The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair has returned to Somerset House in London for its 14th edition with a notable new addition: a section devoted to African modernism, titled "West Wind" after Miriam Makeba's 1966 anthem for unity and curated by art historian Nancy Dantas. The presentation addresses a conspicuous gap left when Sotheby's shut its dedicated African modernism department in 2025, celebrating mid-20th-century masters including Ibrahim El-Salahi, Bertina Lopes and Seyni Awa Camara from a period of political and aesthetic liberation.

Among the fair's strongest presentations, Fabienne Levy is showing seven paintings by Nigerian-born Ekene Emeka Maduka, whose oil diptych Presence, Half-remembered (2026) builds a nostalgic "memory palace" from her years at a Nigerian boarding school. The canvases pit the human figure against the architecture of a postcolonial modernist compound, reading William Golding's Lord of the Flies against Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart to examine the alienating machinery of neo-colonized education.

London-based designer Holly Rollins, working as ROLSTUDIO, turns the domestic interior into an archive of diasporic memory: the centerpiece is the pink Kaymito Chair (2026), 3D-printed from recycled plastic, surrounded by lamps and clay photo frames informed by her research into neuro-architecture. At Yenwa Gallery, Damilola Opedun's two 2026 paintings give visual form to Makoko, the vulnerable Lagos waterfront community hit by government demolitions and land reclamation in 2025, imagining its stilted structures in dialogue with the canals of Venice. Elsewhere, Cape Town's Buqaqawuli Nobakada paints lace-on-canvas poolside scenes projecting Black women into spaces of leisure historically denied them, while Egyptian artist Medhat Shafik builds "fragments" from sand, teabags and Indian-dyed fabrics as a metaphor for social fracture.

The edition also spotlights craft and material memory: Congolese artist Yvanovitch Mbaya's monumental recycled-denim textile honors Bantu figures; South African ceramicist Mellaney Roberts works in clay, resin and tree bark from her home region, mourning the May 2026 floods that washed away ancestral lands of marginalized Coloured and Khoi communities; Nairobi's self-taught Alpha Odhiambo paints on industrial vinyl mesh; Cairo's Souad Abdelrasoul stages surreal confrontations between women and oppressive social orders; and South African Kimathi Mafafo's embroidered tapestries braid botanical imagery with female empowerment.