Tiwani Contemporary, Pioneer of African Art in London, Is Closing

Tiwani Contemporary is closing its London doors. The gallery, which has operated out of 24 Cork Street in Mayfair since 2023 will shut its London space after already pausing operations at its Lagos outpost on Victoria Island.

Tiwani Contemporary. Image courtesy Tiwani Contemporary.

The gallery's early roster includes in following; Njideka Akunyili-Crosby; Simone Leigh; Emeka Ogbo; Kapwani Kiwanga. All showed at Tiwani before the art world decided they were important. That timing reflects something Tiwani understood — that the work of championing artists from the continent required institutional commitment, the kind that doesn't flinch when the market hasn't caught up yet. The gallery placed works in MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Tate Britain. It built a roster that included Joy Labinjo, Virginia Chihota, Gareth Nyandoro, Zina Saro-Wiwa, Dawit L. Petros — artists whose practices span painting, photography, moving image, sound.

The name itself—Tiwani — proposed by the late Nigerian curator Bisi Silva, who guided the gallery's early formation and died in 2019 — translates loosely from Yoruba as "ours" or "it belongs to us." Silva understood what she was naming. An insistence. A counter-claim. The gallery as a form of reclamation.

Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos, for the opening of ‘Material Affirmations – ORÍKÌ Acts I–III’, the first solo exhibition in Lagos by internationally acclaimed designer and artist Nifemi Marcus-Bello.

In a statement posted to Instagram today, Varnava was direct about the cause. "The current economic climate and the shifting landscape of the London art market no longer support our business model," she wrote. "The decision to wind down our activity is extremely painful, but it is a responsible step to address the financial challenges the gallery faces in a difficult market." BTG Begbies Traynor (Central) LLP has been instructed to manage the transition for staff and artists. The Lagos space, she noted, will "cease operations in its current format to allow for restructuring in the months ahead" — leaving open, just barely, the possibility of something continuing on the continent.

What we can observe is the shape of a familiar tension: the financial reality of running two physically demanding gallery spaces across two continents, in a global art market that rewards scale and liquidity and tends to punish mid-size galleries regardless of programme quality. The gallery kept its schedule running late into 2026 — Breaking Down Realities at Cork Street opens this week, May 28, featuring Nifemi Marcus-Bello, Hadassa Ngamba, Dawit L. Petros, and Muzae Sesay. That the lights may go off while a show is still hanging is its own kind of melancholy.

There is a broader reckoning embedded in this news. The art world spent the last decade loudly discovering African artists — collecting them, showing them at major fairs, mounting institutional surveys, awarding prizes. Tiwani was doing that work before the discovery arrived. What the closure asks is whether the structures that benefit from that discovery have done anything to sustain the infrastructure that made it possible. Or whether they consumed the output and left the machinery to fail on its own terms.

The artists Tiwani championed will continue. The names are established, the institutional footprints are real. But the particular kind of space Tiwani occupied — a gallery with a dual physical commitment to London and Lagos, running serious programming in both cities simultaneously, resisting the drift toward safe commercial choices — that kind of space does not simply reappear.