2026-04-29 | Fellows at 1922 Revisited: Live Arts Program, during the Opening Week of the Venice Biennale
Our fellows Bernard Akoi-Jackson and Jelili Atiku are participating in 1922 Revisited: Live Arts Program, which will take place during the Opening Week of the Venice Biennale, May 5–9, 2026.
The program is presented by Third Space Art Foundation, in collaboration with the African Art in Venice Forum and the European Cultural Centre, curated by Janine Sytsma.
In 1922, the Venice Biennale presented a special exhibition of thirty-three African sculptures, drawn from the Luigi Pigorini National Museum (now part of the Museum of Civilizations) in Rome and the Ethnographic Museum in Florence. The surviving archive, including Carlo Anti’s introductory text and a single black-and-white photograph of a sculpture by a Luba artist set against a stark white backdrop, presents a familiar colonial narrative that reinforces the racial hierarchies underpinning the imperial world order. While acknowledging the artistic merits of these works as evidence of the “absolute ingenuity” of African art, the text simultaneously casts them in derogatory terms as “primitive.”
1922 Revisited, a live arts program staged during the opening week of the 61st Biennale, is conceived as an invitation to mine this fragmented archive—to poetically confront the imperial logic of the Biennale, to amplify long-silenced voices, and to propose new frameworks grounded in African epistemologies. Featuring artists including Jelili Atiku, Tsedaye Makonnen, Jermay Michael Gabriel, Va-Bene Fiatsi, Zora Snake, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, ruby onyinyechi amanze, Wilfried Nakeu, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, and Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, the program unfolds across Venice as a series of live performances, a screening, and a panel discussion staged at Hotel Monaco, the European Cultural Centre’s Marinaressa Gardens, and other sites throughout the city.
The program reanimates this history in the present, positioning performance as a critical method for engaging the 1922 exhibition and the wider imperial histories within which it is situated, while opening new narrative pathways. Through embodied, time-based practices, artists move between archive and action, drawing out the tensions at work within the 1922 exhibition while insisting on alternative modes of knowing and remembering. In dialogue with Artistic Director Koyo Kouoh’s vision, it becomes not only a site of reflection, but a space for “repairing wounds and worlds.”
Third Space Art Foundation supports artistic exchange and collective engagement through the cultivation of third spaces, or dynamic zones of encounter, negotiation, and creative transformation. Drawing from the widely embraced concept of third space as a site for dialogue, as well as Homi K. Bhabha’s decolonial formulation of the “third space” as a liminal ground that challenges fixed hierarchies and dominant narratives, the foundation advances practices that expand cultural understanding and foster new frameworks for connection. Through colloquia, performances, exhibitions, residencies, and other collaborative initiatives, it brings together artists, curators, and scholars across geographic and cultural divides, working to catalyze critical inquiry, mutual understanding, and new structures of solidarity.
Bernard Akoi-Jackson
Untitled: Flaggings IN MEMORIAM in the BLUES on some CUES and when WAX ain’t so LOST (a sketchy score for some processional gestures and an eventual celebratory discussion)
Saturday, May 9, 12pm
European Cultural Centre Giardini Marinaressa
The work unfolds as a series of performative interventions manifest as processional gestures, fictive liturgical invocations, leading eventually to a day of collective re-membering (a gathering). These actions hinge tangentially on observations made from the contemporary public sphere, but are also somehow inspired by visual, textual, and gestural vocabularies culled from a variety of sources.
Jelili Atiku
Eyes No Dey Forget Wetin Heart See
Enact 1
Tuesday, May 5, 5:30pm
Hotel Monaco
Sala Vallaresso
Enact 2
Thursday, May 7, 2pm
European Cultural Centre
Marinaressa Gardens
The performance, Eyes No Dey Forget Wetin Heart See, features a mystical figure embodying the earth’s energy, embarking on a ‘Luminous Pilgrimage,’ a deliberate, trance-like journey that weaves through urban landscapes, integrating Orisha rituals with psychogeography and dérive.
More information here