple sites of research. This framework, of epistemic sovereignty, where the institution functions not merely as a gallery but as a site for producing indigenous knowledge and self-determined histories, underpinned Silva’s entire practice. As Grosse (Reference Grosse2020) suggests, such spaces are vital for negotiating art and histories outside of state-controlled frameworks or the dominant art-historical canons of the Global North.
Artist Bolatito Aderemi-Ibitola describes CCA Lagos as an “art incubator” that fosters a culture of critique where art operates as a primary method of inquiry.Footnote 6 Certainly, Silva’s framework foregrounded process over object-based or commercially driven output. Curator Temitayo Ogunbiyi stated that the Centre provides a space for conversations that “aren’t happening elsewhere,” emphasizing dialogue as central to its institutional function.Footnote 7 This approach aligns with Paul Gilroy’s (Reference Gilroy2004) notion of conviviality, prioritizing interaction and informal exchange over fixed hierarchies. Early exhibitions featuring artists such as Emeka Ogboh and Jelili Atiku moved away from white cube aesthetics toward discursive, site-specific, and research-heavy modes of production.Footnote 8 For these practitioners, the Centre provided the intellectual space to experiment with sound, performance, and social commentary often ignored by the commercial market. While this emphasis attracted criticism from some for aligning too closely with contemporary art aesthetics from Europe and North America, Silva’s approach was not imitative.Footnote 9 She was invested in repurposing innovative methodologies through which artistic practice could be expanded and validated within the Lagosian context.
CCA Lagos is distinguished from commercial galleries by its nonprofit status, which underpins its intellectual legitimacy as a research-led institution and enables, what gallery owner Dolly Kola-Balogun describes as its “intense curatorial focus.”Footnote 10 This structural choice puts the Centre in what Silva acknowledged to be a “precarious situation” (Moses Reference Moses2016) and reflects the limited availability of long-term local support for independent cultural institutions. Established through funding from organizations such as the Prince Claus Fund, the British Council, and the Goethe-Institut, the Centre remains reliant on external sources. Such dependence can reinforce global asymmetries, as institutions seeking to challenge Northern authority remain entangled in the same power systems they critique. This entanglement raises critical questions about whether an institution can truly produce “sovereign” knowledge when its survival is predicated on outside validation and capital. For Silva, this meant that epistemic autonomy was never a total rupture from global networks, but rather a strategic negotiation within them. The continuation of this tension was illustrated in 2022, when a benefit auction was held at Sotheby’s in London to support the redevelopment of CCA Lagos (Figure 2). While the event highlighted the Centre’s global legibility and status, it also underscored a continued reliance on Northern markets for institutional survival and development. External funding thus simultaneously enables the existence of local infrastructure while perpetuating the uneven geography of validation that Silva’s practice sought to challenge.
The design projection (exterior) for CCA, 2022 designed by Lagos-based architectural firms Greycave and Studio Contra Ltd. Courtesy of CCA Lagos. As of 2022, named The Bisi Silva Centre.
Figure 2. Long description
The architectural rendering depicts a four-story modern building for CCA Lagos. At the ground level, a low stone sign reads CCA LAGOS in capital letters, positioned in front of a cobblestone driveway. Three palm trees are spaced across the front of the structure. The building’s facade is primarily glass, allowing a view of the interior galleries and workspaces. A distinctive copper-colored perforated metal mesh screen covers the upper three floors, providing texture and shading. On the top floor, a recessed balcony features a row of green plants. The right side of the glass entrance displays the text CCA LAGOS in white lettering. The building is flanked by a plain grey wall on the left and a traditional white two-story building on the right under a clear, bright sky.
The reliance of arts institutions in the Global South on transnational funding structures is nothing unusual, yet Silva’s model was distinct from her peers’. Silva’s practice can be compared with curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim, who founded the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge in Accra, Ghana. An art historian and filmmaker, Ayim formed the ANO Institute as a cultural and ecological research organization in 2002; it operates as an independent not-for-profit venture like CCA Lagos. However, Ayim adopts a hybrid approach towards government funding, leveraging her role as a special adviser to the Ghanaian Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture to actively reform national museum policy and direct state-sanctioned projects like Ghana’s 2019 Venice Biennale pavilion (Ayim Reference Ayim2019). In contrast, Silva maintained a position of strict autonomy from the Nigerian state. She viewed the neglect of the arts by the Nigerian government as a prompt to build her own self-sufficient authority operating at the “margins of the state” described by Falola and Heaton (Reference Falola and Heaton2008). While Ayim attempts to transform the state from the inside, Silva’s practice was defined by total independence from government bureaucracy, relying instead on international networks and private philanthropy to sustain her vision. Silva’s greater critical freedom necessitated an exhausting effort to secure independent resources. Furthermore, while Ayim’s networks mobilize across distributed and transnational platforms, Silva’s were anchored in the institutional framework of CCA Lagos.
This anchoring allowed Silva to pull creative talent towards the continent; for example, artist Nengi Omuku recalls Silva’s role in encouraging her return to Nigeria and providing the professional networks necessary to set up her long-term practice in Lagos.Footnote 11 Silva’s ability to connect people was often highly strategic, as artist Taiwo Aiyedogbon noted, knowing the “right person” at the “right time” could “speed up a lot of things” in Lagos.Footnote 12 This suggests that access to opportunities was often structured through relational proximity to Silva and her immediate network. Consequently, her network-building functioned as both mentorship and a form of intellectual patronage, redistributing opportunities while consolidating both her personal position, and that of CCA Lagos, as the central node of the art scene. This reflects a broader structural reality: the absence of formalized pathways within the local art infrastructure meant that professional advancement was frequently mediated through interpersonal social capital rather than transparent institutional systems.
While these relational infrastructures could be transformative to some, they also functioned as mechanisms of selection and exclusion. By structuring participation through professional proximity, they inevitably created new hierarchies by defining who could participate based on their access to Silva’s specific institutional capital. Because the Centre operated through informal networks to fill the void left by stagnant or nonexistent state pathways, access itself became a site of contestation. As one anonymous gallery visitor noted, “you really had to be within Bisi’s circle to benefit the most from what CCA had to offer.”Footnote 13 Silva’s professional circles of influence created asymmetrical access to the resources of CCA Lagos, where those already familiar to her networks found it significantly easier to navigate the space than those on the periphery.
These dynamics were mirrored in audience participation patterns, where exhibitions primarily attracted a “relatively narrow, educated urban public.”Footnote 14 Interviewees suggest that this was an academically minded public, able to access the specific theoretical language of contemporary art discourse.Footnote 15 As art collector Babatunde Adeyemi reflected, the “particular way of talking and speaking” often excluded locally trained or self-taught artists.Footnote 16 This raises questions about the reach of such interventions beyond restricted intellectual circles and suggests that access was not only spatial but discursive. While Silva challenged the North–South divide, the internal social geographies of Lagos presented new barriers. If the epistemic map was to be redrawn, it remained an ongoing site of contestation across local class and educational lines.
The labor required to set up and maintain the infrastructure of CCA Lagos was often deeply affective. Members of Silva’s network recall her seeking support for the library, crowdfunding for a publication, or leveraging speaking engagements abroad to fund the institutional needs of CCA Lagos.Footnote 17 Institution building in this context was contingent upon ongoing acts of maintenance, negotiation, and resource mobilization. As such, this maintenance work becomes a core component of strategic Southernness, as it involves the constant, exhaustive mobilization of resources required to keep the site of authority on the continent. Epistemic reconfiguration is thus inextricably linked to material conditions. Silva was performing and acquiring the essential labor needed to develop the Centre as library, archive, exhibition space, and discursive hub, to ensure that autonomy remained a lived reality rather than a theoretical aim.
This demonstrates that autonomy is not a one-time declaration, but a relational condition shaped by ongoing acts of maintenance and the persistent building of infrastructure. By establishing such intense and focused activity on the African continent, by adopting a position of intellectual resistance rather than just a geographic coordinate, Silva created a stable base for radical experiments in knowledge production. Her approach to institution-building circulated far beyond the walls of the Centre. Practitioners note how CCA Lagos provided the conceptual blueprint for subsequent initiatives, ranging from local platforms like Art X Lagos to international models such as the 1–54 Contemporary African Art Fair, or Tiwani Contemporary Gallery in London.Footnote 18 This demonstrates how a continental site of authority, CCA Lagos, could reshape the practices and perceptions of contemporary art from Africa within the UK. Its significance lies in how it shifted the baseline for contemporary art from Africa to ensure it could be treated as a site of rigorous inquiry. This reconfiguration of institutional conditions served as the foundation for Àsìkò Art School and Silva’s goal of positioning art education as a critical site of autonomy.
Àsìkò Art School: Pedagogy as Epistemic Practice
Silva extended her commitment to institution and network building into the realm of art education with the launch of Àsìkò Art School in 2010. This initiative was driven by a fundamental optimism regarding the continent’s intellectual potential, a sentiment reinforced during a 2013 visit to Ghana with Àsìkò. In Kumasi she observed how practitioners were profoundly inspired by the research models encountered at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), leading her to express “great reason to be optimistic about the possibilities for art on the continent” (Silva and Baptist Reference Silva and Baptist2017). For Silva, Àsìkò was the vehicle for this optimism. The program was an alternative educational model designed to do more than teach. It made visible the underlying conditions and labor under which pedagogical and curatorial practices operate, positioning pedagogy as a primary site of intellectual intervention. Through Àsìkò, Silva reconfigured the conditions under which contemporary art was studied and sustained, reclaiming the capacity to validate intellectual work from the continent itself.
Àsìkò was developed to address the systemic gaps in formal art curricula across the continent. Silva’s ambitions were that the program would dismantle the vertical hierarchies of Euro-American art education, replacing them with a model centered on Africa-based peer learning, experimentation, and critical dialogue. As N’Goné Fall observed, Àsìkò was conceived to “arm the next generation” with the tools of research-based art making and curating, which emerged from a shared urgency regarding the “inadequacy of existing educational structures across the continent.”Footnote 19 Described as “part art workshop, part residency, and part academy” (Silva and Baptist Reference Silva and Baptist2017), Àsìkò brought together emerging practitioners and an elite international faculty, to undertake an intensive, short-term period of learning. By enlisting leading curators and academics, such as N’Goné Fall, Koyo Kouoh, Simon Njami, Salah Hassan, and Elvira Dyangani Ose, Silva provided more than merely an art education: she developed a robust Southern-led intellectual circuit. The program effectively reclaimed the capacity to authenticate African practice, a key component in any project to reconfigure epistemic art maps.
Central to Àsìkò’s mode of operation was its pan-African, mobile, and collaborative nature. Each year the program took place in a new city—locations included Lagos, Accra, Dakar, Maputo, Addis Ababa, and Praia. This itinerant structure enabled engagement with Anglophone, Lusophone, and Francophone contexts, physically enacting the sideways orientation that Simbao et al. (Reference Simbao, Miko and Eyitayo Tolulope2017) suggest can bypass traditional Northern hubs. Silva’s aim was to foster these sideways connections between diverse artistic communities on the continent, to ultimately resituate education within locally grounded yet transnationally connected contexts. Through these multiple Africa-based platforms, the school cultivated what Kissiedu and Simbao (Reference Kissiedu and Simbao2021) describe as a “spirit of scholarly and creative camaraderie,” foregrounding dialogue as a primary mode of knowledge production rather than a supplementary activity.
Àsìkò’s itinerant format became a literal manifestation of the geopolitics of knowledge (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2002), where the specific site and the identity of the producer fundamentally shapes the intellectual authority being produced. By grounding the program in discursive methods, such as intensive critique sessions, field-based workshops, and collaborative lectures, Silva ensured that knowledge was not just imparted to participants but actively generated through their engagement with the local context. This reorientation privileges pan-African dialogue over traditionally North-oriented frameworks, effectively using lateral exchange to collapse the distance between local practice and global discourse. Àsìkò participants, such as artist Jess Atieno, consistently describe this impact through the program’s intensity, noting that the opportunity to work closely with acclaimed international figures served to validate their practice within a self-contained, continental circuit.Footnote 20
Silva structured Àsìkò around site-oriented methods of learning that emphasized debate and collaboration. She placed particular emphasis on preparation and process, encouraging participants to foreground research, reading, and sustained engagement. Atieno notes: “Bisi told us we must create the conditions to do the work before doing the work.”Footnote 21 These conditions framed artistic practice as iterative and research-driven, reinforcing forms of learning grounded in sustained inquiry rather than immediate output. Àsìkò therefore aligns with epistemologies of the South which reclaim the power to centralize African expertise by anchoring the validation process in local sites of production. Silva reinforced this emphasis by exposing participants to diverse intellectual contexts, encouraging them to engage with local histories, material cultures, and inherited knowledge as the basis for contemporary practice. Alongside CCA Lagos as an artistic hub, Àsìkò functioned as a key site of network formation and extension, where participation enabled students to access wider curatorial circuits, shaping professional trajectories and facilitating international mobility.Footnote 22
These accounts suggest that Àsìkò operated as a relational infrastructure through which practitioners were incorporated into broader networks, reflecting sideways modes of connection across the continent. Silva’s influence also extended beyond formal teaching to include sustained mentorship and professional guidance within the wider artistic community. Nigerian artist Juliet Ezenwa Pearce, a Lagos-based contemporary of Silva rather than an Àsìkò participant, recalls Silva’s support. She states that Silva offered her strategic advice on promoting her work, illustrating how this mentorship operated both symbolically and practically across different career stages.Footnote 23 Atieno describes Silva as “incredibly generous … connecting me to so many other opportunities.”Footnote 24 Aiyedogbon reflects that her introduction to Silva was a key moment in her career, facilitating subsequent residencies and connecting her with the right people.Footnote 25
Throughout these interactions, participants recall Silva’s particular support for women, whom she famously suggested needed to “do twice the work that the men are doing.”Footnote 26 Temitayo Ogunbiyi reflected on this impact, observing that Silva’s visibility “made people think a bit more consciously about women.”Footnote 27 As a mentor, Silva’s interventions supported individuals while simultaneously shifting the gendered dynamics of the broader art scene. However, these systems could be as exclusionary to those on the outside as they were beneficial to those on the inside, highlighting the inherent tension and uneven distribution of access within Àsìkò’s networks.
This friction reveals the limits of understanding Àsìkò through a sideways orientation, as the intensity of Silva’s personal involvement complicates the program’s presentation as a fully horizontal structure. Katy Deepwell (Reference Deepwell and Crimmins2019) argues that participatory formats do not necessarily dismantle hierarchies and power often persists in diffuse forms. In this context, Silva’s role as founder, lead curator, and patron was central to shaping the agenda, positioning Àsìkò as a “charismatic infrastructure” (Mbembe Reference Mbembe2015; Kellner Reference Kellner2020) where institutional coherence depended heavily on individual leadership. This reliance became evident after Silva’s death, when the program largely halted. While its 2022 revival in Cape Verde points to efforts to extend her vision, its continuity remains uneven (Figure 3). Rather than a fully horizontal model, Àsìkò functions as a space where authority is redistributed but not removed.
Àsìkò Art School, Cape Verde, 2022. Courtesy of CCA Lagos.
The architecture of the program, as defined by Silva’s central leadership and the recruitment of an elite visiting faculty, complicates any reductive notion of Southernness as a purely autonomous or oppositional stance. Rather than seeking an existence outside the gravity of dominant art world structures, Àsìkò operates through a sophisticated negotiation with them. This tension reflects the argument made by Simbao et al. (Reference Simbao2017) that sideways exchanges remain perpetually entangled within global systems of power. Such a model echoes Mignolo’s (Reference Mignolo2009) epistemic disobedience, where transformative reorientations take place from within, rather than beyond, existing frameworks. By occupying these structures, alongside redirecting their flow, Àsìkò recasts strategic Southernness as a relational method of engagement and one that prioritizes pan-African connection while taking account of the global pressures that shape it.
These structural conditions also raise critical questions of sustainability. While the itinerant workshop format succeeded in creating a concentrated space for critical engagement, its episodic nature inevitably limited its permanent institutional footprint. Despite these temporal limitations, Àsìkò is widely credited with shaping a generation of globally dispersed practitioners now fundamentally committed to research-led and pedagogically engaged practices which often center African locations and perspectives. By integrating these elements, Silva successfully positioned art education as a primary mechanism and not a secondary support system, through which contemporary art was produced and circulated.
This emphasis on knowledge production through pedagogy extended beyond the classroom and into Silva’s curatorial work more broadly. To Silva, the exhibition format functioned as an active site of research and archival practice, where meaning was negotiated through the display of objects. Moving from the classroom to the gallery space reveals how Silva utilized the exhibition as a continued pedagogical exercise in remapping the archive, a theme that would define her most significant curatorial interventions.
Curatorial Practice as Epistemic Mediation
Silva’s curatorial practice transformed exhibition-making into a sophisticated mode of epistemic mediation. Beyond static display, her exhibitions functioned as active arenas for the production and negotiation of knowledge. This approach integrated the research-driven methodologies of CCA Lagos and Àsìkò directly into the gallery space, effectively reconceptualizing the exhibition as a laboratory for intellectual inquiry. Silva’s work thus mobilized Simbao’s (Reference Simbao2017) assertion that curatorial practice in the Global South can fundamentally reorient how knowledge is generated and circulated. By resituating contemporary art from Africa within transnational dialogues while remaining anchored in local institutional conditions, she staged encounters between divergent epistemologies. Rather than subordinating regional practices to external frameworks, Silva facilitated a model where meaning emerged through relational interaction rather than top-down imposition.
Silva’s methodology developed within a contested, often resistant artistic landscape in Lagos. At the turn of the millennium, contemporary art faced frequent ambivalence, appearing disconnected from local concerns. Responses to experimental works—for example, Emeka Udemba’s Floating Calabashes (1996) or El Anatsui’s New Energies (2001)—mirrored a broader uncertainty toward concept-driven practice. These works divided audiences: dismissed as postmodern intrusions or embraced as innovative reinterpretations of African tradition. Silva’s practice emerged within this friction, and rather than adopting global frameworks uncritically or retreating into reactionary traditionalism, she reworked many influences through deliberate selection and recontextualization. Her exhibitions became sites where meaning was not merely imported but actively renegotiated to align with the specificities of the African context. This constituted a form of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2009), whereby Silva did not simply move art into a gallery but insisted on a local interpretive framework.
Silva’s inaugural exhibition at CCA Lagos, Democrazy (2007), coincided with Nigeria’s first civilian-to-civilian democratic transition. With this democratic handover, President Olusegun Obasanjo (People’s Democratic Party) transferred power to Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. This marked a significant political juncture from which Silva chose to interrogate the structural limitations of democracy. By weaving together divergent media, including Ndidi Dike’s sculptural installations on contemporary slavery, George Osodi’s photography of the Niger Delta, and Lemi Ghariokwu’s album covers as symbols of resistance, Silva transformed the gallery into a comprehensive site of inquiry into social injustice and environmental degradation. This approach utilized the sideways methodology of prioritizing relational affinities and lateral comparisons (Davies Reference Davies1985) between local practitioners rather than seeking validation from dominant global centers. By positioning artists such as Dike, Osodi, and Ghariokwu as primary critics of the post-transition state, the exhibition functioned as a discursive arena where dominant political narratives could be produced and interrogated. This process was fueled by the ethos of CCA Lagos as an art incubator, where a rigorous culture of critique established proximity and encounter between practitioners as the primary drivers of production and public engagement.
The exhibition Fela, Ghariokwu Lemi and the Art of the Album Cover formed a critical part of the wider Democrazy program and demonstrated how epistemic strategy functions through curatorial framing. By foregrounding album design, an artform excluded from canonical art histories, Silva challenged arbitrary distinctions between “high” and “popular” art (Figure 4). This repositioned vernacular visual culture as a legitimate site of analytical knowledge and aligned with MacViban’s (Reference MacViban, Kamerun and Namibia2019) focus on the importance of specific historical and institutional context. As a respondent who had visited the show in 2007 recalled, the work felt familiar but was “seen differently” through this presentation, illustrating how curatorial mediation can transform recognition into deep reinterpretation.Footnote 28 Beyond the gallery, the wider program around Democrazy included public talks and screenings that brought these artistic critiques into dialogue with Lagosian urban life. Through this multilayered approach, Democrazy established the exhibition as a space of civic inquiry for multiple and competing understandings of the Nigerian state and social life.
Installation view Fela, Ghariokwu Lemi and the Art of the Album Cover exhibition at CCA Lagos. Photograph courtesy of CCA Lagos.
Figure 4. Long description
The photograph shows a gallery installation at CCA Lagos. The primary focus is a square artwork mounted on a white wall, viewed from a slight right-side angle.
At the top left of the artwork, the name FELA is written in large, purple, jagged letters, with and Egypt ‘80 written smaller below it. To the right, the title BEASTS OF NO NATION is printed in red, with a yellow banner underneath containing the French translation BETES SAUVAGES SANS NATIONALITE.
The central image is a large, close-up portrait of Fela Kuti, rendered in warm orange and brown tones, looking toward the left. To the left of his face, a group of caricatured figures with horns is depicted. Above them, a speech bubble reads ...THIS UPRISING WILL BRING OUT THE BEAST IN US!
In the lower-left corner, a crowd of people is shown, with one person holding a sign that reads HUMAN RIGHTS IS OUR PROPERTY. The bottom right corner features the artist’s signature, Ghariokwu Lemi ‘89.
A second, smaller artwork is partially visible on the far left of the frame, and a small white identification label is mounted on the wall to the left of the main piece.
The exhibition drew significant attendance and press attention, suggesting that the public was prepared to engage with experimental media when framed through urgent local concerns. This methodology successfully transformed the gallery into a discursive arena where political concepts were both produced and destabilized. Democrazy thus moved beyond the transient visibility of international fairs to foster a deep, localized reinterpretation of the Nigerian state.
Democrazy demonstrated that politically engaged art exhibited in interrogative spaces held significant local relevance within Lagos. Silva built on this momentum with her next show, Like a Virgin (2009), to address the regulation of sexuality, virginity, and bodily autonomy within African contexts. By featuring artists Lucy Azubuike and Zanele Muholi, Silva positioned the body as a primary site where social norms are both produced and contested. Azubuike’s work incorporated menstrual blood as both material and subject, to confront cultural taboos and draw attention to specific practices such as female genital mutilation, widowhood rites, and child marriage (Figure 5). Within this framework, Azubuike’s practice functioned as a mode of embodied critique that prioritized epistemologies of the South rooted in lived experience. Silva’s methodology directly challenged dominant structures that render such experiences invisible or dismiss them as culturally fixed. Through Like a Virgin, Silva again utilized curatorial mediation to transform visibility into a form of political agency, enacting strategic Southernness by validating local bodily histories as sites of theoretical inquiry.
Lucy Azubuike, The Whisper, 2006.
The inclusion of Zanele Muholi’s work extended Silva’s provocation into a broader transnational context. Muholi’s photographic practice, particularly the series Aftermath (2004), documents the lived realities of queer Black individuals in South Africa (Figure 6). Muholi’s work is hard-hitting, foregrounding forms of violence such as “corrective” rape, yet it resists sensationalism. By bringing this work to Lagos, Silva expanded the boundaries of what could be made visible and thinkable within the discourse of contemporary art. The exhibition highlighted the mediated nature of this visibility, raising critical questions about how knowledge is translated across divergent audiences as Like a Virgin actively navigated the tension between globally circulating feminist discourse and locally embedded understandings.
Zanele Muholi, Aftermath, 2004. Courtesy of the Michael Stevenson Gallery.
This dialogue engages Oyěwùmí’s (Reference Oyěwùmí1997) critique of the imposition of external gender frameworks onto African contexts. Oyěwùmí argues that Northern feminist categories often overlook the specificities of African social organizations, risking a form of intellectual colonization. Silva addressed this by situating Muholi’s work not as a universal queer narrative, but as a specific South-to-South encounter that prioritized shared continental struggles. By framing the exhibition through lived experience rather than academic feminist theory emanating from the Global North, Silva ensured that the provocation remained grounded in African sociopolitical realities. This transformed the exhibition into a site where regional taboos were challenged through an internal, lateral dialogue, effectively bypassing the Northern gaze that Oyěwùmí critiques.
By grounding these transnational provocations in African sociopolitical realities, Silva’s exhibitions remained invested in the possibility of dialogue between global discourse and local understanding, even where meaning was contested. However, the reception of Like a Virgin illustrated the inherent limits and frictions of this approach. There was more push back than there had been for Democrazy, and significant discomfort regarding the taboo subjects which were presented. Interviewees suggested that exhibitions such as Like a Virgin were often experienced as conceptually demanding for the public.Footnote 29 While those working within the established networks of CCA Lagos found the space intellectually generative, others noted a distance between the discursive frameworks and broader publics.Footnote 30 These responses demonstrate that exhibitions do not merely transmit information but actively construct the framework through which knowledge is understood. Silva’s exhibition practice at CCA Lagos created an arena where divergent ways of thinking were forced into dialogue. For Silva, the mapping of contemporary art was a dynamic, ongoing process that could tackle urgent questions but offer no fixed or final meanings. Within her practice, curatorial mediation created South-to-South dialogue where different ways of knowing can coexist, ensuring that the reconfiguration of the epistemic map remains an open-ended inquiry.
Despite this inclusive intent, a tension arises as epistemologies of the South—while aiming to validate lived experience—can inadvertently recreate the hierarchies they seek to dismantle. This raises a significant critique of the framework. If the production of knowledge remains locked within elite institutional vocabularies, it risks becoming a new form of insider discourse that is as inaccessible to the local public as the Northern universalism it rejects. This friction highlights that the move toward local legibility is not a natural byproduct of a Southern location, but a precarious labor that may struggle against its own intellectual elitism. Silva sought to resolve this tension by tackling urgent questions through recognizable material, for example in the recognizable album covers from Fela, Ghariokwu Lemi and the Art of the Album Cover. She also grounded her more abstract discursive frameworks in the tangible, historical weight of the archive. This commitment to mapping contemporary art as a dynamic process found its primary expression in her decade-long engagement with the archive of J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere.
J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere was a Nigerian photographer who began his career in the 1950s and documented the social transitions of the colonial and postindependence periods. His work therefore forms a crucial bridge between these two eras. He is most well-known for his Hairstyles series, a systematic typological study of nearly 1,000 intricate hair designs that served as a visual record of shifting cultural identity. While Silva’s contemporary art exhibitions interrogated the immediate political present, her work with Ojeikere constituted a methodological re-entry into the past that actively contested the ethnographic labels often imposed by Northern institutions. Ojeikere had amassed over 10,000 photographic negatives and Silva spent five years working closely with him to research, catalogue, and contextualize this vast repository. This intervention moved his work from documentation to a site of rigorous formalist and academic social theory-making. In Reference Silva2014 Silva produced and published a monograph of his work through CCA Lagos, which featured over 200 photographs and scholarly essays to reposition Ojeikere as a master of African photography and critical historian, rather than a commercial studio photographer. African modernism has always been a hybrid formation and Ojeikere’s work was an entangled product of global modernist influences and colonial-period training. Silva therefore refused to frame Ojeikere through any traditionalist or exoticizing lens. She foregrounded his formalist methods and demonstrated that his work functioned as a sophisticated knowledge system precisely because it mastered and repurposed global aesthetic tools to document a specific Nigerian identity.
By crowdfunding the research into J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere via Kickstarter, Silva established an independent funding model that bypassed traditional gatekeepers to ensure that the research remained grounded within the archival and discursive spaces of CCA Lagos. The project highlighted the intense labor of maintenance required to sustain such epistemic sites beyond the moment of exhibition. Silva’s work involved the physical preservation of negatives alongside the intellectual labor of cataloguing a lifetime of work. By integrating archival research into the institutional framework of CCA Lagos and the pedagogical framework of Àsìkò, Silva ensured that the archive was not a static relic but a living resource for contemporary inquiry. Through this sustained mediation, Silva demonstrated that the decolonization of knowledge is a precarious labor that requires managing uneven power dynamics while ensuring the continent’s own histories remain authoritative within its own borders.
Silva demonstrated that curatorial mediation involves more than staging something new or shocking. Her focus on the archive as a site of production reinforces the argument that Silva’s practice was never merely about display. It was a holistic attempt to reconfigure the maps of knowledge that define contemporary art by moving between the classroom, the archive, and the gallery. It was the interconnectedness of her roles as educator, archivist, curator, and fundraiser that provided the specific structure needed to sustain and influence the center of epistemic autonomy.
Conclusion
Bisi Silva’s curatorial practice constitutes a coherent and sustained theoretical project. She did not merely respond to the conditions of Northern epistemic dominance but actively constructed an alternative infrastructure of intellectual authority on the African continent. By reading her work through the interlocking frameworks of strategic Southernness (Simbao Reference Simbao2017) and epistemologies of the South (de Sousa Santos and Meneses Reference de Sousa Santos and Meneses2019), this study has demonstrated that curatorial practice in the Global South can function as a primary mode of theory-making. Silva’s institutional, pedagogical, and exhibition-based work did not merely challenge the epistemic map, it reconfigured the conditions under which contemporary art is researched and understood.
Silva’s practice enacts a reconfiguration of strategic Southernness itself, as a geopolitical lens for understanding how practitioners bypass Northern hubs through lateral, sideways exchange. However, her practice reveals a dimension that Simbao’s framework does not fully theorize, which is the relationship between Southernness and institutional permanence. Strategic Southernness is not a geopolitical orientation that seamlessly follows from location or infrastructure on the continent, it is a condition that must be continuously reproduced through the sustained labor of institutional maintenance; for Silva, this included fundraising, archiving, pedagogical programming, mentorship, and resource mobilization. Silva’s career demonstrates that epistemic authority on the continent is constructed and must be carefully maintained. CCA Lagos was not simply a site from which to practice Southernness, it was the institutional apparatus through which Southern autonomy became a durable reality. The sustained labor of keeping CCA Lagos running allowed the structural conditions for Silva’s sideways orientation.
This demonstrates that epistemic sovereignty in the Global South cannot be understood as a clean rupture from the structures of Northern power. Silva’s practice was defined by strategic, and often contradictory, negotiations with international funding bodies and global exhibition circuits. Although CCA Lagos did not receive funding from the government, Silva relied on funding which often came from outside of Nigeria. The Sotheby’s benefit auction of 2022 and the reliance on the Prince Claus Fund and the British Council illustrate that institutional independence and material dependence are not mutually exclusive but mutually constitutive conditions. What distinguishes Silva from the “culture broker” model that Ogbechie (Reference Ogbechie2010) critiques is that she directed these entanglements inward toward the continent, channeling the resources of global networks to build a local infrastructure of validation rather than to circulate contemporary art from Africa outward for Northern consumption. This study shows that decolonial practice in this field must be understood not as the pursuit of exteriority from global systems, but as the strategic redirection of those systems’ resources toward the production of continental authority.
A key theoretical contribution illuminated by this case study lies in the understanding of the curatorial exhibition as a site of epistemic mediation. Silva’s exhibition making, Democrazy, Like a Virgin and her decade-long engagement with J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere did not function as object display in any passive sense, but as active arenas in which competing epistemologies were forced into productive tension. This operationalized Davies’s (Reference Davies1985) concept of looking sideways at the level of the gallery itself, generating meaning not through vertical appeal to Northern frameworks but through lateral dialogue between practitioners inhabiting comparable postcolonial positions. Her curatorial framing of Muholi’s work in the context of Lagos enacted a South-to-South encounter that, following Oyěwùmí (Reference Oyěwùmí1997), deliberately refused the imposition of Northern feminist categories onto African social realities. Her monograph on Ojeikere transformed the archive from a site of ethnographic documentation, a category imposed by Northern institutional convention, into a site of formalist analysis and social theory. This demonstrates that the decolonization of the art historical canon proceeds through intervention in the conditions of knowledge production rather than through discursive critique alone.
In a similar vein, Àsìkò Art School illuminates the relationship between pedagogy and epistemic authority. With Àsìkò, Silva showed that the validation of African artistic practice need not pass through Northern academic institutions. By mobilizing an elite but Southern-led faculty across multiple linguistic and national contexts, Anglophone, Francophone, and Lusophone, Àsìkò enacted the geopolitics of knowledge (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2002) at the level of the curriculum. The program’s itinerant, pan-African structure physically embodied the proposition that the site of knowledge production fundamentally shapes its intellectual authority. Thus, Silva extended decolonial critique from the gallery to the classroom and back again, establishing art education itself as a mechanism through which epistemic reconfiguration is materially reproduced across generations.
This analysis does not advance an uncritical account of Silva’s project. The study has foregrounded the structural contradictions that attend any attempt to build epistemic sovereignty within conditions of material dependence. The narrow demographic of CCA Lagos’s audience—an academically trained urban public fluent in the specialized vocabularies of contemporary art discourse—raises the question of whether epistemologies of the South, in displacing Northern universalism, risk installing a new form of insider knowledge as inaccessible to many Lagosians as the frameworks it replaced. The halting of Àsìkò following Silva’s death further exposes the structural vulnerability of what this study, following Mbembe (Reference Mbembe2015) and Kellner (Reference Kellner2020), identifies as a charismatic infrastructure: an institution whose coherence derives disproportionately from the intellectual authority and relational capital of a single figure. The tension between the program’s aspirations toward horizontal, pan-African exchange and the persistent hierarchies produced by Silva’s own centrality reveals that looking sideways is not a stable methodological achievement but a relational condition that must be actively maintained and remains susceptible to the structural conditions of its own emergence. These tensions do not undermine the significance of Silva’s contributions, instead they deepen our theoretical understanding of the conditions under which decolonial practice operates and the specific limits it must negotiate.
The reconceptualization of strategic Southernness as institutional labor, as model of relational autonomy, as epistemic mediation via exhibition work, and as pedagogical reproduction of continental authority, advance an institutional framework for understanding decolonial curatorial practice in African studies. This framework moves beyond both the representational critique, which asks whether African practitioners are adequately visible within global circuits, and the cultural-broker model, which remains focused on the mechanisms of Northern gatekeeping. It directs analytical attention toward the institutional conditions under which African knowledge is sustained, legitimated, and anchored in the continent. Silva’s practice provides a model for how this framework operates in practice. Her work demonstrates that the most radical theoretical intervention available to an African curator is not the critique of existing epistemologies but the exhausting, generative labor of building the ground on which new ones can stand. Future scholarship in this field would benefit from extending this framework to other Africa-based curatorial institutions, to examine how the conditions of charismatic infrastructure, relational autonomy, and the politics of access shape projects of epistemic reconfiguration across the continent. Advances in digital technology may also provide an important new direction for the institutional resources Silva built, potentially broadening the reach of strategic Southernness beyond the educated urban publics that her physical and pedagogical spaces were able to serve.
