Reassembling archives, reimagining cooperation: a conversation with Naima Hassan

What does it mean to deconfine cultural cooperation? For researcher, curator, and archivist Naima Hassan, this question is central to her work across archives, institutions, and geographies. Based in Berlin and currently working with the Yinka Shonibare Foundation and Guest Artists Space Foundation, Naima’s practice is grounded in building archival infrastructures that support African and Afro-diasporic cultural production – beyond the limitations of extractive, colonial frameworks. In this conversation, she reflects on the possibilities and tensions of transnational collaboration, the role of artist-led initiatives in reshaping cultural narratives, and the transformative potential of archives as living, relational spaces. From her leadership on the Re:assemblages program in Lagos to her involvement in TheMuseumsLab, Naima offers a powerful vision of cultural exchange grounded in care, equity, and shared authorship.

• Can you start by introducing yourself? Who are you, what drives your work and how have your professional experiences (research, curatorial practice and archival work) shaped your approach to cultural cooperation today?

My name is Naima Hassan. I’m a researcher, curator, and archivist based in Berlin. I currently work as Associate Curator and Archivist at Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F), London and Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation, led by Belinda Holden (CEO, Y.S.F.) and Moni Aisida (Executive Director, G.A.S.). My practice is rooted in building archive infrastructures for African and Afro-diasporic cultural institutions. I’m particularly drawn to forms of cultural cooperation that emerge through archival work, especially those that unfold across geographies, disciplines, and institutional frameworks.

I am currently interested in issues of archival displacement and postcolonial heritage, concerns that consistently arise in my curatorial and research work. In 2024, I co-curated Annotations at G.A.S. Foundation alongside Maryam Kazeem. The project facilitated artistic encounters in archives related to 20th-century pan-African festivals. While current restitution debates around African cultural heritage often focus on objects and artworks, I am especially concerned with less visible postcolonial archives. This includes extensive archives generated by 20th-century pan-African festivals, many of which are also held outside the African continent.

• Your research explores Africa-EU relations and South-South dynamics. What shifts are you seeing today that make you hopeful for more balanced cultural exchanges? How do you see the role of artists and curators in navigating and reshaping these relationships?

African art institutions, particularly residency institutions—are reconfiguring cultural cooperation by reframing the guest/host dynamic. Rather than framing cooperation or exchange as a formalised exchange between institutions or states, the residency space allows for co-presence, observation, and learning on different terms. It decentres expertise, creates space for unplanned dialogue, and invites guests to orient themselves within local ecosystems.

Artists and curators play a critical role in facilitating these encounters. At G.A.S. Foundation, for instance, visiting researchers, artists, and curators may undertake residencies to inform exhibitions, publications, or long-term research. During his residency, curator Osei Bonsu developed research around the legacies of Nigerian modernism, in preparation for his forthcoming exhibition at Tate. His residency culminated in a public programme titled Building Artists’ Estates and Legacies, which brought together Nigerian artist estate holders in a conversation about authorship, preservation, and intergenerational transmission. Crucially, this wasn’t just research a context, but research local interlocutors. These types of residencies often produce subtle shifts that result in long-term impact.

• In your work, you highlight the importance and power of artist-led initiatives. Why do you think it is vital for African artists and curators to lead in shaping cultural narratives? What do you feel they bring that larger institutions sometimes miss?

In a 2024 lecture titled Institution Building as Curatorial Practice, the late curator Koyo Kouoh asserted that without the experimental Senegalese art collective Laboratoire Agit’Art, Raw Material Company, one of Dakar’s most vital contemporary art centres, would not exist. Founded in 1973 by writer and performer Youssouf John, Laboratoire Agit’Art sought to revitalize artistic production in Senegal by breaking away from formalism and engaging critically with dominant cultural ideologies such as Negritude. Kouoh’s observation points to a crucial genealogy of artist-initiated practices across the continent, projects that not only resist inherited institutional models, but actively reimagine what cultural infrastructure can look like on African terms.

One of the enduring challenges within large art institutions in the Global North holding African and Afro-diasporic collections is the persistent framing of expertise tethered to colonial-era taxonomies, privileging the “ethnographic” and the “traditional,” while overlooking the dynamism of contemporary African art and diasporic entanglements. This reductive approach flattens cultural narratives and fails to accommodate the complexity and plurality of African artistic expression. Initiatives led by African artists and curators offer a critical counterpoint, by prioritising local knowledge, experimentation, and self-determined narratives. Though not without structural and financial challenges, such initiatives are forging very new kinds of arts ecosystems.

• You’re currently developing the Re:assemblages program at G.A.S. Foundation Lagos. Could you tell us more about the vision behind this project and what you hope it will achieve?

Re:assemblages is a roaming, multi-year program that emerged at G.A.S. Foundation in response to the Picton Archive—a significant collection of African-published journals, magazines, and manuscripts, which constitute a significant archival assemblage for re-thinking contemporary African art in relation to the broader conditions of the 20th century. The archive, established in 2022 with the donation of a large portion of the personal library of Emeritus Professor of African Art John Picton and Sue Picton.

In 2025–26, Re:assemblages will unfold through four interwoven themes—Ecotones, The Short Century, Annotations, and The Living Archive—each guiding a cycle of public convenings, micro-publishing experiments, and research activations. These initiatives feed into the development of the African Arts Libraries Lab (AAL Lab)—a cohort-based initiative linking independent art libraries, publishers, and archives across the continent, alongside a corresponding Affiliates Network of supporting global institutions. The Lab fosters new forms of collaboration across linguistic, geographic, and institutional borders. Through collective convenings, experimental publications, and the development of archival toolkits, participants approach libraries and archives not as static repositories but as active, world-making infrastructures. The culmination of this work is the Archive Futures Road Map—a multiyear map proposing tangible, care-driven models for the acquisition, digitization, and activation of African art archives, grounded in local knowledge, transnational networks, and sustained critical engagement.

• What are some of the challenges you have encountered so far, and how do you navigate them?

One of the core challenges is infrastructural—not just in the material sense, but in terms of how knowledge is shared, who gets access. There’s a growing recognition that African and diasporic art archives need support now, but sustainable change requires a transformation of infrastructure too. Institutions holding these archives are balancing delivering outputs, programming, publications, digitization, on timelines and budgets that are restrictive. Another layer is the challenge of collaboration across contexts. Re:assemblages is intentionally international, but that means dealing with linguistic, cultural, and institutional asymmetries. We are navigating by building relationally: through long conversations, shared authorship models, and an ethos of designing the AAL Lab as a distributed, cohort-led initiative with a built-in handover model.

• You’re also involved with TheMuseumsLab, a major Africa-Europe partnership. What lessons have you learned from that program about how cultural exchange can be structured more equitably?

TheMuseumsLab is a revealing site for testing not just the possibility of equitable cultural exchange between African and European institutions, but its deep complications. One of the clearest lessons I’ve taken from the experience—especially through my work with the TheMuseumsLab Steering Board—is that equity must be designed, resourced, and governed into the structure of the partnership itself.

We’ve seen, for example, how African institutions often carry asymmetrical burdens—from hosting responsibilities without adequate funding, to logistical and infrastructural barriers that European partners simply don’t face. In African cities, where transport, access to tech, and institutional staffing are uneven, what may appear unproblematic often reproduces existing inequities. The lesson isn’t just to “include” African partners. It’s to listen to their terms of participation—and resource them accordingly. That includes rethinking funding mechanisms, allowing for differentiated support, and recognising that institutions operating under colonial legacies, do not arrive at the table equally.

• The DECONFINING project is about exploring new ways of artistic and cultural cooperations, ways that rethink borders, not just physical, but political, institutional, and social ones. What kind of borders or confinement patterns do you believe we most urgently need to address and dismantle in the cultural field?

We need to rethink epistemological confinements that restrict whose histories are valued and how they are represented. These confinements often manifest as rigid “protocols of intellectual disciplines,” as described by scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman. These protocols establish what counts as legitimate knowledge and disciplinary violence that creates structural inequalities within museums, archives, and cultural institutions.

The recent landmark case of Tamara Lanier against Harvard University is an example of these dynamics. Lanier’s legal fight to reclaim daguerreotypes of her ancestors, enslaved individuals whose stories she inherited through oral traditions, highlighted how institutional collections often disregard the epistemic frameworks that communities rely on to remember and make sense of their pasts. Lanier’s insistence on oral history and familial memory dismantled the epistemological border that separates institutional knowledge from lived experience, revealing the need for museums and cultural institutions to move beyond confinement patterns that perpetuate historical and ethical violence.

Dismantling these borders means transforming museums as sites where multiple epistemologies coexist and where restitution is not only about returning objects but restoring the memory, languages, and practices surrounding them. This requires institutions to critically interrogate their own protocols, to embrace structural changes that foster equity, and to co-create knowledge in partnership with communities.

• In your view, what does a truly deconfined, decolonized, equitable cultural collaboration look like? What would you say are the most important steps toward “deconfining” cultural cooperation between Africa and Europe?

A truly deconfined relation between African and European cultural institutions and workers, requires sustained efforts to dismantle visible, systemic and symbolic borders that govern cultural exchange and mobility. Achille Mbembe, in Bodies as Borders, articulates that Africa and Europe urgently need to confront each other over the issue of human mobility. Within culture, the ongoing visa-border regime restricts the free movement of African cultural workers and artists, which creates enclosures and existential threats for Africa-EU cultural cooperation.

• How can projects like DECONFINING and Re:assemblages inspire new ways of thinking about mobility, belonging, and creative exchange?

DECONFINING and Re:assemblages emerge from distinct yet overlapping traditions and disciplinary protocols. Yet, what these projects share, is a commitment to decentering dominant power structures and epistemologies that have historically defined cultural cooperation on colonial, extractive, and exclusionary terms. Both insist on plurality and relationality: DECONFINING calls for dismantling systemic borders that regulate who can move and participate; Re:assemblages insists on destabilizing fixed meanings of archives to enable multiplicity of histories and identities to coexist and co-produce knowledge. Together, they push for a concept of mobility that transcends physical crossing to include intellectual and affective movement, reconnection, and transformation.

Critically, these projects reveal tensions within cultural cooperation: they operate across different registers of confinement—physical, institutional, epistemological—that often remain siloed in conversations about mobility and belonging. DECONFINING foregrounds the urgent and material limitations imposed by border regimes on African artists and cultural workers, highlighting how these restrict possibilities for sustained collaboration and exchange. Re:assemblages challenges mobility confinements by instead fostering living, participatory practices and residency models where multiple actors can encounter African art archives in experimental ways together.

• Finally, what advice would you offer to institutions or individuals who want to support more meaningful, sustainable cultural exchanges?

African and Afro-diasporic cultural institutions are highly vulnerable to shifting funding landscapes and changing geopolitical priorities. While African institutions often face instability due to fluctuating donor focus and diminishing financial commitments, Afro-diasporic institutions in Europe are frequently overlooked altogether in these cooperation discussions. This exclusion deepens inequities and fragments cultural networks critical for shared histories and creative exchange.

What’s urgently needed is patient, flexible, and sustained support that responds to local and diasporic priorities rather than external agendas or short-term cycles. Funding must be rethought as a form of solidarity that enables institutions to build infrastructure, retain staff, and maintain spaces of cultural production and care across both continental and diasporic contexts. Without long-term commitment, cultural work risks becoming fragmented or sidelined, undermining efforts toward decolonization, restitution, and equitable cooperation. In this light, cooperation funding must be understood as foundational investment in shared futures which enables African and Afro-diasporic cultural institutions to lead, innovate, and sustain transformative cultural exchange beyond the constraints of volatile political and economic cycles.

About Naima Hassan

Naima Hassan is a researcher, curator, and archivist based in Berlin. Her practice foregrounds alternative epistemologies, curatorial and archival ethics, with a focus on the epistemic transformation of postcolonial collections and memory cultures. She currently leads Re:assemblages, jointly developed with Guest Artists Space Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation, as Associate Curator and Archivist. In 2022, she founded SITAAD, a platform dedicated to supporting archival research on Somalia and its diaspora. Hassan also serves on the Steering Board of TheMuseumsLab and is a member of New Currents: Indian Ocean Futures Working Group.