“I try to live and participate with minimal dissonance between my existence as a thinker and as a compassionate being trying to make sense of my survival in this world,” Nwagbogu told ArtReview this year of his mode of curating. This holistic approach is necessary when dealing with themes such as the slave trade, the figure of the Amazon and the Vodun religion, as the curator did for the first Benin Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (featuring the work of Chloé Quenum, Moufouli Bello, Ishola Akpo and Romuald Hazoumè). The founder and director of African Artists’ Foundation, the 16-year-old nonprofit arts organisation, and Lagos Photo Festival has been preoccupied with questions of survival: in 2020 the foundation was evicted from its base by its landlords, unfairly it claims, which has put its activities on hiatus. Meanwhile, a new iteration of Dig Where You Stand – From Coast to Coast, a roaming and evolving exhibition project about decolonisation, restitution and repatriation, which Nwagbogu initiated in 2022, landed this year in Benin.