New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has publicly championed the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition of West African modernist architecture, praising the show on Instagram and singling out one sculpture for special attention. Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa presents around 400 works from seven countries, spanning the independence era from the late 1950s through the early 1980s, and is on view until 2 January 2027.

Mamdani highlighted Kader Attia's 2014 sculpture Independence Tchao, the final work in the exhibition. The Algerian-French artist built the piece from rows of rusted index card boxes sourced from a French colonial police headquarters, topped with a sign reading Hotel Independence, a reference to a hotel of the same name in Dakar, Senegal. Mamdani wrote that the sculpture prompts the question of to what extent the visions of the independence era were achieved.

The exhibition, organised by Martino Stierli, MoMA's Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design, and guest curator Ikem Stanley Okoye, is the first major survey to examine modern architecture from Benin, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo in the context of political independence. It brings together architectural models, drawings, archival photographs and contemporary artworks, with particular attention to the first generation of trained African architects.

Mamdani's post is part of an ongoing social media campaign in which the mayor-elect highlights the city's cultural institutions. The exhibition has been widely discussed since it opened in July, both for its subject and for its argument that the independence years were a prolific period of architectural production. The mayor-elect's endorsement gives the show a new burst of attention in its final months, and puts a spotlight on a survey that treats architecture as a record of decolonisation.