Guzangs

At the couturier's Paris foundation, Olivier Saillard gathers some fifty pieces against painted cloth, from galuchat and shells to foal hide and horsehair. Azzedine Alaïa, special creation, 1996. Foal hide and horsehair. Installation view, “Azzedine Alaïa and Africa,” Fondation Azzedine Alaïa. © Stéphane Aït Ouarab Azzedine Alaïa left Tunis as a young man and built his life in Paris, but the leaving was never really finished.

Compressed laterite earth blocks and a lightweight steel canopy create the distinctive architectural identity of the new Goethe-Institut Dakar. Photography by Oury Sène. In Dakar, a new cultural landmark is rising from the soil. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, the new Goethe-Institut Senegal turns earth, memory, and craftsmanship toward a new era of African architectural possibility.

African fashion is told it needs more capital. The deeper problem is that most available capital was not built for how fashion actually works. Ituen Basi at GTCO Fashion Weekend, 2024. Photo: Olaniyan Pelumi for Guzangs The year Beyoncé wore her clothes, Sarah Diouf was still, in effect, her own bank.

The Sovereign Stack, Part Three. A heritage archivist who builds African archives by her own categories, and a marketplace founder who says nobody gets paid for work a system can't read. A 2026 timeline of AI content and provenance laws being set elsewhere: California's content-marking law, the UK's licensing-first position, and the EU AI Act on 2 August, against an empty African-governed standards track marked. Ask a machine where to find African design and it will answer without hesitation.

Abdoul Manane Bakary is a Beninese designer who treats fabric as origin rather than ornament. Born in Porto-Novo and based in Cotonou, he works between the two cities, drawing on the inherited rhythms of craft in one and the production energy of a working capital in the other. The result is a practice that carries both registers without insisting on either.

Generational Love sets two couples in Michel Odouffan’s childhood living room and asks them to do the one thing we have trained ourselves out of: to be obvious about wanting each other. Against wax-print backdrops and a familiar red sofa, the newer couple lets the wanting spill over — a hand, a kiss, a head come to rest — while the older pair has learned to sit a careful inch apart.

From healing and memory to craft, poetry and political resistance, the African pavilions this year feel more visible and more deeply rooted in their own stories than ever before. For a long time, Africa’s presence at the Venice Biennale has felt slightly out of place.

What brands and institutions misread about one of Africa's most sophisticated cultural markets. Photography by Mehdi Jouali. The Ancien Palais de Justice has no business being as beautiful as it is. It is an abandoned colonial courthouse out on Cap Manuel, the sea right behind it, the concrete going soft at the corners, the kind of building the city has been meaning to deal with for as long as I have been alive.

An artisan wears traditional handwoven cotton textiles during ASFW Dakar 2026. Photo: ASFW Dakar. The most important fashion event in Dakar this year had less to do with fashion than with industry.

In A Love Letter With Teeth, the artist paints the contradictions of home Ewuresi Archer in the studio Before the exhibition A Love Letter With Teeth, Ewuresi Archer travelled to Busua, a fishing village in the Western Region of Ghana, where she spent an eight-week residency with Berj Gallery producing the new body of work. Her initial intention was to create works that would celebrate Ghana, a love letter to a country she has known almost all her life but spent only her early days in.