Kokopelli Art Foundation has launched its first artist residency, bringing together five artists from four African countries for a two-week programme of studio practice, mentorship and field research.
What happens when five artists from four African countries are given two weeks in Lagos to work, research and develop a new piece of art?
That is the question behind Once Upon a Time (O.U.T) Residency: Edition I, Our Story First, the inaugural programme of the Kokopelli Art Foundation, the non-commercial arm of Lagos-based Kokopelli Gallery.
Running from 24 August to 6 September 2026 in Ikoyi, the residency brings together artists from Ethiopia, Ghana, Benin Republic and Nigeria for an intensive programme built around studio practice, critical discussion, mentorship and research across Lagos.
The programme culminates in five new works, one by each resident, which will be presented in Epignosis I: Our Story First, opening at Kokopelli Gallery on 12 September.
For Kokopelli, the residency responds to what it describes as a persistent gap in the African art ecosystem: not a shortage of talent or stories, but a shortage of infrastructure to help artists turn those stories into sustained practices.
“African artists have never been short of talent or stories,” says Herald Dare, Director of Kokopelli Gallery and Kokopelli Art Foundation. “What has been scarce is the infrastructure – the access, the mentorship, the opportunity – that allows those stories to become practices, careers and legacies.”
Five artists, five perspectives
The inaugural cohort includes Ethiopian painter and printmaker Estifanos Solomon Gashaw, whose work addresses vulnerability, neglect and the failure of social systems to protect children and other vulnerable communities.
Nigerian painter Victor Anachuna explores power, social hierarchy and political instability through realist compositions influenced by Renaissance visual language. His work ranges from intimate depictions of tenderness and solidarity to larger scenes of confrontation and protest.
Ghanaian artist Putin Bempong works across painting and installation, incorporating materials such as mining soil, contaminated water, preserved organic matter and found objects into a practice concerned with folklore, environmental transformation and speculative futures. The Akan trickster Ananse is a recurring presence.
From Benin Republic, Falhone Kemi Ogoun works across drawing, painting and installation, exploring appearance and essence, the natural world and the relationship between contemporary practice and Yoruba and Nago cultural traditions.
Nigerian photographer Vurzie Kimnaton, who has spent much of her career documenting Northern Nigeria, is using the residency to look at Lagos as an outsider. She is photographing markets, neighbourhoods, bus stops and waterfronts, examining the everyday details that can disappear through familiarity.
The cohort’s practices are diverse, but the residency does not require them to make work around a common subject.
Instead, “Our Story First” is intended as a position rather than a brief: the belief that the first account of a people should come from those people themselves.
Training beyond the studio
The programme is structured around three areas: Mind, Body and Soul.
Mind focuses on critique and intellectual development; Body on the physical practice of making and engagement with the city; and Soul on communal living, relationships and mentorship.
Eight facilitators are leading sessions across the programme, covering subjects ranging from sustaining an artistic practice and developing a distinctive artistic voice to materials, iconography and research.
The curriculum also addresses practical issues that can determine the longevity of an artist’s career. Sessions cover writing an artist’s practice, copyright and contracts, and personal branding.
Five senior practitioners, meanwhile, are participating as Flash Mentors through a concentrated studio-based apprenticeship. Duke Asidere, Ayoola Gbolahan, Akinbode Adebiyi, Kelani Abass and Juliet Ezenwa are each hosting a resident inside their working practice.
Field research is another component. The cohort is visiting sites including Jaekel House, the Nigerian Railway, the Old Secretariat and the Brazil Quarters, with a further trip to Badagry scheduled for 5 September.
From residency to exhibition
The programme’s final output is deliberately focused.
Each artist is producing one resolved work for Epignosis I: Our Story First, rather than a larger body of work.
The exhibition pairs those five works with a solo body of work by Ayoola Gbolahan and is built around the idea of “Call and Response”, a structure drawn from African oral and musical traditions.
Kokopelli says the presentation is intended to place two generations of artists on equal exhibition terms rather than frame the residents as students alongside a senior artist.
The exhibition is also the centrepiece of Kokopelli Gallery’s fifth-anniversary programme, themed Epignosis.
“We called it Once Upon a Time because that is how a story announces itself before it begins,” Dare says. “It signals that what follows is not a record but a telling, and that a telling belongs to whoever decides to tell it.”
For the five residents, the immediate task is to finish the work.
The longer-term ambition is bigger. On completing the programme, they will become the founding members of the Foundation’s alumni network, the OUTliers.
The residency, in other words, is being positioned not simply as two weeks in Lagos, but as the first stage of an institutional relationship intended to extend beyond the exhibition.
“Five artists from four countries came to Lagos and made work that did not exist before they arrived,” says Dare. “That is the whole of it, and it is not a small thing.”
Epignosis I: Our Story First opens to the public on 12 September at Kokopelli Gallery, 17 Ademola Street, off Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos, and runs until 8 November 2026.
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