The Pan-African Biennale 2026 places African architecture at the centre of global debates on resilience, identity, ecology and urban futures.

The Pan-African Biennale 2026, whose inaugural edition will take place in Nairobi from 7 to 11 September, proposes a radical reconsideration of Africa’s position within international architectural discourse. Under the curatorial framework “Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience”, the Biennale challenges narratives that have historically interpreted the continent through colonial parameters or imported models of development, asserting instead Africa’s capacity to generate its own spatial knowledge, material innovation and urban futures. Fragility is therefore reframed not merely as vulnerability, but as a condition from which strategies of adaptation, memory and transformation can emerge. Displacement, extractive economies, environmental instability and colonial legacies become starting points for new architectural imaginaries grounded in vernacular intelligence, climate-responsive construction, community practices and indigenous knowledge. Nairobi plays a particularly significant role within this framework: rather than functioning simply as an exhibition backdrop, the city becomes an active curatorial site, embodying tensions between informality and regulation, colonial inheritance and local appropriation. The continental selection expands this proposition through practices such as Hive Earth in Ghana, Association La Voûte Nubienne in Burkina Faso, MASS Design Group in Rwanda, Cave Bureau in Kenya and Studio Ola Hassanain in Sudan. Together, these participants articulate diverse responses to territory, materiality, community and memory. Ultimately, the Biennale argues that decolonising architecture means reclaiming authorship, transforming the criteria through which space is produced and evaluated, and recognising Africa not as a peripheral recipient of global models but as a crucial laboratory for imagining sustainable architectural futures. Pan-African Biennale 2026, Curatorial Statement, Participants, Publication Reference: Pan-African Biennale (2026) Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience. Available at: https://www.panafricanbiennale.org/curatorial-statement (Accessed: 10 August 2026).

Mask of Becoming

 

Virginia Chihota’s Kuva inini (Being me) may be understood as a compelling meditation on the unstable architecture of selfhood, where the figure becomes less a portrait than a psychic event. The composition stages identity not as a fixed essence but as a site of becoming, rendered through a syntax of distortion, chromatic violence and corporeal elongation. The dominant black form, simultaneously human, avian and spectral, refuses anatomical resolution; instead, it enacts a condition of inward multiplicity, as though the self were constituted through accreted masks, memories and emotional residues. The saturated red ground intensifies this drama, operating not merely as backdrop but as an atmospheric field of affect, alarm and existential exposure. Particularly striking is the tension between the figure’s enlarged, vigilant eyes and the gestural extension of the arm, which suggests both self-touch and self-defence, intimacy and estrangement. Such formal dissonance recalls broader contemporary practices in which figuration becomes a vehicle for articulating trauma, resilience and unstable embodiment. In this specific case, the work’s asymmetry, its rough inked surfaces and its refusal of perspectival comfort synthesise a visual language of interiority: the subject is not shown as socially legible, but as psychically inhabited. Consequently, the piece achieves more than expressive deformation; it offers a rigorous ontology of being in which identity emerges as fractured, sensate and defiantly unresolved. 

BLUE PANTS__________________________________________________________UNSTABLE INSTALLATION :________________ CADIZ NORWAY BERLIN CROATIA NEGRADAS 2014 2019______________________IDENTITY SCULPTURE SERIES

Blue Pants operates as a distilled vocabulary of embodied minimalism, using a simple, recurring element —bright blue trousers— to activate an evolving identity code across multiple geographies. The work unfolds between 2014 and 2019 through ephemeral performances and photographic documentation in sites ranging from urban interiors to natural deserts, establishing a mobile sculptural grammar. By placing the artist’s body consistently within varying contexts, always wearing the titular garment, the project becomes a modular exploration of presence, place and authorship. Without relying on textual explanation, the repetition of form and posture generates a symbolic infrastructure that is at once personal and transferable. In works like Dark Blue Pants II and Jungle Hardangen, the gesture is refined to a minimalist tableau: the outstretched arm, the standing body, the vibrant blue. These configurations subtly invoke traditions of conceptual art, land art, and performance, while inserting affective registers linked to displacement and self-representation. Here, clothing becomes object-sign, the body becomes sculpture, and the landscape becomes frame. Blue Pants functions as an open protocol —not a statement, but a presence— where the lack of verbal mediation enhances its visual authority and leaves interpretation in the hands of the viewer.

Lloveras, A., 2014–2019. Blue Pants [installation/performance]. Various locations: Cádiz, Norway, Berlin, Croatia, Negradas. Available at

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