The world's only fair dedicated wholly to contemporary African art, 1-54, fills Somerset House's eighteenth-century rooms for its London edition this October.
1-54, the first and only international fair for contemporary African art, comes to Somerset House in Covent Garden from Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 October 2026.
Touria El Glaoui founded 1-54 in 2013 and held the first fair at Somerset House that October. It reached New York in 2015, Marrakech in 2018 and Paris in 2021, and added 1-54 Presents, a series of curated shows, in 2023.
The London edition has stayed at Somerset House throughout, an unusually long tenure in one building.
Galleries from across Africa and its diaspora show alongside European and American dealers who represent African artists. An artist here hangs among peers, and museum curators buy as readily as private collectors.
The 2026 edition runs its own programme of special projects and commissions beside the exhibiting galleries, in the week the rest of the London art market is in town. Somerset House gives it eighteenth-century rooms in place of a hall, so visitors walk the fair as a series of chambers.
The Thursday is the preview, and the fair opens to the public for the other three days.