Important Dates

The Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence and Iwalewahaus are delighted to welcome Syowia Kyambi, the Kenyan-German artist and scholar, for the 2026 Okwui Enwezor Distinguished Lecture.
This year’s lecture will take place as a key event marking the opening of the African Feminisms Gathering Shifting Feminist Futures, part of African Feminisms: Refractions, a semester-long exhibition and public programme at Iwalewahaus developed in cooperation with the Goethe-Institutes in Nigeria, Rwanda, and South Africa. Bringing together artistic, academic, and activist perspectives, the programme draws on the Goethe-Institut project African Feminisms – Rights, Representation, Resources, an initiative of the House of African Feminisms supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, and places these perspectives in dialogue with the collections of Iwalewahaus, Black German histories, and the institutional context of the University of Bayreuth.
Syowia Kyambi is also among the artists featured in the group exhibition Beyond the Sweet and Obvious. African Feminisms Refracted, which opens on the same evening. Bringing together artistic positions from the Goethe-Institut’s African Feminisms project with selected works and materials from the Iwalewahaus collections, and Black diasporic perspectives, the exhibition explores how African feminist artistic practices open ways of seeing, remembering and imagining futures otherwise.

The Okwui Enwezor Distinguished Lecture honours the legacy of the internationally renowned curator, art historian, and intellectual Okwui Enwezor (1963–2019). The lecture series invites leading artists, curators, and scholars to engage with critical questions of contemporary culture and to rethink the role of art, knowledge production, and institutions from a global perspective.

Further details on the lecture and the opening programme will be announced shortly.