At the thirteenth edition of the Venice Biennale in 1922, organizers presented a special exhibition of thirty-three African sculptures drawn from the Luigi Pigorini National Museum (now part of the Museum of Civilizations) in Rome and the Ethnographic Museum in Florence. On its surface, the exhibition aligned with early twentieth-century efforts to reclassify and elevate select forms of African cultural production as art. Yet this gesture was fraught with contradiction: even as it acknowledged African artistic creativity, it reinforced the racial hierarchies that underpinned the colonial world order.

A century later, 1922 Revisited, a live arts program staged during the opening week of the 61st Biennale (May 5–9, 2026), returns to this pivotal moment. The project brings together five to six leading performance artists from across Africa and its diasporas, reanimating the fragmentary archive to interrogate how African art was framed within this discursive space and to open pathways for narrating these histories anew. In dialogue with Artistic Director Koyo Kouoh’s vision of the Biennale, artists such as Jelili Atiku, Tsedaye Makonnen, Jermay Michael Gabriel Cappellin, Va-Bene Fiatsi (crazinisT artist), Zora Snake, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, ruby onyinyechi amanze, and Bernard Akoi-Jackson reposition the exhibition as a space for the “harmonies of those repairing wounds and worlds.”