About this episode
Aindrea Emelife is Curator, Modern and Contemporary at MOWAA (Museum of West African Art), a new museum which opened in Benin City, Nigeria in November 2025. She was also the curator of the Nigeria Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Born in London, United Kingdom, Emelife studied at The Courtauld Institute of Art. Her work focuses on questions around colonial and decolonial histories in Africa, transnationalism and the politics of representation. Her recent exhibitions include BLACK VENUS; a survey of the legacy of the Black woman in visual culture which opened at Fotografiska NY and toured to MOAD (San Francisco, USA) and Somerset House (London, UK). Emelife’s first book, A Brief History of Protest Art was released by Tate in March 2022, Emelife has contributed to exhibition catalogues and publications, most recently including Revising Modern British Art (Lund Humphries, 2022). In 2021, Emelife was appointed to the Mayor of London’s Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm. She and Zuckerman discuss being seen in institutions, how exhibition making can shape the curator, nuance, artists as activists, what a museum can be, power, ancient traditions as innovation, impact, visibility and belonging, the archive, the human imagination, and not being afraid of imaginative possibility!