Five years ago, the conversation about African contemporary art still happened almost entirely in London and Paris. Today, the most consequential rooms are in Lagos.
Art X Lagos has graduated from a regional fair to a market-making event — the cohort of galleries showing there is increasingly the cohort of galleries collectors plan their year around. For studios working from Nairobi, Accra or Dakar that means a new pipeline: not the colonial-era London/Paris export, but a continental circuit where the lead buyers are increasingly continental too.
For the artist this changes pricing power. For the collector it changes what "early" means.