LAGOS.- The Lagos Biennial is pleased to announce the inaugural Curatorial Lab Lagos—an intensive three-day programme led by Adam Szymczyk. Taking place immediately after the Biennial's opening weekend, Curatorial Lab Lagos is conceived as an experimental platform to question inherited exhibition models and to imagine new curatorial futures from Africa and beyond. This idea first manifested during the 2019 edition of the Lagos Biennial as a curatorial intensive programme. Responding to the Biennial's 2026 theme, The Museum of Things Unseen, the programme invites participants to rethink the museum, the exhibition, and the canon itself. Through collective discussion, site visits, presentations, and workshops, participants will investigate how curatorial practice can become a tool for rewriting institutional histories, challenging dominant narratives, and inventing new forms of cultural imagination.
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Rather than teaching established methods, the Curatorial Lab asks a more urgent question: How might exhibitions become laboratories for producing new knowledge rather than simply displaying existing histories? How do curatorial strategies adapt to evolving artistic and institutional positions? The programme is open to early-and mid-career curators aged 20–35 from across the world. International return flights to Lagos, local transportation, and participation are fully funded. Participants will be responsible for their own accommodation, visa fees, and upkeep.
Interested applicants should please send a one-page motivation letter and a CV to applications@lagos-biennial.org.
Twelve successful applicants will be contacted on September 22, 2026
Adam Szymczyk (b. 1970 in Piotrkw Trybunalski, Poland) is a curator, author and editor based in Zurich and Basel, Switzerland. He is Director of the Swiss Architecture Museum (S AM) in Basel.
He was Director and Chief Curator of Kunsthalle Basel between 2003 and 2014 and co-curated, with Elena Filipovic, the 5th berlin biennale for contemporary art in 2008. He served as Artistic Director of documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel between 2014 and 2017. In 2022, he founded the Verein by Association, a non-profit association for contemporary art and culture in Zurich.
Recent exhibitions projects include Tirana Patience (co-curated with Nataša Ilić) at the National Gallery of Arts, Tirana (2020), Yannis Tsarouchis: Dancing in Real Life at Wrightwood 659, Chicago IL (2021), Other Voices, Other Rooms at Criminal Investigation Department of Zurich Municipal Police (2021), Life, Without Buildings at gta Exhibitions, Zurich (2022), Ahlam Shibli: Dissonant Belonging (co-curated with Vassilis Oikonomopoulos) at LUMA Arles (2023), Wilhelm Sasnal: Painting as Prop at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2024), and What Is Real?, the Art Focus exhibition of Art Week Tokyo, at the Okura Museum of Art, Tokyo (2025).
Szymczyk taught seminars on exhibition making and curatorial practice at the Art History Institute of the University of Basel, Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, History and Theory of Architecture Institute (gta) at the ETH Zurich, and the University of Zurich.
