The Pan-African Biennale 2026 guide – explore the first architecture festival of its kind

The Pan-African Biennale 2026 is gearing up to launch on 7 September in Nairobi, Kenya, marking an important global milestone – the continent's first-ever dedicated architecture platform, focusing solely on the built environment of Africa. The emphasis is on creativity and thought leadership from within African countries, rather than from the outside looking in – so exhibits will share spatial stories and designs from African or diasporic studios.

What is the Pan-African Biennale 2026?

The event's inaugural curator, Somali-Italian architect Omar Degan, discussed the festival's mission, vision and scope with us a year ago, and he explained how he hopes it will grow into an important platform for discourse and experimentation in the African continent. Degan (whose past works include Arbe, a Somali café for the community in Mogadishu) worked with the Architectural Association of Kenya (AAK) and its president, architect George A Ndege, to develop the festival, which is due to open next week.

Degan is keen to create a biennale that 'belongs to all of Africa', he explained at the time.

The Pan-African Biennale 2026 theme and structure

The inaugural biennale's theme is Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience. From there, the curator organised the displays around five key topics: 'Shifting the Center', 'Ecologies of Repair', 'Living Archives and Embodied Knowledge', 'Imagining Otherwise, on African futures', and 'Pan-Africanism, the Centre in Motion'.

In a break from a more country-focused approach, the show is organised by climatic zone. Degan explains: 'Practices are grouped by the conditions they actually work in, so the Sahel sits with the Sahel and the coast sits with the coast, and the national border, which was drawn elsewhere and imposed later, does not structure the room. What unifies a group is what nature established and what extraction has done to it, not what a treaty decided.

'Two practices two thousand kilometres apart and separated by four borders often share a soil, a rainfall pattern, a building material and a history of removal, and once the work is arranged that way, the shared knowledge becomes visible immediately. It also removes the comparison the pavilion model invites, where visitors move from country to country, keeping score. Here you move through conditions.'

Brief and exhibitors

There are a total of 54 exhibitors across the Pan-African Biennale 2026 – at least one practice, collective or individual per country. The responses vary, as uniformity was never the goal, the organisers explain. The point was for every nation to be represented. Kenya, as the host, is prominently represented by a group of studios who were asked to work together on a single piece.

Exhibitors were asked to bring their own work and knowledge in a way that relates to the five main themes – 'what the land is doing, what has been inherited and is still being used, what is being archived or lost, and what is being imagined next', Degan explains. They had to show 'evidence rather than image' in order to present process and information rather than focus on aesthetics and an overly curated image. 'The biennale is arguing that African spatial knowledge exists in abundance and has simply not been assembled in one place before, so the brief had to invite proof of that rather than representation of it,' Degan adds.

How were exhibitors selected?

There was no open call for participation for the inaugural Pan-African Biennale. The exhibits were selected through curatorial decisions, which were rooted in local realities and key questions that the event as a whole sought to address: climate, urbanisation, material culture, and future spatial imaginaries.

'The founding position matters here,' Degan says. 'The biennale does not operate a national pavilion model, because that model has always required a country to fund and secure its own representation, which quietly decides in advance which nations appear and which do not. Selecting from within removes that filter. This is the first time African spatial practices have convened under a single curatorial framework built from within the continent.'

Meanwhile, Africa is addressed not merely as a geography but as a range of diasporic cultures, too. As a result, the biennale is a mixture of Africa-based works and diasporic practices. 'The same reasoning produces the climatic organisation of the show,' adds the curator. 'We are grouping people by the conditions and histories they share, not by the lines on a map or the passports they hold.'

Pan-African Biennale 2026 venues

The Kenyatta International Convention Centre is the main biennale hub, hosting the opening and closing events – but the event as a whole is spread across several other venues, mostly in the Ngara district of Naibori. The spaces and activities include an evening film programme at Unseen Nairobi drawn from an international open call.

Degan's intention was to use the city as a continuous backdrop to the biennale, rather than concentrate it all in a single venue where everything unfolds internally, separate from city life.

Programming beyond the exhibits

Beyond the main show and its five topics, a wealth of public programming aims to bring the architectural debate alive and engage with visitors and the wider public. This will include five days of keynote addresses, institutional dialogues, public panels, workshops and site-based encounters. There is also the evening film programme at Unseen Nairobi, selected through an international open call.

Meanwhile, New York's Van Alen Institute has revived its Paris Prize, which has been dormant for three decades. For the biennale, it will be relaunched as the Re:Paris Prize, 'The [prize's] history is the point,' says Degan. 'From 1904 to 1997, the prize sent young architects to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and its winners included William Van Alen himself. It defined architectural merit from a single Western vantage point for over a century. The relaunched prize turns that around, towards reparative and regenerative urbanism across the post-colonial world.'

The winning group will be announced in Nairobi on 10 September, allowing the chosen architects to carry out field research within the continent, 'with an emphasis on communities that have long navigated displacement and exclusion'.

The biennale's future

The Pan-African Biennale's concept is that it will move to a different African city every two years. Nairobi is just the first stop.

Access and tickets

The Pan-African Biennale 2026 will remain open to the public across its Nairobi venues, from 7 to 11 September 2026. General admission to the exhibition and the talks is free.

Tickets and venue details are available at panafricanbiennale.org