‘It’s important because it’s a part of me’: why a growing number of African diasporic artists are showing work on the continent

The London-born and based artist Emma Prempeh hit a major career milestone in 2021, debuting in Africa with a solo show at ADA Contemporary Art Gallery in Accra, Ghana, her father’s homeland. The show was preceded by a month-long residency in the West African country.

It was a decision “to connect with my heritage”, she tells The Art Newspaper. “My father is a proud Ghanaian; it was important for me to seek him out and my art was able to bring me there.” Since then, her work has been shown at Gallery 1957 in Accra and she has also exhibited at Bwo Art Gallery in Douala, Cameroon and Tiwani Contemporary in Lagos, Nigeria, and during a residency in her fiancé’s home-country of Uganda. On 6 March, she opens her latest solo show at Tiwani Contemporary Lagos, Belonging In-Between (until 24 May), which responds to a visit to her mother’s homeland of St. Vincent, in the eastern Caribbean, and explores the “weird middle ground” that diasporans sometimes find themselves on, with ties to different cultures but still considered as strangers in those places.

Asked about her experience exhibiting across these different locations, Prempeh says: “To be able to continue to show my work in West Africa, I feel it’s important because it’s a part of me.”

Prempeh’s experience is part of a wider trend, with an increasing number of African diasporic artists showing their work on the continent over the past decade. Five years before Prempeh’s Africa debut, the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s first major solo presentation in Nigeria was unveiled at the Ndubuisi Kanu Park in Lagos. “It is a great privilege to exhibit my sculpture here in Lagos,” he said at the time, adding that it was a city where he had grown up between the ages of three and 17.

A notable jump has followed, with at least five established or rising diasporic artists having solo shows in different African cities since 2021 alone, and more than a dozen featuring in group exhibitions.

In West Africa, Gallery 1957—established in 2016—has been an important hub: hosting shows with work by the British-Nigerian artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones; the British-Ghanaian artist Adelaide Damoah; the British-Sierra Leonean artist Julianknxx; the London-born artist of Caribbean heritage Michaela Yearwood-Dan; and the Ghanaian artist Amoako Boafo, while he was based in Vienna, to name a few. Gallery 1957 also put on a solo show by the London born and based Barbadian artist Andrew Pierre Hart as part of its most recent Accra Cultural Week initiative.

The newly founded Bwo Art Gallery in Cameroon is one of the newest additions to Central Africa’s gallery circuit, and its recent shows include a solo exhibition for the UK-based Italian-Ghanaian artist Stephen Price, who has also exhibited in group shows at Ko in Lagos.

In South Africa, the country with one of the most established commercial art scenes on the continent, Goodman Gallery's Cape Town and Johannesburg spaces have shown works by a growing number of diasporans over the past ten years, among them the American artist Kehinde Wiley, who has Nigerian heritage, the Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu and the Nigerian-Belgian artist Otobong Nkanga. More recent notable additions include Cape Town’s Norval Foundation, established in 2018, which has exhibited work by artists including the Canadian artist Kapwani Kiwanga, who has Tanzanian heritage.

Up north in Marrakech, Morocco, meanwhile, Loft Art Gallery, opened in 2009, is currently presenting Homesick, a solo exhibition by Moroccan-Belgian photographer Mous Lamrabat (until 15 March), coinciding with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. The show—his second solo, and fourth show in total to be held at Loft Art Gallery in three years—speaks to the artist “missing” his country of birth, he tells The Art Newspaper.

“Being homesick is not always for a specific place, it's just a feeling of how you feel in a place or in an environment,” he says. “Sometimes I just miss the warmth of the [Moroccan] people.”

What other factors lie behind this trend?

Maria Varnava, the founder and director of Tiwani Contemporary, which hosted the first solo shows in Africa for British-Nigerian artist Joy Labinjo in 2022 and British artist of Zimbabwean and Caribbean heritage Sikelela Owen in 2024, says artists share “different and deeply personal” reasons for their decision to show their work on the continent.

“This idea of homecoming,” she tells The Art Newspaper, “is for some artists a strong reason. [Another is] this idea of ‘putting the dots together’ or being part of the same constellation, if you like. I think that’s very important.”

Varnava adds that some artists are interested in “visibility and engagement with local audience” in Africa. Showing on the continent is also an opportunity for diasporic artists, and commercial galleries such as hers who represent them, to build relationships with collectors. “It’s important for [the work of these] artists to be in collections that are based on the continent,” she says.

Yasmine Berrada Sounni, the co-founder and director of Loft Art Gallery, which has a space in Casablanca as well as Marrakech, says that the arrival of platforms such as 1-54 have been crucial, providing new and diverse spaces for diasporic artists to show their work.

"I'm Moroccan, and in Marrakech, which is an amazing city, and [1-54] is a very important moment for us,“ she says. “I think it's also the moment to show African artists on their continent but to an international art [audience].” This year, her Loft Art Gallery booth included the work of the France-born Moroccan artist Nassim Azarzar. ”[Nassim had] great success at the fair. A lot of his collectors were institutional collectors.”

Sounni emphasises the “question of identity” too. The rise in artists working with textiles, she says, is a testament to this point, with the material speaking to themes like home, heritage and identity. Prempeh, referencing conversations with her Caribbean friends, explains that sometimes these ideas can be loosely defined but still very powerful. “A lot of us from the Caribbean don't really know where we're from specifically [in Africa], she says. “It’s the idea of going somewhere or going back to [a place] where they may have roots.”

Lamrabat also alludes to a sense of connection and community. “Showing my work in Africa is always a bit easier because I feel like there's less need of explanation of my work,” he says. “People understand the work—and what I want to say—very quickly.”

Much of it, he says, comes back to the very act of making art. “I think every African artist living abroad wants to show on the continent because a lot of the inspiration that we take is from [there]. It's also almost an homage.”