A year‑long crit‑lab and mentoring programme that gathers a small cohort of Nigerian artists, curators, and writers for slow, rigorous, collective study — and asks them, over ten months, to make something together.
Its conviction is that an art ecology flourishes not when a few names are singled out and promoted, but when space, time, and serious attention are made for many practices to bloom at once.
The programme draws directly on the pedagogical legacy of CCA Lagos and of its founder, the late Bisi Silva, whose Àsìkò Art School reimagined art education across the continent. Àsìkò was itinerant and intensive — a roving school that convened emerging artists and curators in a different African city biennially, for weeks of peer critique and the recovery of under‑taught local art histories, closing each edition with a public presentation.
The Synthesis inherits Àsìkò’s core tenet: that criticism is a discipline to be learned, that art history must be reclaimed from within rather than received from elsewhere, and that the most durable learning happens between peers.
The pilot edition selects ten participants, drawn in roughly equal measure from artists, curators, researchers, and writers. In working life these roles think with and against one another — the lab is built to model that interdependence rather than to silo it.
The year is structured around ten sessions, with each session held once every month. Between sessions, participants make, read, and reflect, returning each time with work that has had room to change and to grow- the slow, returning attention on which the whole programme depends. Each session pairs a morning of discursive input and a set reading, an art-historical thread placed in conversation with global debates with an afternoon crit lab: structured, generous, and demanding critique of work-in-progress, in the spirit of CCA Lagos’ own pedagogy.
Alongside the collective sessions, each participant is paired with a mentor who is a member of the faculty for one-to-one guidance sustained across the year. A shared reading list, between-session assignments, and small peer check-ins.
Eligibility Criteria
- Participants must be available for all ten sessions in person at CCA Lagos (9 McEwen Street, Sabo, Yaba) between 14 September 2026 and 3 July 2027; the full session calendar is issued on selection.
- Participants must commit to the monthly mentor meetings, the between-session assignments and full participation in the final exhibition. The programme is conducted in English.