Abstract This article examines how contemporary curatorial practices reimagine Nigerian modernism and postcolonial nationalism through the worldmaking/building that is enabled through exhibitions. Taking Tate Modern's 2025 show Nigerian Modernism: Art and Independence as a point of departure, the article explores what it means to be presented with Nigerian modernism sixty-five years since the country's independence from Great Britain in a Western exhibitionary context, and then also, almost simultaneously, at home, in Nigeria. Drawing on philosophical and theoretical frameworks articulated by Hal Froster, Olu Oguibe, and Uche Okeke, with the benefit of Chika Okeke-Agulu's foundational work on Nigerian postcolonial modernism, the article highlights exhibitions as sites for reunification and witness bearing. Ultimately, the article argues that recent curatorial projects engaging with Nigerian modernism, whether belated or not, do more than restore the country's inaugural artistic movements into a global narrative of modernism and art history; the existence of these exhibitions, their responses, and surrounding organization affirms the sustained relevance of Nigerian modernism and the structures it produced as a consistent point of reference for artistic legitimation. Even more, these exhibitions approach the archive as a site of infinite renewal. In the end, engaging with Nigerian modernism is about grappling with the disjuncture between the present and the past; it is about trying to reconcile with fracture and with tragedy, with the fact that the utopia promised at the point of independence is yet to come to fruition.
Oluwakemi Akinrele (Fri,) studied this question.