Between Here & Elsewhere marks the culmination of 1952 Africa’s 4th Art Accelerator Program, bringing together the diverse practices of five African artists whose works explore the thresholds of identity, memory, and material transformation. This year’s cohort — Olubunmi Atéré, Yasmin Mbadiwe, Evans Akornor, Salvador Tomnyuy, and Bakare Shariff — interrogate the shifting boundaries between the spiritual and the tangible, the past and the present, the rooted and the itinerant.

The exhibition unfolds as a study of movement — across geographies, histories, and emotional terrains. It reflects the lived complexities of being African today: of creating within systems that both sustain and constrain. Through ceramics, sculpture, painting, and mixed media, the artists examine the spaces “in between” — where cultural memory encounters reinvention, and where the self becomes a site of both continuity and rupture.

In this edition, the residency itself became an extension of the artwork — a living experiment in belonging, collaboration, and resistance. The artists’ experiences, shaped by both creation and confrontation, mirror the ongoing negotiations of what it means to build and sustain creative life within fragile ecosystems.

In Between Here & Elsewhere, the “here” refers to our immediate cultural and bodily geographies—our rituals, lineages, and lived experiences—while the “elsewhere” gestures toward the imagined, the diasporic, the spiritual, and the unknown. The exhibition situates these artists at the crossroads of memory and materiality, , amplifying 1952 Africa’s ongoing mission to platform African artists whose practices engage the complexities of belonging, transition, and the ever-expanding interpretive space of contemporary African art that shapes global narratives from the continent outward.