From Ibrahim Mahama’s Monumental Münsterplatz Commission to Major Booth Presentations, African Artists Were Impossible to Ignore
At Art Basel 2026, African and African diasporic artists were not simply present. They shaped the fair’s visual, intellectual, public and market conversation.
Across the main Galleries sector, Premiere, Statements, Feature, Kabinett, Parcours, Unlimited and the city’s public programme, artists from Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Senegal, Cameroon, Benin and the wider diaspora appeared through some of the fair’s most visible and ambitious presentations.
What made this presence significant was not only the number of artists included, but the range of positions they occupied: public commissions, blue-chip booths, historical master presentations, Unlimited installations, Parcours projects, Statements debuts and market sales.
This was a year in which Ibrahim Mahama transformed Münsterplatz with a monumental public installation, El Anatsui appeared through both Goodman Gallery and White Cube, Goodman Gallery presented a powerful multi-generational African and diasporic booth, Selma Feriani Gallery returned to Premiere with three Tunisian artists, Gypsum Gallery brought Hana El-Sagini to Statements, Jenkins Johnson Gallery foregrounded Gordon Parks and Esther Mahlangu, and Galerie Barbara Thumm presented Kaloki Nyamai within a wider conversation shaped by Venice and Basel.
Across other booths, works by El Hadji Sy, Youssef Nabil, Gérard Sekoto, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Omar Ba, Alioune Diagne, Souleymane Keita, Kader Attia, Wael Shawky, Berni Searle and Moffat Takadiwa further expanded the African presence at the fair.
Together, these presentations revealed a clear shift: African artists are no longer peripheral to the global art market. They are among its defining voices.
Ibrahim Mahama: The Public Face of Art Basel 2026
No African artist occupied Basel more visibly than Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama.
As part of the Art Basel Awards programme, Mahama unveiled The God of Small Things at Münsterplatz, one of Basel’s most historic public squares. The work transformed the city centre through a large-scale sculptural and textile intervention using materials connected to labour, trade, postcolonial histories and industrial memory.
Mahama’s practice has long been rooted in the transformation of found and used materials. From jute sacks and railway remnants to metal tags and industrial objects, his work examines the hidden histories carried by materials that have passed through systems of labour, commerce and colonial extraction.
At Art Basel 2026, his presence extended beyond the public commission. White Cube also presented Kulala, a hand-woven textile work incorporating reclaimed tire ply and metal tags. The reported sale of the work further confirmed Mahama’s growing market strength, but the deeper significance of his Basel presence was symbolic. A Ghanaian artist was not only inside the fair; he was shaping the city around it.
White Cube: El Anatsui, Michael Armitage, Julie Mehretu and African Diasporic Material Power
White Cube’s Art Basel 2026 presentation at Booth C13 included several major African and African diasporic voices, with works by El Anatsui, Michael Armitage and Julie Mehretu among the highlights.
At the centre of its African presence was El Anatsui’s MivEvi VII (2025). Since the late 1990s, the Ghanaian master has transformed used bottle caps and metal fragments into vast sculptural fields that move between textile, painting and installation. By cutting, flattening, folding and suturing discarded materials into shimmering surfaces, Anatsui turns the residue of trade, consumption and circulation into works of monumental beauty and historical depth.
White Cube also presented Michael Armitage’s Campus Divas (2014), coinciding with the Kenyan-British artist’s exhibition The Promise of Change at Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Armitage’s paintings often draw from East African politics, memory, folklore and contemporary life, using the material surface of Lubugo bark cloth to complicate the relationship between image, place and history.
Julie Mehretu, who was included in the “Established Artists” category at the 2026 Art Basel Awards, also featured in White Cube’s presentation. Born in Ethiopia and based in the United States, Mehretu has developed one of the most influential abstract practices of her generation, using layered marks, architectural references and cartographic fragments to examine movement, migration, conflict and the pressures of global modernity.
Together, Anatsui, Armitage and Mehretu expanded White Cube’s booth into a powerful statement on African and diasporic material intelligence. Their works moved across sculpture, painting and abstraction, showing how artists connected to the continent continue to redefine the formal and political possibilities of contemporary art.
White Cube’s wider Basel presence also included installations by Tracey Emin and Theaster Gates in Unlimited, further positioning the gallery across both the main fair and its large-scale curated sector.
El Anatsui: A Ghanaian Master Across Goodman Gallery and White Cube
El Anatsui was one of the most important African presences at Art Basel 2026, appearing in presentations by both Goodman Gallery and White Cube.
With Goodman Gallery, Anatsui formed part of a multi-generational presentation that brought together artists whose work has shaped postcolonial, diasporic and global contemporary art. With White Cube, he was represented through MivEvi VII continuing his internationally celebrated exploration of material transformation.
Anatsui’s practice has expanded the possibilities of sculpture. His monumental works, often made from discarded bottle caps, metal fragments and other found materials, operate between textile, painting and sculpture. They speak to histories of consumption, trade, colonial contact and renewal. At Basel, his presence across two major galleries confirmed his status as one of the most influential living artists working today.
Goodman Gallery: A Pan-African and Diasporic Powerhouse
Goodman Gallery delivered one of the strongest African and diasporic presentations at Art Basel 2026, using its Stand R11 presentation to connect contemporary African practice with the deeper histories of African modernism.
Founded in Johannesburg in 1966, Goodman Gallery has played a central role in supporting artists who confront history, race, power, memory and social transformation. At Basel, the gallery’s presentation brought together works by Ghada Amer, El Anatsui, Kudzanai Chiurai, Alfredo Jaar, Kapwani Kiwanga, William Kentridge, Atta Kwami, Misheck Masamvu, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Naama Tsabar, Yinka Shonibare, Carrie Mae Weems and Sue Williamson, among others.
The presentation also coincided with Goodman Gallery’s 60th anniversary and more than four decades of participation at Art Basel, reinforcing its position as one of the most important African-founded galleries in the international art world.
Goodman Gallery’s Basel Exclusive: Gerard Sekoto and Irma Stern
As part of Art Basel’s Basel Exclusive initiative, Goodman Gallery presented a dedicated focus on African masters through works by two foundational South African painters: Gerard Sekoto and Irma Stern.
The presentation reflected the gallery’s longstanding commitment to advancing artists who are central to the development of modern art histories on the continent. Rather than treating African art as a purely contemporary category, Goodman used Basel Exclusive to foreground the modernist lineages that helped shape the field.
Gerard Sekoto: Black Urban Life and South African Modernism
Gerard Sekoto remains one of the most influential painters in South African history.
Born in Botshabelo in 1913, Sekoto achieved early prominence through nuanced, painterly depictions of Black urban life in South Africa’s major cities before the formal advent of apartheid. His paintings captured ordinary people with dignity, emotional intelligence and painterly subtlety at a time when Black life was violently marginalised by social and political structures.
In 1947, Sekoto left South Africa for Paris, where he lived for the rest of his life. His Eastwood period, produced shortly before his departure, is widely regarded as one of the high points of his career. Works such as Boys around a Brazier, Eastwood show his ability to transform everyday scenes into quiet meditations on endurance, youth and social vulnerability.
Goodman Gallery’s Basel Exclusive presentation also included Le Café Parisien (1959), a work connected to Sekoto’s life in Paris and his immersion in the city’s postwar café and jazz culture. Its presence at Art Basel linked Sekoto’s South African modernism to a broader history of Black artistic circulation across Africa and Europe.
Irma Stern: A Foundational Figure in South African Modernism
Alongside Sekoto, Goodman Gallery presented work by Irma Stern, one of the foundational figures of South African modernism.
Born in 1894 in Schweizer-Reneke and trained in Germany, Stern was shaped by European Expressionism before settling permanently in Cape Town in 1920. Her work was initially received as radical and “ultra-modern,” but she later became one of South Africa’s most celebrated painters.
At Basel, Goodman Gallery presented Stern’s Still Life with Dahlias in a Vase (1960), a late work that demonstrates her assured handling of colour and form. Stern’s flower paintings allowed her to explore gesture, texture and chromatic intensity, turning still life into a space of painterly experimentation.
The renewed international attention around Stern and Sekoto is significant. Both artists were included in the central exhibition of the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Sekoto was also included in Paris Noir: Artistic Circulations and Anti-Colonial Resistance, 1950–2000 at the Centre Pompidou in 2025, while Stern was the subject of a major retrospective at Berlin’s Brücke-Museum.
El Anatsui: Fractured Histories and Material Transformation
Ghanaian artist El Anatsui formed part of Goodman Gallery’s Basel presentation with Fractured World Order (2025), made from burnt and incised tropical hardwood and tempera.
Anatsui is best known internationally for his monumental metal works, but this presentation highlighted another side of his material intelligence. Through wood, incision and surface, the work extended his sustained investigation into fragmentation, repair, transformation and the histories carried by materials.
His presence at Goodman, alongside his work with White Cube at the fair, confirmed his position as one of the most important living artists in the world.
William Kentridge: History, Memory and Political Imagination
William Kentridge, one of South Africa’s most significant contemporary artists, was featured with Goodman Gallery through Drawing for L’Orfeo (Orfeo & Eurydice) (2025), a large charcoal and coloured pencil work on paper.
Kentridge’s multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, film, theatre, sculpture, printmaking and performance. For decades, he has explored apartheid, colonial history, violence, memory and the instability of political truth.
His Basel presence strengthened Goodman Gallery’s historical depth and connected South African modern and contemporary art to wider global conversations around opera, mythology, politics and memory.
Kapwani Kiwanga: Architecture, Power and Historical Systems
Kapwani Kiwanga was represented by A Coincidence of Wants: Copper-Reds (2024), a work made with glass beads, metal and copper leaf.
Kiwanga’s practice investigates how power is embedded in architecture, material systems, archives and institutional structures. Her work often examines the relationship between beauty and control, asking how materials can carry histories of trade, extraction and social organisation.
At Basel, her work added a refined conceptual dimension to Goodman Gallery’s presentation.
Yinka Shonibare CBE: Empire, Freedom and the Politics of Fabric
British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE anchored Goodman Gallery’s booth with the monumental equestrian sculpture Feeling Free Like a Bird (2023).
Known for his use of Dutch wax fabric, Shonibare’s work challenges simplified ideas of cultural authenticity. His sculptures and installations often expose the contradictions of empire, showing how African, European and global histories are deeply entangled.
At Basel, the scale and theatricality of Feeling Free Like a Bird gave the booth a powerful visual centre, linking questions of freedom, colonial history, mobility and spectacle.
Ghada Amer: Feminism, Embroidery and Power
Egyptian-born artist Ghada Amer appeared in Goodman Gallery’s presentation with A NYMPHEA FOR PARKER (2022), made with acrylic, embroidery and gel medium on canvas.
Amer is widely known for her embroidered paintings and works that examine gender, sexuality, power and representation. Her practice challenges male-dominated art histories while using thread, painting and language to create works that are both delicate and politically charged.
Her inclusion brought a strong North African feminist voice into Goodman Gallery’s Basel presentation.
Kudzanai Chiurai: Postcolonial Power and Political Theatre
Zimbabwean artist Kudzanai Chiurai was featured with Untitled ’26 (2026), an oil painting on canvas.
Chiurai’s work addresses postcolonial governance, masculinity, state violence, liberation histories and African political imagination. Working across photography, film, painting and installation, he stages powerful visual narratives that question how nations remember themselves.
At Basel, his work added urgency to Goodman’s presentation, connecting contemporary painting to the unfinished political histories of the continent.
Atta Kwami: Ghanaian Abstraction and Urban Memory
The late Ghanaian artist Atta Kwami was another important presence in Goodman Gallery’s presentation.
Kwami’s abstract paintings draw from Ghanaian architecture, kiosks, textiles, music and urban colour. His work expanded the language of African abstraction and remains central to conversations about modernism beyond Europe and America.
Reports from the opening day also noted sales of works by Atta Kwami, confirming continued market and institutional interest in his legacy.
Misheck Masamvu: Psychological Landscapes from Zimbabwe
Zimbabwean painter Misheck Masamvu appeared in the presentation with Frosting (2025), an oil painting on canvas.
His work often combines figuration and abstraction to explore inner struggle, social instability and the psychological effects of history. His figures appear to emerge from restless surfaces, suggesting both personal and political unease.
Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum: Myth, Migration and Speculative Worlds
Botswana-born artist Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum was represented by Take justice upon my hands (2025), an oil painting on cradled wood panel.
Her work moves between drawing, painting, mythology, geography and speculative fiction. Sunstrum creates worlds shaped by memory, migration and imagined selves, placing Black female subjectivity within expansive cosmic and historical landscapes.
Her inclusion also carried market significance, with opening-day sales reportedly including work by Sunstrum.
Carrie Mae Weems: Photography, Power and the Black Image
Carrie Mae Weems brought an important African diasporic dimension to Goodman Gallery’s presentation with The Sea Side, 2 (2026), a large silver metallic print.
Weems is one of the most influential artists working with photography, text and installation. Her work examines race, gender, family, history and the politics of looking. At Basel, her presence connected African diasporic memory to the gallery’s wider concerns with visibility, justice and representation.
Sue Williamson: Witnessing South African History
Veteran South African artist Sue Williamson appeared with Dakar – Piroguiers (2026), a graphite and ink work on Yupo paper.
Williamson’s work has documented apartheid, resistance, memory and social change for decades. Through photography, installation and archival strategies, she has become one of the most important artists of South Africa’s post-apartheid visual history.
Pélagie Gbaguidi in Parcours: Fragmentation as a Generative Force
Beyond the booth, Goodman Gallery also participated in Art Basel’s Parcours sector through Beninese artist Pélagie Gbaguidi, presented in collaboration with Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Tim Van Laere Gallery.
Installed at St. Clara Church, the presentation brought together two painting installations from Gbaguidi’s ongoing Fragmentation series. Through layering, erasure and recomposition, the works reconfigured historical, personal and collective narratives.
In the church setting, Gbaguidi’s installation treated fragmentation not simply as rupture, but as a generative condition. The work proposed that broken histories can become sites of new consciousness, repair and alternative readings of the past.
Selma Feriani Gallery: Rituals, Ecology and Fracture in Tunisia’s Premiere Presentation
Selma Feriani Gallery returned to Art Basel’s Premiere sector with Rituals of Fracture, a focused presentation at Booth P12 bringing together three contemporary Tunisian artists: Monia Ben Hamouda, Mohamed Amine Hamouda and Nidhal Chamekh.
The presentation explored fracture both as a material condition and as a conceptual tool. Rather than treating rupture as only a wound or break, the booth approached fracture as a way to think through identity, ecology, politics, cultural memory and historical continuity.
The gallery, based between Tunis and London, used the presentation to foreground contemporary Tunisian expression within one of Art Basel’s most closely watched sectors. The booth brought together Ben Hamouda’s large-scale sculptural-like paintings, Mohamed Amine Hamouda’s ecological interventions and Nidhal Chamekh’s charged assemblages, creating a layered conversation around inheritance, environment and power.
Monia Ben Hamouda: Ritual, Protection and Ancestral Memory
At the centre of the booth, Tunisian-Italian artist Monia Ben Hamouda presented a monumental wall-sized painting split across two canvases.
Born in Milan in 1991 and living between al-Qayrawan, Tunisia and Milan, Ben Hamouda creates works rooted in generational Muslim heritage, ritual and cultural-religious symbolism. As the daughter of an Islamic calligrapher, she uses her practice to confront inherited expectations, ancestral memory and the pressures of tradition within the politicised present.
Her process is intensely physical. Using spices, soil and clay, she creates gestural compositions that evoke ritual, protection and transformation. In Rituals of Fracture, her large-scale painting connected architecture, sacred imagery, physical and spiritual protection, love, sacrifice, crisis and fragmentation.
Mohamed Amine Hamouda: The Gabès Oasis and Ecological Regeneration
Mohamed Amine Hamouda’s contribution extended the booth’s material language into the fragile ecosystem of the Gabès oasis, the only maritime oasis in the Mediterranean.
Born in Gabès in 1981, Hamouda has developed a practice closely connected to the environmental degradation of this endangered landscape. Working through painting, collage, installation, handmade paper, pigmented fibre compositions and tapestries, he uses vegetal waste, wool, cactus pulp and native fibres sourced from the oasis.
His work examines cycles of degradation and regeneration, while also responding to the social, environmental and economic challenges facing the region as a result of industrial intervention. Often organised around the motif of the palm tree, his installations function as both landscape and self-portrait, carrying the memory of an ecosystem under threat while imagining new possibilities for resilience.
Nidhal Chamekh: Frictions, Archives and Cultural Hybridity
Nidhal Chamekh brought a sharp historical and political dimension to the presentation through works from his Frictions series.
Born in Dahmani, Tunisia in 1985 and working between Paris and Tunis, Chamekh’s practice moves across drawing, sculpture and installation. His work sits at the intersection of biography and politics, lived experience and historical archive.
For Rituals of Fracture, Chamekh’s assemblages drew from Greco-Roman sculpture and African mask traditions, creating hybrid forms that challenge inherited hierarchies of representation. Through carved wood, sculptural fragments and patinated surfaces, he exposed tensions between archaeological and ethnographic categories.
His work disrupted dominant historical narratives and revealed the complexity of cultural hybridity, trauma and continuity. In dialogue with Ben Hamouda and Hamouda, Chamekh expanded the booth’s central question: how can fracture become a method of creation rather than only a sign of loss?
Gypsum Gallery: Hana El-Sagini in Statements
Cairo-based Gypsum Gallery presented Egyptian artist Hana El-Sagini in the Statements sector with Plot Twist.
The installation transformed the booth into an immersive sculptural environment of braided bronze branches and relief forms. Rooted in the artist’s experience of illness, recovery and bodily vulnerability, the work presented resilience not as triumph, but as something fragile, complex and continually changing.
Hana El-Sagini: Illness, Recovery and Sculptural Resilience
El-Sagini’s practice moves across sculpture, drawing and installation. In Plot Twist, she turned personal experience into a wider meditation on care, transformation and survival.
Her Basel presentation marked an important moment for contemporary Egyptian art within one of the fair’s most closely watched sectors. The work’s branching bronze forms evoked roots, nerves and hair, turning bodily fragility into an architectural presence within the booth.
Jenkins Johnson Gallery: Black Art Histories and Diasporic Memory
Jenkins Johnson Gallery, a Black-owned gallery based in San Francisco, New York and Brooklyn, returned to Art Basel with an intergenerational presentation that included Gordon Parks in Kabinett and works by artists including Esther Mahlangu.
The gallery’s programme has long focused on expanding the canon of African American and African diasporic art, making its Basel presence especially important within conversations around visibility and historical correction.
Esther Mahlangu: Ndebele Mastery on a Global Stage
South African artist Dr Esther Mahlangu was another major African presence with Jenkins Johnson Gallery.
For decades, Mahlangu has transformed Ndebele mural painting into a global contemporary language. Her vivid geometric compositions carry deep cultural knowledge while also asserting the place of African women artists within modern and contemporary art history.
Her presence at Art Basel connected indigenous South African visual systems to the international art market, while also celebrating an artist whose practice has influenced design, painting, public art and global visual culture.
Galerie Barbara Thumm: Cross-Cultural Dialogues and Contemporary Histories
Galerie Barbara Thumm returned to Art Basel 2026 with a cross-generational and international presentation that brought together artists including María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Fernanda Galvão, Roméo Mivekannin, Kaloki Nyamai, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, El Hadji Sy, Gülbin Ünlü, Carrie Mae Weems and Teresa Burga. The presentation reflected the gallery’s longstanding commitment to practices that engage history, memory, identity and socio-political transformation across geographies.
Among the African artists featured, Kenyan artist Kaloki Nyamai and Senegalese painter El Hadji Sy offered particularly powerful explorations of history and cultural memory. Nyamai’s layered paintings, constructed from acrylic, sisal rope, fabric and photo transfers, draw upon Kamba oral traditions and contemporary Kenyan realities, while El Hadji Sy’s dynamic abstractions continue his decades-long challenge to conventional art historical narratives through an experimental and politically engaged practice. Together, their works underscored the gallery’s broader interest in artists who use material, memory and storytelling to rethink historical experience from non-Western perspectives.
Galerie Nagel Draxler: Contemporary Voices Across Africa and Beyond
Galerie Nagel Draxler returned to Art Basel 2026 with a presentation that brought together artists working across diverse geographical and political contexts, including Kader Attia, Abdulnasser Gharem, Zandile Tshabalala, Teresa Kutala Firmino, Martha Rosler, Huang Rui, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Christine Tien Wang, among others. The booth reflected the gallery’s longstanding commitment to politically engaged and conceptually rigorous practices that interrogate history, identity, power and social transformation.
Among the African artists featured, South African painter Zandile Tshabalala and Algerian-French artist Kader Attia offered distinct yet complementary explorations of identity and historical memory. Tshabalala’s vibrant figurative paintings centre Black women as confident, sensual and self-possessed subjects, challenging the historical marginalisation of Black female bodies within Western art history. Attia, meanwhile, extended his ongoing investigation into colonial trauma, repair and collective memory beyond the booth through Untitled (Rainsticks) in Art Basel Parcours, a large-scale kinetic installation that transformed natural materials and sound into a meditation on time, ecology and interconnectedness. Together, their works underscored the gallery’s commitment to artists who rethink historical narratives while imagining new social and cultural possibilities.
NIMA MOK – Chapter 2, 2021
Emalin: Jonathan Okoronkwo and the Material Life of Ghana’s Suame Magazine
Jonathan Okoronkwo, a Ghana-based artist connected to KNUST and Kumasi’s creative ecosystem, appeared with Emalin in the Kabinett sector.
His work is deeply informed by Suame Magazine, one of West Africa’s largest industrial zones, located in Kumasi. Through painting, sculpture, assemblage and installation, Okoronkwo examines machines, labour, repair, disassembly and reuse.
His practice considers how objects carry evidence of time, use and transformation. In the context of Basel, Okoronkwo’s work brought Ghana’s industrial landscape into conversation with the global art market, showing how local material histories can speak to wider questions of labour, technology and value.
David Zwirner: Nigerian and Diasporic Market Strength
David Zwirner’s Art Basel 2026 presentation included important works by Nigerian-born Njideka Akunyili Crosby and British-Nigerian artist Chris Ofili.
Their inclusion reflected the growing institutional and market power of African diasporic artists within blue-chip gallery presentations. Both artists have built practices that move between painting, photography, memory, mythology, domestic space and diasporic identity, yet their approaches are distinct.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby: Migration, Memory and Domestic Intimacy
Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s The Beautyful Ones appeared in David Zwirner’s Basel presentation.
Her layered mixed-media works combine painting, drawing, photography and image transfers to explore migration, family, intimacy, Nigerian memory and life between cultures. Her work remains highly sought after because it speaks to the emotional and visual complexity of diasporic experience.
Akunyili Crosby’s practice is especially powerful because it transforms domestic space into a site of cultural translation. Furniture, wallpaper, family photographs and everyday gestures become carriers of memory, showing how migration is lived not only across borders, but also inside homes, relationships and images.
Chris Ofili: Myth, Painting and Market Strength
Chris Ofili was represented by David Zwirner with Past Times: Narcissus and the silent stingray in the sky, a major oil and charcoal painting dated 2016–2026.
Ofili’s work moves between mythology, spirituality, abstraction, landscape and Black cultural experience. A reported sale of a Chris Ofili painting for $650,000 was one of the notable African diasporic market moments connected to the fair.
His Basel presence also underlined the continued relevance of painting as a space of myth-making and transformation. Ofili’s work often draws from literature, music, religious imagery and the Caribbean landscape, creating paintings that feel both dreamlike and historically charged.
Galerie Cécile Fakhoury: Souleymane Keita in Feature
Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, founded in Abidjan and now operating across Abidjan, Dakar and Paris, presented Senegalese artist Souleymane Keita in the Feature sector.
Feature is dedicated to historically focused and carefully curated presentations, making Keita’s inclusion important for the recognition of African modern and post-independence art histories.
Souleymane Keita: Senegalese Abstraction and Art Historical Recovery
Keita’s layered abstract works occupy an important place in Senegalese art history. His presence in Feature helped position West African modernism within a global framework and pushed against the tendency to treat African contemporary art as only young, emerging or market-new.
His circular and atmospheric compositions point to a painterly language shaped by colour, rhythm, movement and spiritual suggestion. At Basel, his work offered a powerful reminder that African abstraction has its own histories, lineages and intellectual foundations.
Galerie Nathalie Obadia: Youssef Nabil and the Cinematic Language of Memory
French-Egyptian artist Youssef Nabil was prominently featured at Art Basel 2026 by Galerie Nathalie Obadia, which presented his work alongside artists including Valérie Belin, Laure Prouvost, Mickalene Thomas, Pierre Soulages and Agnès Varda at Booth J11. Nabil’s inclusion brought an important North African voice to the fair and reinforced the continuing significance of photography within contemporary African and Middle Eastern art.
Internationally celebrated for his distinctive hand-coloured photographs, Nabil draws upon the rich visual traditions of Egyptian cinema, studio portraiture and popular culture to create works that exist between photography and painting, memory and fiction. His images frequently explore themes of exile, identity, desire and belonging, often reflecting his own experiences of migration and displacement. Through their cinematic atmosphere and carefully staged compositions, Nabil’s works transform portraiture into a deeply personal and poetic meditation on memory, nostalgia and self-fashioning..
Gérard Sekoto: South African Modernism and the Poetics of Everyday Life
The appearance of Gérard Sekoto’s work added major historical depth to the African presence at Art Basel.
Sekoto is widely regarded as one of South Africa’s most important modernist painters. His work captured scenes of everyday Black life with sensitivity and dignity during a period when such lives were often marginalised or violently controlled by the structures of segregation and apartheid.
His paintings are quiet but powerful records of community, labour, domestic life and social presence. At Basel, Sekoto’s work helped place African modernism within a wider international conversation, reminding viewers that African art history is not only contemporary, but deeply rooted in twentieth-century modernist practice.
Pascale Marthine Tayou: Mobility, Hybridity and Global Exchange
Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou brought a vibrant and materially rich presence to the fair.
Tayou’s work often explores migration, identity, globalisation, cultural exchange and the movement of objects across borders. His practice resists fixed categories, moving across sculpture, installation, drawing and assemblage.
His colourful forms and use of everyday materials often carry a playful surface, but beneath that playfulness lies a serious interrogation of postcolonial identity, consumer culture and global circulation. His presence at Art Basel showed how African artists continue to reframe questions of movement, belonging and exchange within contemporary art.
Omar Ba: Reimagining Power Through Painting
Senegalese artist Omar Ba was another strong African presence at the fair.
Ba’s paintings often create dense, symbolic worlds populated by hybrid figures, political references, mythological elements and richly patterned surfaces. His work frequently investigates power, masculinity, leadership, violence and the fragile architecture of authority.
At Basel, Ba’s presence contributed to the strength of contemporary Senegalese painting. His work stands at the intersection of political imagination and visual storytelling, using figuration to question the systems that shape modern life.
Alioune Diagne: Figuro-Abstro and the Everyday Image
Senegalese artist Alioune Diagne added another important contemporary voice from Senegal.
Diagne is known for his distinctive “Figuro-Abstro” approach, combining figuration and abstraction through thousands of small marks that build into larger scenes. His works often depict everyday life while resisting simplified readings of African experience.
His visual language turns ordinary moments into textured fields of memory and movement. At Basel, his presence showed how younger and mid-career African painters are creating new formal strategies for representing life on the continent and in the diaspora.
Kader Attia: Repair, Colonial Trauma and Restitution
Algerian-French artist Kader Attia appeared in Basel’s wider programme through Galerie Nagel Draxler and Regen Projects.
Attia’s practice has become one of the most influential bodies of work on the concept of repair. Across sculpture, installation, photography and research-based projects, he examines colonial trauma, museum histories, restitution, bodily memory and cultural wounds.
At Basel, his work carried a strong symbolic charge, connecting African and diasporic presence to unresolved questions around colonial history, heritage and the politics of restoration.
Stevenson: A Cross-Generational Survey of African and Diasporic Practices
Stevenson, with galleries in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Amsterdam, returned to Art Basel 2026 with one of the fair’s most expansive presentations of African and diasporic contemporary art.
Founded in 2003, Stevenson has played a central role in shaping the international visibility of artists from Southern Africa and beyond. Over the past two decades, the gallery has become synonymous with intellectually rigorous practices that engage questions of history, memory, identity, migration and postcolonial experience.
At Art Basel 2026, Stevenson’s booth brought together works by Jane Alexander, Mahesh Baliga, Ben Enwonwu, Meschac Gaba, Georgina Gratrix, Sosa Joseph, Moshekwa Langa, Meleko Mokgosi, Paulo Nazareth, Odili Donald Odita, Frida Orupabo, Robin Rhode, Gerard Sekoto, Penny Siopis and Portia Zvavahera.
The presentation moved fluidly between modernism, contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, collage and installation. It showed Stevenson’s ability to hold different generations together: from historic figures such as Ben Enwonwu and Gerard Sekoto to contemporary voices such as Portia Zvavahera, Frida Orupabo and Meleko Mokgosi.
Ben Enwonwu
The inclusion of Nigerian modernist pioneer Ben Enwonwu provided an important historical anchor to Stevenson’s presentation.
Widely regarded as one of Africa’s most influential twentieth-century artists, Enwonwu helped establish modern African art on the international stage while creating a visual language rooted in Nigerian cultural traditions and modernist experimentation.
Meschac Gaba
Beninese artist Meschac Gaba continued his long-running investigation into systems of value, institutions and exchange.
Internationally recognised for Museum of Contemporary African Art, Gaba’s practice challenges Western museum structures while reimagining how African art histories are narrated.
Moshekwa Langa
South African artist Moshekwa Langa brought his deeply personal cartographic and memory-based practice to the booth.
Through drawing, found materials and installation, Langa constructs poetic geographies that speak to displacement, migration and belonging.
Meleko Mokgosi
Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi presented works continuing his ambitious examination of democracy, education, nationhood and postcolonial African societies.
His large-scale paintings have established him as one of the most significant contemporary painters working today.
Odili Donald Odita
Nigerian-American artist Odili Donald Odita contributed his vibrant geometric abstractions.
His works explore migration, identity, colour and spatial politics through a distinctly contemporary visual language.
Frida Orupabo
Norwegian-Nigerian artist Frida Orupabo, whose collages have garnered major international attention, continued her investigation of race, gender and the historical representation of Black bodies.
Her fragmented compositions often challenge the way Black bodies have been archived, consumed and misrepresented across visual culture.
Penny Siopis and Portia Zvavahera
South African artist Penny Siopis and Zimbabwean painter Portia Zvavahera further strengthened the presentation.
Siopis’ practice has long explored trauma, memory and history, while Zvavahera continues to produce emotionally charged paintings informed by dreams, spirituality and lived experience.
Together, Stevenson presented a booth that moved between modern and contemporary art, demonstrating the extraordinary breadth of artistic practices emerging from Africa and its diasporas.
blank projects: Experimental Practices from Southern Africa
Cape Town-based blank projects brought a sharply focused and conceptually ambitious presentation to Art Basel.
Founded in 2005, blank projects has established itself as one of Southern Africa’s most influential experimental galleries, consistently supporting artists whose practices challenge disciplinary boundaries and conventional narratives.
Presented at Booth K1 in the Galleries sector, the gallery featured works by Igshaan Adams, Annabelle Agbo Godeau, Jared Ginsburg, Asemahle Ntlonti, Kresiah Mukwazhi, Gregory Olympio and Kemang Wa Lehulere.
As part of Art Basel’s Basel Exclusive initiative, the gallery unveiled a new presentation by South African artist Asemahle Ntlonti.
Igshaan Adams
South African artist Igshaan Adams continues to gain international recognition for his intricate textile-based installations and sculptures.
Drawing upon spirituality, community, identity and personal histories, Adams transforms beads, rope, fabric and found materials into works that blur distinctions between craft, sculpture and performance.
Asemahle Ntlonti
Asemahle Ntlonti’s exclusive Basel presentation further established her as one of South Africa’s most exciting emerging voices.
Through painting and installation, Ntlonti examines Black womanhood, intimacy and social experience with remarkable sensitivity and formal experimentation.
Kresiah Mukwazhi
Zimbabwean artist Kresiah Mukwazhi brought her powerful textile and mixed-media practice to Basel.
Her work addresses gender inequality, labour and the lived realities of women in contemporary Zimbabwe, frequently incorporating second-hand clothing and found fabrics.
Kemang Wa Lehulere
South African artist Kemang Wa Lehulere contributed works continuing his long-standing engagement with memory, erasure, education and South African history.
Working across installation, sculpture, drawing and performance, Wa Lehulere remains one of the continent’s most critically acclaimed conceptual artists.
African Artists Beyond African Galleries
The African presence at Art Basel 2026 extended well beyond galleries based on the continent.
In Unlimited, Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa appeared with Semiose, presenting the kind of large-scale material practice for which he is internationally known. His work transforms discarded consumer materials into sculptural forms that speak to waste, colonial residue, consumption and environmental memory.
South African artist Berni Searle was also presented in Unlimited with PSM, bringing her long-running engagement with identity, race, gender, memory and the body into the fair’s large-scale platform.
Egyptian artist Wael Shawky appeared in Unlimited with Lisson Gallery, Lia Rumma and Sfeir-Semler Gallery. His work often revisits historical narratives through film, theatre and installation, complicating how histories are told and performed.
In Parcours, Kader Attia was presented by Regen Projects and Galerie Nagel Draxler. His practice examines repair, colonial trauma, memory and the politics of restitution. Pélagie Gbaguidi also featured in Parcours through Goodman Gallery, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Tim Van Laere, extending African and diasporic presence into Basel’s public urban programme.
Wael Shawky: Myth, Archaeology and the Reimagining of History
Egyptian artist Wael Shawky was one of the standout African voices in Art Basel 2026’s Unlimited sector. Co-presented by Lisson Gallery, Sfeir-Semler Gallery and Lia Rumma, Shawky unveiled the monumental installation I Am Hymns of the New Temples at Booth U54.
Widely regarded as one of the Arab world’s most influential contemporary artists, Shawky is renowned for films, performances and large-scale installations that revisit mythology, religion and historical narratives. For Unlimited, he presented an immersive installation comprising monumental vitrines populated by masks, glass works and bronze sculptures connected to his acclaimed film project. Drawing on Greco-Roman mythology, archaeology and the layered histories of Pompeii, the installation examined how civilisations remember, mythologise and reconstruct the past. Shawky’s presence at Basel came only months after he made history as the first artist to serve as Artistic Director of Art Basel Qatar, further underscoring his growing influence within the global art world.
Moffat Takadiwa: Monumental Sculptures from Discarded Materials
Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa brought one of the largest African presentations to Art Basel 2026 through the Unlimited sector, where Semiose presented The Water Vessels (2024), an installation stretching nearly eight metres in length.
Designed to resemble a vast, living cell in motion, The Water Vessels was constructed from keyboard keys, pen casings and plastic bucket handles, materials that have become synonymous with Takadiwa’s practice. Through the transformation of discarded consumer and industrial waste into monumental sculptural environments, Takadiwa addresses the intertwined histories of consumption, colonial extraction, environmental degradation and global capitalism. The work continued his longstanding exploration of how everyday materials circulate through systems of trade and waste, while also proposing new possibilities for regeneration and collective memory. Its scale and ambition reinforced Takadiwa’s position as one of Africa’s leading contemporary sculptors.
Berni Searle: Identity, Memory and the Body
South African artist Berni Searle was presented in Unlimited by PSM with Profile (2002), an eight-part photographic installation originally commissioned for the exhibition Fronteras in Santander, Spain.
Across photography, video and installation, Searle has spent decades exploring race, gender, identity and historical memory. In Profile, the artist uses her own body as a site upon which histories of colonialism, religion, trade and apartheid are inscribed. The work consists of a series of transparent Duraclear lambda prints showing temporary impressions left on the artist’s cheek by objects carrying complex historical meanings, including a Catholic cross, a Dutch windmill, a British crown, a Zulu love letter, an anti-riot shield, Arabic prayer beads and cloves associated with histories of European trade.
Rather than addressing borders solely through nationalism or geography, Searle examines how boundaries operate within intimate and domestic spaces, shaping individual identity and lived experience. The layering of transparent images echoes the multiple and often conflicting histories carried within a single body, revealing how personal identity is continually formed through overlapping histories of heritage, migration, colonialism and memory. At Basel, Profile reaffirmed Searle’s importance as one of South Africa’s most significant conceptual artists.
A Fair Defined by African Authorship
Art Basel 2026 made clear that African presence at the fair could not be reduced to one geography, one style or one market category.
It moved through Ghanaian textile intervention, South African political memory, Nigerian diasporic painting, Egyptian sculpture, Tunisian ritual abstraction, Kenyan layered history, Senegalese modernism, Cameroonian material experimentation, Zimbabwean sculptural transformation, Botswanan mythology and African American photography.
What emerged was not simply representation. It was authorship.
African artists were not only included in Art Basel 2026. They shaped its public spaces, its strongest booth presentations, its major sales conversations and its intellectual direction.
From Ibrahim Mahama’s transformation of Münsterplatz to El Anatsui’s presence across Goodman Gallery and White Cube, from Selma Feriani’s Tunisian Premiere presentation to Hana El-Sagini’s Cairo-rooted Statements installation, from Esther Mahlangu’s Ndebele mastery to Kaloki Nyamai’s layered Kenyan histories, Art Basel 2026 showed that the future of contemporary art cannot be written without Africa and its diaspora.
The reported opening-day sales of works by artists including William Kentridge, Atta Kwami, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Chris Ofili and Ibrahim Mahama also showed that African and diasporic practices were not only critically visible, but commercially active within the fair’s highest levels.
This was not simply African participation at Art Basel. It was African authorship at the centre of the global contemporary art conversation.
Images courtesy of the respective artists, galleries, Art Basel and rights holders. Used for editorial purposes only. Copyright remains with the original owners.
