Victoria Miro has announced Unfolding Memories, an exhibition featuring Njideka Akunyili Crosby at the Draiflessen Collection in Mettingen, Germany, on view from 18 October 2026 to 7 February 2027. The show explores private photo albums as unique repositories of memory, drawing on selected albums from the Brenninkmeijer family held in the collection.

The exhibition's premise treats the family album as more than a keepsake: assembled, annotated and revisited across generations, these albums become intimate archives through which personal and collective histories are negotiated. The Brenninkmeijer albums, drawn from the collection's holdings, anchor that inquiry in one family's visual memory, opening questions about how images preserve, distort and transmit the past.

Akunyili Crosby, the Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist, is known for large-scale works that layer photo transfers, drawing, painting and collage into dense, intimate scenes of domestic and transatlantic life. Her inclusion brings a contemporary counterpoint to the historical albums, connecting private image-making to the questions of migration, family and cultural memory that run through her practice.

Akunyili Crosby's working method makes her a natural fit for the exhibition's theme: her large paintings routinely incorporate transferred family photographs into densely layered surfaces, so that private images become structural elements of the finished work. In Mettingen, that approach enters into dialogue with the Brenninkmeijer albums themselves, setting an artist who builds with photographs alongside the anonymous compilers whose albums she is shown with.

For the Draiflessen Collection, the exhibition continues a line of programming that places historical material in dialogue with contemporary art. It is one of several institutional presentations of gallery artists announced by Victoria Miro this month, a period in which the gallery's programme has been dominated by museum collaborations and fair presentations during Frieze Week.