Faridah Folawiyo’s Year of Yes

She apologizes for being late before the interview even starts. It’s a small thing, but it sets the tone for the conversation that follows: warm, self-effacing, and unusually candid for someone who has spent the last decade building one of the most successful and closely watched curatorial practices in West Africa.

Faridah Folawiyo founded and runs FF Projects, a curatorial platform she describes as “nomadic by design,” moving between Lagos, London, and Dubai, and that’s just so far. For most of 2026, however, that nomadic instinct has been anchored to one place. She is just past the halfway mark of a year-long residency at ALÁRA, the Lagos space that has quietly become a cultural infrastructure, a reference point for a generation of young audiences moving through art and design. “When I started FF Projects, the nomadic aspect was about curiosity,” she explains. “How artworks shift between contexts, and how meaning changes.” 

The residency is not a departure from that thinking but a constraint she deliberately chose.  What happens when movement is reduced, but intensity increases? It is a strange position for someone whose entire curatorial thesis was built on movement. For her, the residency was a personal dare, an opportunity to ask herself what happens when she stays still and goes deep. She wanted to know if she could mount numerous exhibitions in a single year, in a single space, rather than her usual handful. “It felt like a challenge to me,” she says. 

That she chose ALÁRA specifically is not incidental. The gallery, founded by her mother, the famed cultural entrepreneur and CEO Reni Folawiyo, is woven into her own coming-of-age as a curator. “It’s a space that really allowed me to self-affirm as a creative,” she says. “It never made me feel small. It always allowed me to express myself.” She is careful not to flatten that into pure sentiment, though. If there is a centre of gravity in Folawiyo’s curatorial platform, it’s ALÁRA, a place that, by virtue of its existence, shifts what Lagos art audiences expect from themselves and from the city.

She breaks down her profession as a curator and exhibition maker into one vital thing: trust. Trust from artists who agree to show in Lagos without hesitation. Trust from audiences who enter a space without knowing exactly what they will encounter. Trust from a city that continues to redefine itself as a cultural centre in real time. In her account, that trust is the core of the work, and it also frames her negotiation with legacy, a subject she does not avoid and is game to discuss.

Folawiyo comes from a prominent Lagos family, and she is unusually direct about what that has meant for her career. Asked about the conversation around “nepo babies” and the inherited opportunity that follows children of well-known families into their own careers, she doesn’t flinch from the label. “I am quite literally a nepo baby,” she says matter-of-factly. She works for her mother; it is not something she shies away from. “I’ve never felt the level of responsibility that I felt when I moved back to Lagos and opened Nok, because I understood that my mother was letting me into her life’s work, and trusting me to execute on her behalf.” It is one of life’s greatest privileges to have parents who can provide for you and give you a platform; Folawiyo posits that it is also a huge responsibility. 

What is notable about Folawiyo’s perspective on the conversation is not only that she is willing to concede her privilege—people in her position do that much, usually as a preface to downplaying it—but that she also separates it into two distinct inheritances and treats them differently. The first is the obvious one: capital, access, an iconic gallery with her family’s name already on the door. The second is harder to audit and, arguably, more interesting —a household where Pan-Africanism functioned as curriculum. That kind of inheritance doesn’t show up on a balance sheet, but it shapes taste and instinct in ways that money alone can’t buy. Her brother’s parallel role alongside their mother reinforces the picture of a family that operates less like individuals with separate careers and more like a single creative institution with shared muscle memory. Folawiyo sees her privilege as a head start. She still has to justify it by running her own race.

For all the polish of opening nights and brochure photography, Folawiyo is blunt about what the job actually consists of. If there is a misconception about curatorial work, she suggests, it is that it is primarily aesthetic. Folawiyo is quick to puncture that romance. By her own estimate, the job is 80% administration —shipping manifests, insurance paperwork, the unglamorous choreography of getting fragile objects across borders intact. It’s a useful corrective for an industry that markets itself almost entirely on the remaining 20%: the opening night, the studio visits, and the artist’s statement. The gap between those two numbers is, in some ways, the real subject of any honest profile of a curator —the distance between what the role looks like from the outside and what it actually demands every hour.

What survives that logistics-heavy reality, in her account, is the relational core of the work —the studio hours spent figuring out how an idea becomes an object, and how an object becomes a show. The unscripted moment when a stranger walks through the finished exhibition and is moved by it in some private way she’ll never fully know about. It’s a small but telling detail that she locates her own satisfaction not in the institutional recognition the work generates, but in something closer to a stranger’s private reaction — a sign that the mundane 80% is, for her, in service of something genuinely felt rather than purely performative. The remaining 20%—the part untouched by logistics—is what continues to make the work worthwhile for her: collaborating with artists. She describes the journey from an exhibition’s earliest concept to its final realization as deeply rewarding, finding a sense of magic in watching ideas gradually take physical form. 

That fulfillment extends beyond the creative process itself. Seeing visitors connect emotionally with an exhibition, discover something they’ve been searching for, or simply leave feeling inspired is one of the most meaningful aspects of her work. “When people come to the shows, and it moves them in some way, or it’s something they’ve been looking for, or it brightens their day?  I absolutely live for that.” There is also, ingrained in her, a historian’s instinct for permanence in a medium that resists it. Trained as an art historian with a research focus on photography, she is drawn to fundamentally temporary exhibitions, a part of why she keeps returning to publishing. “I’m always trying to make publications, things that can last for future generations.”

At the midpoint of her year-long residency, that standard is constantly being tested through repetition. Exhibitions arrive one after another, shaped by different artists, geographies, and material concerns. Russian, Senegalese, and American practices are all moving through the same room in Lagos.  The fourth chapter was recently announced: In August, FF Projects will present What Comes to Mind When You See the Garment?, a black-and-white solo exhibition on devotees of the Aladura movement by Lagos-based photographer Stephen Tayo. The programme is more about momentum than certainty. “Exhibition-making always surprises me,” explains Folawiyo. “I don’t go in with expectations. Anything can happen at any moment.” Still, she admits there is one constant surprise: people show up. 

Two shows into the ALÁRA residency featuring international artists, Folawiyo admits that curiosity set in. “How would these works be received by Nigerians? I try not to get too involved in that; I don’t want the artist thinking too much about the audience instead of the work they want to make. It’s my job to figure that out once the work is made. Why was it made?” 

Something does shift when Nigerian artists are shown to a Nigerian audience. “Showing works by Nigerian artists in Lagos is totally different, in the sense that the understanding is there,” she says, pointing to her experience showing the same artist’s work in both Lagos and Miami and watching the emotional register change. She has also noticed a more granular difference in how Lagos crowds engage with the art compared to London crowds. “In Lagos, people tend to ask me more questions, because they know me and are familiar,” she says. “They’re not shy to ask. Whereas in London, I feel like people don’t ask because they feel like they’re supposed to already know.” And she adds with a laugh, “Maybe it’s also that quintessential British thing of not wanting to ask too many questions and seem like you’re bothering someone!”

That trust runs in both directions. When she has approached artists outside Nigeria about showing at ALÁRA, she says the harder conversations she expected mostly never materialized. “They have been so open to everything,” she says of artists like Maya Beverly and Braeden Hollis, both American, New York-based artists, whose two-person exhibition Formae ran at ALÁRA in May. “When you work in this industry, you can get bogged down by all the nos you get all the time. What I choose to think about is all the people who said yes to me when they didn’t even know what we’d be doing.”

Part of what has defined the residency so far is its openness to geography. Artists from Russia, Senegal, and the United States, among others, have shown within the space. It is a decision she was not exactly concerned about, but was initially curious about, not because of the artists, but because of the audience. Having now done it, she suggests Lagos audiences are more fluent in interpretation than they are often given credit for. They ask questions, engage directly, read proximity into the work when it is Nigerian, and curiosity into it when it is not. “There is, of course, a deeper emotional connection when it’s Nigerian artists exhibiting,” she says. “But people are always very open, no matter who it is.”

Still, she is careful not to over-assign certainty to audience behaviour. If anything, she resists the idea of fixed readings altogether. “I always think exhibitions should be asking questions, not answering them, so I never really go in with expectations.”That openness extends in the other direction, too. International artists, she says, have been surprisingly willing to enter Lagos’s context without hesitation. “They just said yes,” she notes. “I think I’m lucky in that way. I’ve had a group of artists who trust me and trust the work.”

That word, yes, surfaces repeatedly across her conversation. The yes that allows a residency to exist, the yes that allows an artist to travel, the yes that allows an idea to move from concept to installation. In a field often defined by hesitation, rejection, and negotiation, she seems particularly attuned to and preoccupied with the opposite end of the spectrum. “I try to think about the yeses more than the nos,” she says.

A recurring theme in Folawiyo’s discussion of her work is accessibility, not as a marketing term but as something closer to a personal correction. She traces some of it back to school, to art teachers who made the subject feel closed off to anyone without obvious natural talent. “I’m always trying to pay that forward and think of ways to make it less intimidating and more inviting,” she says. ALÁRA was built to address exactly that feeling, and she lists how she has been intentional and involved in specific logistical plans to keep it open. Price lists are posted plainly at exhibitions, with QR codes for anyone curious. Openings happen on Saturday afternoons to accommodate people with 9-5s and limited time on weekdays, as well as those who want to bring their children, and there are no entry fees. A fact she suspects keeps some people away simply because they assume otherwise.

The harder problem, she admits, is getting the word out. “Sometimes it’s hard to get the word out in Lagos,” she says. “I want to make sure it’s not just the same people coming to the openings all the time.” A recent citywide gallery weekend drew, by her own observation, a noticeably different crowd than usual, which she’s taken as encouragement to keep pushing into spaces like universities that don’t typically intersect with the gallery circuit.

Her photography background runs through nearly everything else. It was the subject of her master’s research, and she describes it as the one medium she has “preferential treatment” for, despite, or maybe because of, its relatively undervalued position in the commercial art market compared to painting or sculpture. “I see part of my job as pushing people who wouldn’t normally buy photography toward it,” she says.

Criticism, in her practice, tends to dissolve into iteration. She demurs when asked to point to a single defining piece of feedback that changed her trajectory, instead championing continuous daily adjustment. “Every show, I’m learning,” she says. “I tweak things and recalibrate.” Sometimes it is as small as height. Sometimes it is the audience’s movement through space. Other times, it is simply noticing where people naturally gather. Her curatorial eye, honed and strengthened over years of moving and working between cities and institutions, is now almost involuntary. She notices everything. Hanging, framing, spacing, colour, tension. “It’s honestly kind of annoying,” she laughs. “Now I see everything and can’t switch it off.”

Even pleasure has become analytical. She describes walking into gorgeous, vibrant installations and immediately tracking the structure rather than surrendering to it. But there are still moments that cut through the system. She recalls works by Turner at the Tate, Edson Chagas at the Venice Biennale, and artists like Richard Hunt, Frank Bowling, and Marilyn Nance, all of whom she returns to not as references, but as points of recurring thought. “I think about that Edson Chagas exhibition a lot,” she says. “It was foundational for me.” When asked about the artwork or museum that has shaped her most, she points first to Turner at the Tate, but also to Naoshima Island in Japan, specifically the first time she went, and specifically Monet’s Water Lilies and James Turrell’s Open Sky at the Chichu Art Museum.

Her influences are not limited to visual art. Film sits just as centrally in her thinking, not just as entertainment but as formative structure, a way of understanding rhythm, framing, and emotion. When it comes to the different art forms she engages with—film, music, and visual art—Folawiyo resists the idea that they amount to a fixed aesthetic or curatorial sensibility, choosing instead to follow her own instincts. “The only constant is me,” she says. “I wrote about this on my Substack recently, that I don’t have guilty pleasures; I just have pleasures. I’m not an intellectual snob about things. I like what I like,” she says simply.

Even mid-residency, with more ALÁRA shows still ahead of her this year, Folawiyo is already planning past it. She mentions that she’s mapping out shows at ALÁRA for 2027. The nomadic instinct that defines FF Projects hasn’t disappeared so much as folded itself into the fixed structure of the residency, proof, in her telling, that the two were never really in tension. “I don’t feel so fixed in any way, shape, or form,” she says. “Things take shape the way they’re supposed to.”

In an industry often shaped by refusal, hesitation, and gatekeeping, Folawiyo has built a practice around affirmation. Which brings her, inevitably, back to the word that keeps appearing beneath everything she does: Yes. 

Yes to artists. Yes to spaces. Yes to constraints. Yes to repetition. Yes to risk. Yes to Lagos as a cultural site that demands seriousness without permission.