1922 Revisited: Live Arts Program
Presented by Third Space Art Foundation
In collaboration with the African Art in Venice Forum and the European Cultural Centre Italy.

At the 1922 Venice Biennale, a special exhibition of African sculptures signaled a shift in recognizing African art, while still reinforcing colonial hierarchies. A century later, 1922 Revisited, a live arts program during the 61st Biennale (May 5–9, 2026), brings together leading artists from Africa and its diasporas to reexamine this moment and open new ways of narrating its histories.

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. Some of the registers may be recognized as codified vestiges from antiquity, whilst others also emerge spontaneously from present experience(s). The entire experience comprises the employment of strategies of communal/participatory activation of shared public and private spaces. The interventions present over three seasons or sessions: a libation-[al] season involves the pseudo-ritual preparation and cleansing of sites identified and designated for the hoisting of flags and standards; a habit-[ual] season refers to the actual hoisting of flags and indigo-dyed standards at the designated sites; an agyina[-al] season where a collective remembering is acknowledged through discussion and the invocation of an almost eucharistic finale.