Nigeria: RAI and the Afterlife of a Lagos Art Experiment

What the report says

This Day reports that the Revolving Art Incubator, or RAI, is marking its 10th anniversary with a six-month programme titled Afterlives/AfterSpaces. The initiative runs from June to December in Lagos and includes conversations, archive installations, urban interventions, a maker lab exhibition, a symposium, a film programme, a storytelling lab, a retrospective exhibition and a final closing activation.

RAI was founded in 2016 by Jumoke Sanwo at Silverbird Galleria in Victoria Island, Lagos. The article describes it as an artist-led platform that has never followed a standard gallery model, instead bringing together artists, architects, designers, filmmakers, technologists, writers and researchers. Sanwo says the project was created to open space for experimentation and to connect memory, place and future-oriented thinking.

According to the report, RAI has hosted more than 50 solo and group exhibitions, along with residencies, workshops, apprenticeships, conversations and collaborative projects. The anniversary programme revisits recurring themes such as technology, architecture, filmmaking, cultural production, artificial intelligence, authorship and Yoruba ideas about the marketplace and collective memory. It also includes tributes to figures such as photographer and filmmaker Tam Fiofori. The piece frames the anniversary as a reflection on the wider influence of the space and the collaborations it helped generate across Lagos’s art scene.