Featuring specially curated content, events, and partnerships. Selected galleries at DaDa and la Mamounia will showcase curated selections of groundbreaking contemporary pieces by both emerging and established artists. The program includes events and gatherings across Marrakech that celebrate the rich cultural landscape of the city.

" Sourced from a combination of taken and found imagery, the paintings rely on the sense of the familiar and the hope that a wide range of people will see themselves in the works, feeling welcome to spend time with them. Labinjo often depicts intimate moments, both real and imagined, and often based on figures appearing in family photographs, found images and historical or archival material. In the past, she has explored themes such as identity, political voice, power, Blackness, race, history, community and family and their role in contemporary experience. Her distinctive painting style presents fresh and arresting compositions of colour, pattern and motifs. Fundamentally at the heart of Labinjo’s practice is a bold interest in storytelling and, ultimately, people’s lives." -Snippet from the exhibition.

"Focused on the intricate dynamics of visibility and authority, "Talking Back to Power" proposes a reclamation of black visibility. C. Rose Smith’s evocative black and white self-portraits revolve around the white cotton shirt, staged at locations affiliated with the wealth generated from cotton plantations in the Southern United States of America. During the 19th century, cotton was one of the most lucrative global commodities. Built on the forced labor of millions of enslaved Africans, plantation complexes that grew, cultivated and sold this crop formed the basis of monumental economic advancement and progress. Throughout her photographs, Smith fashions a crisp white button-up shirt, a potent emblem of both exploitation and respectability. She poses in opulently decorated antebellum homes in Tennessee, South Carolina and Louisiana, by-products of the wealth amassed by the owners of cotton plantations. Entrenched throughout these buildings is the lingering spectre of the magnitude of violence and anguish that is inextricably linked to chattel slavery. Despite many undergoing meticulous restorations and now serving as tourist destinations, these buildings bear witness to the enduring legacy of human suffering." - Press Release

"In a new exhibition this autumn, Autograph will present never-before-seen works from the artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode's wider practice. These photographs delve into ideas of theatre, performance, studio and community – depicting radical forms of black bodily expression. During a tragically brief career, Fani-Kayode used photography to explore themes of race, sexuality, spirituality and the self. He masterfully staged and crafted portraits visualising black queer self-expression. Prominent in the Black British art scene in the 1980s, he remains an important figure in art history." - Autograph

"Incorporating the Ethiopian Modernist tradition of including Amharic alphabetic script in paintings, Tadesse interprets the human figures as a type of lettering, the figures echoing the vertical loops and angles of Amharic text. In this way, the subjects of his work can be perceived as their own type of meaning makers, not merely passive beings, but actively participating in the creation of their environment. In the artist’s words, ‘through repetition they have become my symbols, my language.’" -Exhibition Excerpt

"An Awkward Relation is a new exhibition from interdisciplinary artist Sonia Boyce (b.1962, London, UK). It is conceived to be in dialogue with the exhibition of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, The I and the You, showing at the Gallery concurrently. The exhibition brings together a number of pivotal and rarely seen works to explore themes of interaction, participation and improvisation – all of which have played a definitive role in Boyce’s practice since the 1990s and reflect a shared interest with many of the radical approaches that Clark pioneered in her own work. Boyce was introduced to Clark’s work in the 1990s and felt a strong synergy with the Brazilian artist’s experiential and participatory practice. An Awkward Relation explores the feelings of both involvement and uneasiness intrinsic to an approach that invites visitors to engage, touch and experience artworks and their surroundings in new and unscripted ways. The title of the exhibition is indicative of this complex, often difficult, relationship between artists, works and audiences. It also recognises that while there are similarities between Boyce and Clark’s work, there are also clear differences, which necessarily, and inevitably, stem from the very different artistic, geographical and socio-political contexts in which the artists were working, as well as the specific intentions behind what they were doing." -Excerpt from Press Release

"Larkin Durey is delighted to present an exhibition of new work by Lavar Munroe. This is the artist’s tenth solo show with the gallery. Lavar Munroe works in the spirit of an anthropologist, studying the human condition via intensive, immersive travels across the African continent and a similar sense of discovery in his studio. His work attests to the power of storytelling, folklore, fable and community, illuminating the threads that weave us together across culture, time and geography, and spark our collective imagination."-Excerpt from Press Release

1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair is the first and only international art fair dedicated to showcasing visual artists of the African Diasporas. 1-54 London is the finale of the tri-annual art fair, talking place at Somerset House; the fair will be held in the West, East, South and Embankment galleries. 1-54 London will coincide with Frieze London.