1-54 at Fourteen: Why the Best History Lesson of Frieze Week Is at Somerset House

While Regent’s Park takes the headlines this week, one of the more rewarding things to see in London is about two miles south-east, at Somerset House on the Strand. 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair opens to the public today for its fourteenth London edition, and this year it has done something fairs rarely bother to do. It has made an argument about art history.

The fair runs until Sunday 18 October, with around 35 to 40 galleries from Lagos, Accra, Cairo, Casablanca, Harare, Cape Town, Paris, Geneva and London spread through the building’s elegant rooms. The sales floor is what you’d expect from a well-established fair. The thinking behind it is the more interesting part.

Looking back on purpose

The centrepiece is West Wind, this year’s 1-54 Presents exhibition, curated by the South African-Portuguese art historian Dr Nancy Dantas. It takes its title from Miriam Makeba’s 1966 song, a hymn to African unity, and it brings together modernist artists who helped shape twentieth-century art but have too often been written about as footnotes to it.

The names repay a little homework. Hannah O’Leary Fine Art brings a remarkable group: the Ethiopian painter Alexander “Skunder” Boghossian, Mozambique’s Bertina Lopes, the South African Gerard Sekoto, the Ghanaian Kofi Antubam, Tanzania’s Sam Joseph Ntiro, the Senegalese Papa Ibra Tall, and Uzo Egonu, the Nigerian-born artist who spent most of his working life in London. Selma Feriani Gallery shows the Algerian painter Baya and the Tunisian Rafik El Kamel, and Vigo Gallery presents the Sudanese master Ibrahim El-Salahi, whose Tate Modern retrospective in 2013 introduced many British visitors to his work.

Touria El Glaoui, the fair’s founding director, puts the case simply: we understand artists differently “when we place them within the histories they helped to shape, rather than at their margins.” Museums have spent the past decade recovering African modernism, and the market has followed. Seeing these artists together is a chance to judge for yourself why curators are so excited.

A British thread running through it

UK visitors will notice how much of this story passes through London. Egonu worked here for decades, largely overlooked in his lifetime. Paris-based Loeve&Co shows the Guyanese-born Aubrey Williams, another painter who made his career in Britain and whose reputation has grown hugely since his death. London’s own The Gallery of Everything presents a solo tribute to the Senegalese sculptor Seyni Awa Camara, whose clay figures are among the most distinctive things you’re likely to see all week.

It is a useful reminder that “British art” has always been more porous than the textbooks once allowed. Some of the most important painting made in this country after the war came from artists who arrived from Lagos, Georgetown or Khartoum, and 1-54 has quietly been making that point since it launched in 2013.

The present, and plenty of it

None of this means the fair has turned into a museum. The contemporary offer is broad and, for new collectors, often more approachable than what you’ll find in Regent’s Park. Solo booths are a strength this year: albertz benda gives its space to Larissa de Souza, Fabienne Levy to Ekene Emeka-Maduka, Kristin Hjellegjerde to Kimathi Mafafo and THK Gallery to Tshepiso Moropa. Four galleries, including London’s Gillian Jason Gallery and Lagos-based O’DA Art, have given over their entire booths to women artists, tracing their influence from the modern period to today.

Look out too for October Gallery, the Bloomsbury stalwart that has championed artists from Africa and beyond for decades, showing the Congolese painter Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga and the Beninese sculptor Romuald Hazoumè. Gallery 1957, with spaces in Accra and London, brings the British-Ghanaian artist Larry Amponsah.

Beyond the booths

Two special projects are worth seeking out. Borderlands Art presents works made entirely on barkcloth, the Ugandan and Ghanaian textile recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, harvested from living trees that are left standing. And the Accra-based Midunu Institute, founded by the chef and artist Selassie Atadika, has made Commodity / Couture, a sensory installation that follows Ghanaian cocoa from farm to chocolate bar. Its central statistic sticks: from a £4 bar, the farmer who grew the cocoa receives roughly 6p. It is a sharp piece about value in a building full of price tags.

Hassan Hajjaj, the Moroccan artist long based in London, also presents My London Rockstars, portraits of the musicians, artists and designers shaping the city now. The talks programme, which runs through the weekend, includes Dantas in conversation on African modernism and a session with the South African auction house Strauss & Co on where collecting goes next.

Should you go?

Frieze is the spectacle, but 1-54 is the fair most likely to change how you look at things. It is a manageable size, the setting is lovely, and you come away having learned something, not just seen a lot.

Tickets are available through Somerset House, with concessions offered (check the official site for current prices). The fair is open 11am to 7pm on Friday and Saturday and 11am to 6pm on Sunday. Go early on Saturday if you want the rooms to yourself, and leave time for West Wind. It is the part you’ll still be thinking about next week.