Project Nexus Supported Residencies 2027

Project Nexus Supported Residencies offers artists from Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora fully funded residencies at Guest Artists Space in Lagos, providing studio space, accommodation, and professional development support.

Overview

Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.), with the support of Deutsche Bank, invite applications for three residency opportunities in 2027 as part of Project Nexus, G.A.S. and Deutsche Bank’s residency and professional development programme.

Two fully supported residencies are open to artists living and working anywhere in Nigeria, alongside a third, part-funded residency for an artist from the global Nigerian Diaspora. There is no requirement relating to career stage. The organizers are interested in the strength and direction of an applicant’s practice, the questions they are exploring, and how they would use the particular context and resources of a G.A.S. residency to develop their work.

Practical Info

Three residencies are offered: Visual Arts and the Environment (Residency 1), Photography (Residency 2), and Nigerian Diaspora Visual Artist (Residency 3).

In particular, the second residency invites applications from photographers living and working anywhere in Nigeria for whom photography is a principal part of their creative practice. They welcome a broad understanding of contemporary photographic practice, including analogue and digital photography, documentary and conceptual approaches, portraiture, constructed image-making, experimental processes, photographic archives and practices that move between photography and other media.

The 4-week residency, happening from 8 February to 5 March 2027, offers dedicated time for research, experimentation and the development of ideas. Applicants do not need to propose a completed body of work. Instead, they are interested in how a period in Lagos could enable a photographer to investigate a question, develop an existing area of practice, experiment with new approaches or begin something new.

Proposals might engage with Lagos as a site of research and encounter through its people, built environment, histories, communities, visual cultures, material life, archives, ecologies or rapidly changing urban conditions. Applicants may also wish to draw on the G.A.S. Library and Picton Archive, and the wider artistic community and networks around the Foundation. Organizers are interested in artists whose practice engages meaningfully with one or more of G.A.S.’s three strands of inquiry: Archives and Publishing, Materiality, Craft and Identity, and Ecology, Farming and Food.

All residencies include accommodation at the relevant G.A.S. site, workspace, residency and pastoral support from the G.A.S. team, access to relevant G.A.S. resources and networks, and a residency award contributing towards travel, living expenses and materials. Residency 3 award covers basic living costs not international mobility and would need to come from other sources.

The nature of the facilities and support differs between Lagos and the Farm House. Applicants should read the 2027 Residency Information Pack carefully before applying for full details of the award, facilities, transport arrangements, materials and costs that are or are not covered.

Residents across all three opportunities will be encouraged to share aspects of their research or practice during their residency through an appropriate form of exchange, which might include an open studio, conversation, workshop, screening, presentation or another format, individually developed in discussion with the G.A.S. team.

About Guest Artists Space Foundation

Guest Artists Space is an international arts organisation supporting contemporary artists through residencies, exhibitions, and professional development programmes. The organisation operates multiple locations including G.A.S. Lagos and G.A.S. Farm House, and maintains the G.A.S. Library and Picton Archive.