About the African Art in Venice Forum
The African Art in Venice Forum (AAVF) is a free, public platform for critical exchange, presented biennially in Venice during the opening week of the Venice Biennale.
Conceived as a space for inquiry rather than conclusion, the Forum brings together artists, curators, writers, and cultural practitioners from across Africa and its diasporas, alongside a wider international community, to engage in conversations that unfold in relation to the Biennale’s unique cultural and institutional context.
AAVF emerged from a simple observation: that one of the most visible moments in the global art calendar also reveals structural absences—of representation, of historical depth, and of the multiple temporalities that shape artistic practices connected to the African continent. Rather than addressing this through visibility alone, the Forum approaches visibility as a threshold, asking what it enables, what it obscures, and how narratives are constructed, framed, and circulated.
Since its first edition in 2017, AAVF has hosted hundreds of contributors and welcomed a broad international audience, both in Venice and online. Over time, it has developed into a collaborative platform that prioritises dialogue, listening, and the coexistence of diverse and sometimes conflicting perspectives. It resists fixed definitions of “African art,” instead engaging with it as a dynamic, continuous field of practices, histories, and forms of knowledge.
A defining principle of the Forum is its commitment to discourse. AAVF does not produce exhibitions, in Venice or elsewhere. Its work is centred on creating the conditions for exchange, foregrounding conversation as a form of practice in itself.
The African Art in Venice Forum is produced by African Art Dialogues, a not-for-profit organisation based in Italy.
Please note that the African Art in Venice Forum is a newly founded initiative, presented for the first time in 2017. It is not the Forum for African Arts, a project first presented in 1999, of which we greatly admire the vision, impact, and legacy.
