The first of the LISTENING SESSIONS took place at the +234 Art Fair in Lagos, Nigeria on 5–8 March 2026 inviting the public to shape the future of the Museum of West African Art by lending their voices, ideas, and critiques.

Titled ‘The Forum’, the platform invited hundreds of visitors to reflect on what cultural institutions can be and whom they should serve. Conceived as an itinerant format, ‘The Forum’ will travel between cities as part of the Listening Sessions programme.

Hosted by SOTO Gallery on Saturday 28th March, creative professionals, researchers, cultural practitioners and members of the general public gathered to ask some of the most pressing questions facing African museums today: Who is heritage for? Who feels at home in the museum? When institutions translate community histories for wider audiences, what is flattened or left behind?

For MOWAA, these questions are not abstract. They speak directly to how our programmes and exhibitions cater to local and diasporic audiences - and what our choices reveal about belonging.

Conversations featured research from Zoë Ene, poetic provocations by Benita Oseremi and Joseph Ndukwu of Onoma Creative Circle (Benin City), and group discussions led by Papa Omotayo (MOE+ Art Architecture) and Lagos Biennale Director Folakunle Oshun.

Hosted across Lagos Island, Owambe is a multi-day Listening Sessions programme exploring play, performance, and the ways cultural knowledge is held, shared, and sustained within community spaces. Across several days, MOWAA moved through rehearsal grounds, festival spaces, and community roundtables as a guest observer, entering into forms of learning already in motion.

The programme began on 4 April at Tafawa Balewa Square, where MOWAA joined the Fanti Carnival rehearsal as participants. This first encounter centred embodied listening, treating the rehearsal ground as a living archive and a site of knowledge shaped by movement, memory, and collective practice.

On 6 April, the team attended Fanti Fest and engaged with the day’s programmes, performances, and public gathering. The series concluded on 10 April with a focused conversation bringing together Fanti community heads and wider community members to reflect on intergenerational knowledge transfer, continuity, and Lagos Island’s role in carrying this memory forward.

Across each moment, Owambe asked what it means for a museum to learn from community-led practice, and how institutions might become more embedded, responsive, and accountable to the people whose histories they seek to hold.

What can a museum learn from a neighbourhood? This session brought community activators and programmers together to explore how exterior engagements shape 

interior curatorial stances. By prioritizing "making through learning," we investigate how museums can reflect organic gathering and “layer of coalescing."

Hosted at Loving Lagos, this session will bring young people into the Listening Sessions through play, movement, and creative activity. Designed as a participatory forum, it centres children’s ways of seeing, allowing them to express how they encounter and understand cultural knowledge in their everyday lives.

Through hands-on interaction and open exploration, the session will be a space to listen to what children carry, what they notice, and how they imagine the role of a museum. Their responses will offer insight into forms of learning and engagement that sit outside formal structures, grounding the conversation in lived experience.

As part of the wider Listening Sessions, this activation extends the programme’s focus on dialogue and exchange, recognising children as active contributors to how cultural institutions can evolve.