At the 61st Venice Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh under the title In Minor Keys, the presence of Guest Artists Space Foundation feels especially resonant. While many presentations within Venice unfold through spectacle, monumentality, or national assertion, G.A.S. Foundation enters the exhibition through a quieter but deeply affecting register—one grounded in listening, collective memory, process, and shared experience. Their presentation, Chorus, currently on view within the Arsenale in Venice, does not position itself merely as an installation, but as an evolving ecosystem of voices, gestures, histories, and encounters.
Founded in 2019 by Yinka Shonibare, G.A.S. Foundation has rapidly become one of the most significant artist-led cultural infrastructures emerging from West Africa. Operating across Lagos and Ikise in Ogun State, the foundation has developed a distinct model rooted in residency programmes, public engagement, interdisciplinary research, and long-term exchange. Rather than functioning as a conventional institution, G.A.S. positions itself as a living ecology—one where artists, thinkers, researchers, farmers, architects, writers, and communities intersect through sustained dialogue and collaborative production. That philosophy now arrives in Venice through Chorus, a multi-sensory installation that extends the foundation’s ethos into the context of one of the world’s most historically significant contemporary art exhibitions.
Conceived as a contemplative environment inspired by the spatial and social logic of the Yorùbá courtyard, Chorus brings together the voices and experiences of former G.A.S. residents and collaborators through sound, moving image, colour, and architectural intervention. The installation resists fixed narratives and singular authorship, instead unfolding as a collective field of reflection and exchange. Visitors are invited not simply to observe, but to enter, pause, listen, and inhabit the work. In many ways, the installation embodies the conceptual spirit of In Minor Keys, which foregrounds subtler modes of relation, attentiveness, and embodied knowledge. Rather than demanding attention, Chorus accumulates slowly within the viewer, operating through atmosphere, resonance, and emotional proximity.
Africans Column spoke with the G.A.S. Foundation team about their participation in the Biennale, the curatorial vision behind Chorus, and what it means to translate a deeply rooted local practice into a global and historical context.
Africans Column: G.A.S. Foundation is rooted in the dualities of Lagos and Ijebu. How does this presentation at the Venice Biennale extend or evolve your core mission of research and knowledge production, and what does it mean to translate that “local” energy into a global, historical context?
G.A.S. Foundation: Established as a non-profit in 2019 to support residencies, public programmes, and cultural exchange, G.A.S. Foundation exists as a bridge between two living worlds: the city pulse of Lagos and the slower, rooted rhythm of the farm in Ijebu. In Venice, that energy is not diluted, it is expanded and carried into the contemporary art landscape as evidence that grounded, place-based knowledge can speak globally and meaningfully to wider publics.
Africans Column: Can you share the curatorial vision behind your participation this year? Given the theme In Minor Keys, what should audiences expect to experience when they step into the G.A.S. presentation?
G.A.S. Foundation: Audiences will meet Chorus as a sensorial gathering of sound, colour, image, memory, and contemplation, shaped by the experiences and textures of G.A.S.’s two sites. We’ve developed the installation to feel like a living, sensorial gathering rather than a conventional exhibition display. It draws on Yorùbá courtyard traditions and invites visitors into a shared space of sound, colour, image, meditation, and exchange, where former residents’ dialogues weave together into a kind of collective chorus.
At its core, the installation is meant to feel like a shelter within the wider Biennale, a place where friends and strangers alike can enter, listen, and rest for a while. It stages G.A.S. as a multi-voiced ecosystem in which reflection, memory, and knowledge production unfold through the exploration of connections rather than spectacle.
Africans Column: The title of this Biennale, In Minor Keys, suggests a focus on lower frequencies, intimacy, and improvisation. How does your participation respond to this theme—particularly in how you represent the “quiet” or foundational work of African and diasporic art practices?
G.A.S. Foundation: Koyo Kouoh’s concept for In Minor Keys asks for attention to the low, sustaining frequencies which surround us. Her curatorial frame emphasizes enchantment, seeding, processional assemblies, rest and deep listening. As one of the “Schools”, G.A.S. is rooted in the transnational ecosystems built on encounter, shared knowledge, and social purpose that this frame highlights.
Chorus is built as a courtyard-like shelter of sound, colour, image, and contemplation, where visitors move through and listen to the intertwined voices of former residents. The installation stands in opposition to fixed, monumental displays that have characterised past biennials on the art circuit, instead drawing on living, locally rooted systems that generate knowledge, care, and regeneration.
Africans Column: Collaboration is the lifeblood of G.A.S. Who are the key voices—artists, researchers, or community members—involved in this presentation, and how did their diverse perspectives shape the final outcome we see in Venice?
G.A.S. Foundation: Our installation is shaped by many voices moving in and out of one another. Former residents, the wider farm community, and a broader constellation of artists, writers, researchers, curators and elders all contribute to the work’s final composition, making collaboration feel less like a method than a way of breathing together.
Among the contributors represented within Chorus are Alberta Whittle, Emma Prempeh, Portia Zvavahera, Ṣọlá Olúlòde, Raqs Media Collective, Umar Rashid, Ayomide Fasedu, and many others whose voices collectively shape the installation’s evolving texture.
Africans Column: As an artist-led organisation rather than a traditional museum, what unique contribution do you think G.A.S. makes to the broader discourse of representation at the Biennale? How are you reimagining “knowledge exchange” for an international audience?
G.A.S. Foundation: G.A.S. models itself as an institution built as a living ecology, rather than a Western-based traditional museum. It brings an artist-led, non-hierarchical spirit of exchange into the field of contemporary art practice, while also advancing a larger mission to foster mutual understanding, support global partnerships, and create pathways for learning and cultural production across West Africa and beyond.
Africans Column: Looking at the road ahead, how does this moment in Venice serve as a portal for the future of the Foundation? What conversations do you hope this project sparks that will continue long after the Biennale closes?
G.A.S. Foundation: For G.A.S., Venice has become a threshold rather than an endpoint. Taking part in the Biennale is a way of carrying five years of collective practice into public view, while simultaneously pointing toward the future G.A.S. is building. We are doing this through residencies, education, archive expansion, and a cultural infrastructure meant to help the next generation thrive, not merely survive.
In many respects, Chorus encapsulates what makes G.A.S. Foundation such an important presence within contemporary African cultural production today. It is not simply a residency programme, nor merely a platform for artists, but an evolving framework for thinking through how knowledge, care, ecology, and artistic practice might coexist outside dominant institutional models. Its contribution to the Venice Biennale arrives not through spectacle or grand institutional assertion, but through intimacy, collectivity, and sustained attention to the quieter systems that shape artistic life.
Within the broader framework of In Minor Keys, G.A.S. Foundation’s presence feels especially significant because it embodies the very principles Koyo Kouoh’s exhibition seeks to foreground: listening over declaration, relation over hierarchy, process over monumentality. Chorus becomes more than an installation—it becomes a proposition for another way of being together through art.
And perhaps that is what lingers most powerfully after leaving the work. Not a singular image or statement, but the feeling of having entered a shared space shaped by voices, rhythms, and histories moving together. A chorus not seeking unanimity, but resonance.
