Lagos Biennial Returns With “The Museum of Things Unseen”

The Lagos Biennial opens its 5th edition on 14 November 2026, running through 6 December under the title The Museum of Things Unseen. Curators Furen Dai, Chinyere Obieze, and Sam Hopkins have built the edition around artworks that have rarely or never been exhibited publicly, using that premise to ask a broader question: what political, philosophical, and economic forces actually decide which artworks a museum chooses to collect, preserve, and put on view — and which ones stay invisible by that same set of decisions.

The Biennial was founded in 2017 by the Lagos-born artist Folakunle Oshun, at a time when few recurring international exhibitions of this scale existed anywhere in West Africa. Organized under the Àkéte Art Foundation, it has grown across five editions into one of the most closely watched fixtures on the continent’s contemporary art calendar, part of a broader surge of institutional and market attention toward Lagos that has, in recent years, put the city on the same shortlists of essential art destinations as capitals with far longer museum histories.

Full venue details and programming for the 2026 edition are on the Lagos Biennial’s official site. Dates and a source-linked summary are also on Art Fair’s Lagos Biennial 2026 listing.