In When the Center Holds, the Nigerian artist speaks with Sabo Kpade about suspension, memory, postcolonial thought, colour and why drawing becomes an x-ray into painting.

This week: grief and inheritance in Lagos, material memory and belonging in Paris, and Ndidi Dike’s economies of extraction in Stockholm.

At Nubuke Foundation domestic objects turn into archives of labour and belonging, Gabriel Selassie Tsagli sets the choreography of the rave against private grief and Frank Coffie makes yarn do two entirely different jobs in one room.

Gabriel Selassie Tsagli left Ghana at eleven and lived in Germany for twenty-six years. He returned to Accra in 2024 and made the paintings in Son of Kafui—his first proper solo exhibition at home—in a single stretch between February and this summer. He does not use a colour palette, works on many canvases at once, and calls the show a graduation. This conversation was recorded in Accra in August 2026 and has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Stephen Tayo finds social choreography in the movements around worship, Ameh Egwuh builds a language from yellow bodies and white birds, and Ngozi-Omeje Ezema discovers what a vessel can hold after it breaks.