Earlier this month, we had the pleasure of welcoming British-Nigerian artist Ranti Bam for a week-long residency at G.A.S. Foundation. Based in France, her work spans sculpture, installation, and performance. In her practice she works primarily with clay to explore holding, presence, and becoming through hand-built forms that carry both strength and vulnerability. Working with red and black clays, materials closely aligned with her African identity, she creates sculptural works that move between the figurative and the abstract. She was recently invited to the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by the late Koyo Kouoh.

In December 2025, G.A.S. Foundation, in partnership with Yinka Shonibare Foundation, launched the fourth edition of the G.A.S. Fellowship Award. This year’s call, the largest to date, included multiple categories for fully funded residencies at G.A.S. Lagos. Residency A was initially designed to support two emerging Nigerian artists, while Residency B was dedicated to one art writer based in Nigeria or the diaspora.

Last week, we welcomed Jonathan Chambalin, a multidisciplinary artist, photographer, and researcher, to G.A.S. Lagos as a recipient of the G.A.S. Fellowship Award 2026. Based in Lagos, Jonathan works across installation, cinemagraphs, sound art, painting, photography, and kinetic sculpture. His practice explores how everyday Nigerian materials and craft processes can be transformed into works that examine social, cultural, and environmental relationships, with a focus on labour and sustainability.

The Foundation’s inclusion in the Biennale Arte 2026, titled In Minor Keys, reflects its ongoing commitment to bringing together artists and thinkers, fostering cultural dialogue, care, and exchange across local and international contexts. Kouoh’s invitation to be part of the Main Exhibition recognises the residency not simply as a support structure, but as a practice in its own right, and a site of research, and sustained engagement that generates meaning through dialogue and shared inquiry.

From June to November 2025, The Short Century Intensive jointly presented by Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.) brought together U.S. fellows Pujan Karambeigi, Miatta Kawinzi, sadé powell, Cosmo Whyte, and Najha Zigbi-Johnson to explore the compressed 20th century as a formative, in-between space. Across artistic registers, they engaged with archives, excavated overlooked genealogies, and rehearsed speculative modes of citation and annotation, tracing new networks, collaborations, and Afro-diasporic relations. The intensive reimagined and activated Enwezor’s 2001–2002 exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, raising key questions: What becomes possible when African political and aesthetic thought is taken on its own terms—not as an extension, supplement, or proxy? And how might new forms of relation across geographies arise from a shared commitment to difference, rather than a desire to collapse it?

G.A.S. Foundation is pleased to welcome Loni Abiodun, a Lagos-based photographer and filmmaker, for a five-week residency at the G.A.S. Farm House in Ikiṣẹ. Working across photography, moving image, and sound, Loni’s practice examines everyday life in Nigeria through the lens of identity, community, and the dynamic tension between tradition and modernity. His work blends candid street photography with stylised portraiture to construct intimate visual narratives rooted in lived experience.

Join us at G.A.S. Lagos on February 19th, 2026 for Story Story, an interactive presentation of residency research, reflections, and clay works by Fiyin Koko. Framed as a journey through storytelling, play, and imagination, the session explores how time spent at the G.A.S. Farm House in Ikise, thinking, observing, and creating, shaped the works developed during her residency. Drawing from folklore, childlike wonder, and encounters with children, animals, and the surrounding environment, Fiyin reflects on how these experiences informed her process, material choices, and creative approach.

Join us at G.A.S. Lagos on February 12th, 2026 for Artist Open Studio, a presentation and walkthrough of works developed by current resident Nduka Ikechukwu during his four-week residency at G.A.S. During his stay, Nduka focused on research and exploring new ways of interpreting his practice through fresh experiments, ideas, and approaches. He has produced new works using his signature materials, industrial strip belts and net belts, while also experimenting with the incorporation of calabash, a traditional household utensil made from the dried, hollowed-out shell of a gourd, a material he first began exploring last year. 

In November 2025, Guest Artists Space Foundation (G.A.S.) and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), partnered to launch  the Finnish-Nigerian Peer Mentoring Residency Programme at Villa Karo’s centre in Grand-Popo, Benin. The programme provides an immersive cross-cultural experience where Finnish and Nigerian visual artists live, work, and learn together, offering two fully funded, eight-week residencies to G.A.S. alumni based and actively working in Nigeria.