Meet the 2022 Access ART X prize jurors

We are pleased to introduce to you our 2022 jurors and curator. They are:

Alessio Antoniolli, Director, Gasworks & Triangle Network
Alessio Antoniolli is an Italian, who serves as the Director of Gasworks in London, United Kingdom, where he oversees a program of artist residencies, exhibitions, and interactive projects focusing on developing the UK and international artists.

Gasworks, under Alessio’s leadership, has sponsored over 300 artist residencies from 80 nations worldwide.

Alessio is also the Executive Director of Triangle Network, a global network of grassroots artists and organizations. He is involved in the Network’s management, fundraising, and strategic planning, as well as initiating projects with new partners such as residencies and artist workshops.

With an MA in Art History from Birkbeck College, the University of London in 1998, specialising in internationalism, diversity, and cultural policy in the visual arts, Alessio has lectured widely and has been on many jury panels, including the Turner Prize 2019.

Victor Ehikhamenor, artist and writer
Victor Ehikhamenor is a prolific abstract, symbolic, and politically charged visual artist, photographer, and writer from Nigeria.

The dualistic relationship between traditional African religion and the interception of Western beliefs, memories, and nostalgia can be seen in Ehikhamenor’s works. His symbols and themes are reminiscent of the art found in the village during childhood.

A respecter of the Benin culture, Ehikhamenor has held a number of exhibitions with a sizable audience in Nigeria, the US, the UK, and other regions of Europe. He has published numerous works of fiction and analytical essays in scholarly journals, popular magazines, and newspapers all over the world, including the New York Times, CNN Online, Washington Post, Farafina, AGNI magazine, Wasafiri magazine, and others.

Numerous magazines and newspapers have been designed by Ehikhamenor. This includes the covers for a number of bestselling authors, including Chimamanda Adichie, Helon Habila, Toni Kan, Chika Unigwe, and Chude Jideonwo.

Bonaventure Ndikung, curator and author
Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is an independent curator, author and biotechnologist from Cameroon.

He is the founder and director of SAVVY Contemporary, a project space that is independent and that serves as a platform for discourse surrounding exhibitions, performances, and other events.

In addition to his work with Savvy, Ndikung is the artistic director of the recurring Dutch exhibition called Sonsbeek in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

The 2019 Bamako Encounters photography biennial in Mali is one of Ndikung’s other noteworthy curatorial endeavours. Additionally, he was a curator at large for Documenta 14 in 2017 and a guest curator for the Dak’Art biennial in Dakar, Senegal, in 2018.

In 2020, he received the Order of Merit of the State of Berlin for his work at Savvy and he is currently a professor in the master’s program at Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin.

While Ndikung was chosen in June 2021 to succeed Bernd M. Scherer as director of Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt on January 1, 2023, he served on the Venice Biennale jury in 2022, which was presided over by Adrienne Edwards.

Gabi Ngcobo, artist and curatorial director
Gabi Ngcobo is an artist, curator and educator living in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Ngcobo has been working on joint artistic, curatorial, and educational projects in South Africa and abroad for over two decades.

Ngcobo has been working on joint artistic, curatorial, and educational projects in South Africa and abroad since the early 2000s. She is a founding member of the collaborative platforms NGO Nothing Gets Organized and the Center for Historical Re-enactments, both based in Johannesburg (CHR, 2010–14).

Ngcobo co-curated A Labour of Love, 2015, at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, as well as the 32nd Bienal de So Paulo, 2016, which was held at the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in So Paulo, Brazil.

She has worked with a number of institutions, including Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain; Durban Art Gallery; Joburg Art Fair; Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC); Johannesburg, South Africa; LUMA/Westbau, Pool; Zurich; Switzerland; New Museum; Museum as Hub; New York; US; and Raw Material Company; Dakar, Senegal, among others.

Maria Varnava, Founder of Tiwani Contemporary
Maria Varnava is a British artist who grew up in Lagos, Nigeria. She is the director at the Tiwani Contemporary in Lagos and London, United Kingdom.

Tiwani Contemporary works in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA Lagos) on both its exhibition and public programmes.

Varnava focuses on the strength of the work of African artists and how these artists are pushing the boundaries of their mediums and the themes with which they work.

She also views herself simply as a gallerist, while she sees her establishment, Tiwani Contemporary as an enabler, an independent space of dialogue that supports young, emerging, and established artists from Africa and the diaspora.

Prof Peju Layiwola, artist and art historian
Peju Layiwola is a Nigerian artist and professor of art history, at the Department of Creative Arts, University of Lagos.
Layiwola’s work spans a variety of media, including metalwork, pottery, textiles, and sculpture, and it addresses various aspects of the postcolonial African condition.

She has been actively involved in the recent return of Benin artefacts to Nigeria and is an advocate for the restitution of expropriated artefacts to their countries of origin.

She has won numerous awards, including the Tyson Scholar Award from the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas in 2019 and grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art in 2018 and the SSA Cultural Exchange Programme in 2021.

Her works can be found in collections at Microsoft Lagos, the Pan Atlantic University in Lagos, the Yemisi Shyllon Museum, and the residences of private collectors like JP and Ebun Clark and HRH, the Obi of Onitsha.

Jumoke Sanwo, this year’s Prize curator
Jumoke Sanwo is a self-taught cultural interlocutor and lens-based visual storyteller from Lagos, Nigeria.

Jumoke’s work engages Afro-aesthetic concerns, while also challenging preconceived ideas about who she is and what she represents. She focuses on enlightenment, spirituality, technology, and mobility, while also rethinking and engaging the ongoing conversation about decolonization.
She has had exhibitions in the US, Canada, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Brussels, UAE, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Ethiopia, Malawi, Benin, Chad, and Ghana, to name a few.

Jumoke is a part of the Invisible Borders Trans-African Photography Project, an organization of x-perspective, black female photographers.

She is the founder and creative director of the Revolving Art Incubator, an alternative art space in Lagos that was named one of the best artist-led spaces in Lagos in a February 2019 New York Times article.