It feels like the artworld is only now catching up to Shonibare’s art, a longstanding prism for what have become our era’s central concerns. In his Serpentine solo this year, the British-Nigerian artist’s signature figures wrapped in colourful faux-African Dutch batik took the form of imperial statues, radiating colonial pasts and asking to be toppled. Simultaneously in London he appeared in museum group exhibitions related to textiles and British colonial history. In the Venice Biennale’s international show his hunched, possessions-carrying refugee astronaut embodied incoming climate displacement, while in the Nigerian Pavilion he addressed restitution via clay statues harkening back to objects looted from Benin by British colonists. In Nigeria Shonibare also inaugurated his first public sculpture in Lagos, where the artist spent a part of his childhood. Meanwhile, he continued to pay it forward via his five-year-old nonprofit GAS residency programme in Lagos and Ijebu (which welcomed over 20 new residents this year), facilitating exchange between diverse practitioners in order, it appears, to alter the fabric of culture itself.