At 1-54 in New York, North African Artists Shine

The burden of expectation comes in blue and weighs a bride’s worth of gold, per the photography of Moroccan artist Sara Benadballah, a standout of Nil Gallery’s stellar booth. The French outfit brought a lean, dreamy offering of painting, sculpture, and mixed media pieces that explore interpersonal tensions within complex cultural contexts. Benadballah, who was present at the fair, explained that to be a single woman over a certain age in her 20s in Morocco courts scrutiny; there’s even a term for it in Arabic, as if singledom were an affliction of the soul. Is marriage the salve? Benadballah’s careful compositions suggest a tantalizing sort of looking: the drawn window of a stranger’s home, through which some vibrant history is evident but unknowable.

Some of the fair’s best acrylic and oil work is close by: Malik Thomas’s Marked by Salvation (Embrace), 2025, is a gracious take on heartache, as layers of bleeding brushwork gift these lovers no beginning or goodbye. Tunisian artist Slimen Elkamel, who is also a poet and has a pointillistic way of painting, makes art that is even more secretive but equally striking. In Nirvana Time (2025), his languid subjects seem woven into a lively tapestry or caught in time’s rip current.

LIS10 Gallery is hosting a solo show of the Kenyan artist Agnes Waruguru, which is a win for anyone who couldn’t make it to last year’s Venice Biennale, where she showed her subtle manipulations of color, cotton, needle, and water. I had seen pictures of Incomprehensible weather in the head (2024), a succession of monumental, dyed canvases, hanging at the Arsenale, but those images did little justice to the material, which has been transformed, on a conceptual and textural level, by encounters with pastels, paint, salt, and saffron. Up close, color blooms and bleeds, but from afar, a keen-eyed viewer can discern semblances of landscapes, albeit not the kind that exist in this plane none. Waruguru, who works across embroidery, sculpture, and installation, but seemingly defines herself by none of those mediums, forgoes figuration entirely. Hers is a study of material granted meaning by time and intention.

The best work in Larkin Durey’s booth explores how political systems dictate who is remembered and how, as well as what constitutes resistance against an enemy like omission. Massoud Hayoun, an Egyptian Tunisian painter and a talent worth watching, refuses such so-called histories. His latest body of work draws on the oral stories shared with him by his community’s elders to create a properly complicated portrait of people who weathered exile and loss with their idiosyncrasies intact. This reality looks a lot like a dream. He paints with a Technicolor palette that favors the distinctive blue hues that accent Tunisian architecture (and whose invention can be traced back to ancient Egypt). And much like a dream, individual and collective memory coexist: One protagonist sits in his lover’s bed, and the bed hides a ghost—a lion, maybe Tunisia’s last known Barbary lion killed in 1891. Habib Hajallie, a Sierra Leonean-Lebanese mixed media artist, likewise sources antique maps and vintage texts to reconstruct Black, Arab histories that were buried or warped by colonial entities. For Say Your Prayers, Eat Your Vitamins & Don’t Be Racist (2021), he drew a bodybuilder exhibiting his physique directly on a 1936 document, as if the man refused to be reduced to print.

Fridman Gallery has surveyed 12 artists who bend the boundaries of representation and abstraction to better examine the subjective concepts that dictate reality—gender, race, sexuality, authority, time. A 2011 screenprint and color linocut from Kerry James Marshall, titled Keeping the Culture, has a gravitational pull. It depicts an Afrofuturist family home, complete with mid-century modernist furniture and the glittery sprawl of space pressed against the window pane. Children seated on the couch inspect a holographic globe that—from the viewer’s perspective—has been spun to display Africa, simultaneously unmooring and contextualizing this narrative.

In dilemma (2024), from Fidelis Joseph, collapses his memories from Nigeria and the US, where he immigrated to attend art school, into a single bittersweet painting. Visually, neither experience subsumes the other, which means neither place is fully present. What’s here is a heart in perpetual transit. Also on view: Jerome Lagarrigue’s viscous, black and blue painting Night Swim (2024). Lagarrigue, who is known for his sharp interpretations of psychological spaces, must clearly remember the menace and thrill of such summer nights—the kind when, in a blink, the adults have disappeared and you’re alone in the dark, in the solace of imagination.

In terms of quality and quantity, photography led this edition of 1-54, and perched at the peak of that summit is surely the portraiture of British Ghanaian artist James Barnor. For six decades, he traveled between London and Accra to capture societies in flux: Ghana in the 1950s was on the brink of independence from England, while in England, he chronicled the emergent African diaspora. For this edition of the fair, Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière assembled a neat summary of his oeuvre, including some striking images from his return to Accra in the 1970s following its colonial liberation, as the higher powers waged successive coups d’état and the people led a revolution of sensibility. Elements of American music and fashion were incorporated into Ghanian tradition, for an unreplicable cultural epoch that, thanks in part to Barnor, was unforgettable, too.