“If Not Us, Then Who?”: 16/16 at 1-54 London
For our first presentation at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, we bring two artists from the Friends of 16 network to Somerset House. Bubu Ogisi works in Lagos with sisal, banana fibre and brass. Alpha Odhiambo works in Nairobi with acrylic on translucent vinyl mesh. Their materials could hardly be more different, but they share a role: both are storytellers, taking back African narratives from the gaze that has so often framed them.
Curated by Fabia Alabraba
Installation view, 16/16 at 1-54 London
The Contemporary Griot
In West Africa, the griot is the keeper of memory: a storyteller, historian and musician who carries a people’s history across generations. Our curatorial statement starts from the idea of the contemporary griot, meaning artists of African descent who let storytelling shape their practice, whatever the medium. They become custodians of memory, translating histories, traditions and lived experience into their own visual language.
Bubu Ogisi and Alpha Odhiambo take that role seriously. Each, in their own material language, tells a story much bigger than themselves.
““Because if we do not take ownership of our stories, who will preserve them, reinterpret them, and carry them forward?””
Booth installation detail, 16/16 at 1-54 London
Bubu Ogisi
Bubu Ogisi is a Lagos-born fibre artist, fashion designer and curator, and the founder and creative director of IAMISIGO, a cross-disciplinary wearable-art practice working between Lagos, Nairobi and Accra. Through garments, installations, film and material research, her work explores African indigenous knowledge systems, spirituality, body-memory and the politics of textile production.
Her practice is slow and experimental. Material research becomes textile and object, and the works bridge the present with ancestral memory. Each piece carries the history of what it’s made from and the land that material comes from. Each is built using traditional techniques specific to the communities she honours. Rawness, a refusal of conventional “finishing” and functionality run through all of it. She manipulates gravity, light, colour, mass and transparency to show how endlessly materials can transform.
For 1-54, Bubu presents a body of work rooted in the deity Ólókūn: large-scale fibre tapestries that are handwoven.
“Ólókūn yá y’ùwà rré –olokun go and bring prosperity”, 2026. 1.5 x 1 (m) stretched. Sisal, hemp, banana fibre, and cotton.
Recent highlights include IAMISIGO’s SS27 show titled “Sacred Ecologies” at Copenhagen Fashion Week, the 2025 Zalando Visionary Award, a place among the 2026 LVMH Prize semi-finalists, and Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion at the Barbican Centre, London.
Alpha Odhiambo
For Alpha Odhiambo, colour is his literary medium. Self-taught and based in Nairobi, he has been working professionally since 2016, and he has spent years developing an acrylic paint of a very particular thickness. He applies it to vinyl mesh and paper, moving between opacity and translucency, so that light passing through the work becomes part of it.
His subject is the political state of the world and its visceral impact on everyday lives. He dissects political actions, decisions and even unrealised ideologies. He isn’t trying to deliver a verdict, but to make people pay attention. He leaves the interpretation open, so each work becomes both a mirror of power structures and a prompt to think critically. Drawing on his own life and the cultural practices of his upbringing, he retells African stories that so often reach the world through a Western lens.
At 1-54, Alpha presents large-scale works on vinyl mesh alongside a series of intimate paintings on paper.
Come In, 2026. 60 x 60 (cm). Mixed medium on vinyl mesh.
Alpha has previously exhibited at 1-54 London (2023), Art Vilnius, Scope Art Miami and BAAR Art Journey in Berlin, and held a residency and solo exhibition at Tumo Gallery, Vilnius.
10 years with the Friends of 16
Detail from Planted Forest, 2026. 94 x 114 (cm). Acrylic on vinyl mesh.
Over the last ten years, 16/16 has grown into a network of artists, designers, makers and friends. The hospitality provides the infrastructure, and the network becomes the connective tissue. Curated by one Friend of 16 and featuring two more, If Not Us, Then Who? is one of the network’s clearest expressions to date: three practices from our community, presented on an international stage, on their own terms.
If Not Us, Then Who? is on view at Booth S13, South Wing, Somerset House, London until 18 October 2026.
For availability and enquiries, contact Fabia Alabraba at fabia@16by16.co.
Follow Bubu Ogisi here and IAMISIGO here. Follow Alpha Odhiambo here. Follow Fabia Alabraba here.
Booth photography: Charles Dardenne. Images courtesy 16/16 and the artists.
