To Have and to Hold: Ganiyat Sani on KAFART’s Boldest Chapter Yet

The Kaduna Fashion and Art Exhibition (KAFART) returns this year with its sixth edition and a new theme, “To Have and to Hold,” after shifting from an annual to a biennial calendar. In an Ask Me Anything session hosted by Tope Akintayo, founder Ganiyat Sani spoke at length about why the extra time between editions matters, how KAFART resists being boxed in as a trade fair, and what a coming permanent art centre could mean for Kaduna’s creative ecosystem.

This is an extended edit of the conversation.

Q. How’s preparation coming along for the sixth edition of KAFART?

Preparation for the sixth edition of KAFART is going well — it’s going smoothly. There’s so much work being put in by all of us, and we’re trying to make sure that this edition makes a huge impact on our community, and even beyond.

Q. It’s exciting to see KAFART back this year, bigger and better, especially after last year’s break. It’s previously been an annual event — what was the driving force behind making it a biennial? And has the extra time off, especially last year, helped shape how the event is coming together this time?

The year we took off, where we didn’t present anything, really put things in perspective for us and allowed us to see what actually matters in what we’re doing. Making it biennial was also a way for us to take the time to put in the work that the festival deserves, because we discovered that doing it annually doesn’t give us enough time, or the resources, to get in contact with the right people and make sure we put out something worthwhile.

So we decided: why not make it biennial, once every two years, and make sure we bring something that impacts our community positively. That’s the whole idea behind the biennial format. And of course, KAFART is not an art fair — it’s a place where we invite artists to share their work and their unique perspectives, fashion designers as well, to come and share their perspectives with the community, and also talk about important issues affecting our cultures, our histories, our identities — things like that. That’s the whole idea behind it.

Q. At the end of that answer you mentioned what KAFART is not — that it’s less a fair and more a place for people to come and showcase their work. So for people who are new to the KAFART universe, how would you describe the core mission of the exhibition, in your own words?

Our core mission is to create space for underrepresented narratives — stories you don’t commonly hear, identities that aren’t normally portrayed through art and fashion. As diverse as the northern part of the country is, which is what we focus on, there are stories the world needs to see and learn from, because the North has this one-dimensional narrative when you look at it from outside, but it’s more complex than that. That’s one thing we’ve tried to do with KAFART — bring out all the perspectives, make space for these narratives to be shared. That’s why we’re here, that’s what our core mission is.

And I know a lot of people ask why we’re championing the North specifically — when we started, we had a lot of people tell us it was difficult for them to show or share their practice with the world from the North. It’s not as easy as being in other parts of the country, where it’s easier to break into the markets or spaces where people already know your work. And we felt — you don’t always have to go somewhere far away to do that. Why can’t you start from here? That’s why we started what we started.

Q. There have been a lot of misconceptions flying around about KAFART — some people say it’s a festival, some say an exhibition, some say a trade fair or a pop-up market. Once and for all, can we set the record straight? How is the KAFART experience fundamentally different from a regular cultural trade fair or market?

KAFART is not a fair. When we first thought about doing this, we didn’t think, ‘okay, how are we going to sell artworks’ — but we realised along the way that a lot of artists want to sell their work, and a lot of them don’t really understand why we’re here. They feel like this is just another opportunity to sell their pieces, and that’s not the front of what we do — that’s not our focus, to be honest. Sales can happen, of course — if someone sees your work and wants to collect it, yes, that can happen — but that’s not our priority. We want it to be a space where the community comes and learns about art, gets a critical understanding of the issues around them, critical understanding of their environments, their communities, their cultures — things they otherwise wouldn’t think about differently. That’s what we’ve always wanted this platform to be. And of course, if you see a piece and you’re interested in buying, you’ll definitely be able to — but we’re not looking at how to make profit from selling artworks. That’s not our focus.

KAFART is a festival, and a festival that has an exhibition within it. The first time we started this, we were calling it the Kaduna Fashion Art Exhibition, because initially we wanted to do just an exhibition — no public programming, no conversations. But the project has morphed into what it is now, a festival, and it’s not a trade fair, because although we involve a lot of local businesses in our festival — giving people the opportunity to sell to visitors, which creates a kind of local economy around the festival — that’s just a way of involving our community in what we’re doing. They may not totally understand why this is an art festival and not just a place to sell, but gradually you see them getting more interested in what it’s all about. Having vendors doesn’t make it a trade fair — that’s not the main priority, it’s just one of the ways we like to add value to our community by involving local businesses.

So the business of art is never the forefront of KAFART. We’re looking at how art can allow us to think critically and have critical discourses — discourses tied around our history, our culture, our identity, our memory.

Themes, Past and Present

Q. What I hear is that KAFART is first and foremost a platform for creativity in art and fashion, meant to inspire conversation — around culture, philosophy, even politics and social life. I remember an edition that touched on sustainability. Can you take us through some of the themes KAFART has explored in the past, and how they tie into the mission you just described?

The previous edition’s theme was ‘From Whence We Came,’ which was really interesting because we were trying to spark conversations that make us think about where we’re coming from and where we’re going — you can’t necessarily know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re coming from. We invited different kinds of creative practices to contextualise that theme — sculptors, painters, photographers — and we were generally trying to look at our history critically through contemporary art and fashion. A lot of fashion designers made pieces that tapped into that idea, and a lot of artists focused their work around those conversations.

I remember an artist, Moses Tuki, who showed a piece made from metal that he called ‘my girlfriend’s handbag’ — it was shaped like a gun, and he was talking about the history of gun violence on our continent, in our country, and where we’re headed if nothing is done about it — somewhere chaotic, or catastrophic. Those were the kinds of stories we wanted artists to bring in about where we’re coming from and where we’re going, looking into the past to see if there’s a clue for how our future can be reimagined.

That was ‘From Whence We Came.’ Then we moved into ‘Into the Art of Making’ — we wanted to look at how things are made, how artists make their work, and that took us into craft as well. We organised a volunteer research programme where young photographers, videographers, and writers came together to document craft communities in their own locations and regions — people from different parts of West Africa, with images and writing about these craft communities and their current conditions. We also featured a lot of artists who’d adopted indegenious craftsmanship into their own work. Those were the ways we tapped “Into the Art of Making.’

Q. And this year’s theme is ‘To Have and to Hold.’ Can you tell us more about where that came from and what it’s exploring?

Our thinking has evolved — we’re thinking wider now. The theme for this year’s edition is ‘To Have and to Hold,’ and it came out of a residency I participated in last year, the ASIKO Art School programme by CCA Lagos, which took place in Cairo, Egypt. That residency really inspired the theme, because we explored a lot of different artistic practices and narratives about how you hold memory. I decided, based on that deep thinking, that the theme should be ‘To Have and to Hold’ — and a lot of people think it sounds a little matrimonial, but that’s not where we want people’s heads to stay.

When you’re thinking about ‘to have and to hold,’ we want people to think about what resists, what has been erased in our history, in our culture, even in our familial legacies — things we used to practice in our families that we’ve simply stopped, things that define our identities. If we leave our countries for a foreign land, what are the things we negotiate, that we drop and leave behind, because we want to fit in or be accepted in those new places? Those are the kinds of things I wanted people to think about.

I also wanted to think about peaceful coexistence, because part of this theme was inspired by Kaduna’s own history. We’ve had these lovely accounts of how Kaduna used to be — very cosmopolitan, even in how people lived together, very vibrant, very smooth-sailing, if I can use that term. But these days it’s different. We experienced a crisis in the early 2000s that trickled all the way to now — we’re still feeling the friction. It’s not the same, and a lot of people who lived through that crisis can attest that we still haven’t been able to restore how we used to live together. And if you look at it globally, we still have these issues of intolerance, whether religious or tribal — migrants going through a lot in other lands, things like that. Those are the kinds of things we want ‘To Have and to Hold’ to address.

And looking at ownership — in our country we have issues with land ownership. The Fulani ethnic group in Nigeria, for instance, generally move around the country, even beyond it, across Africa. So the question of land ownership comes in — when they settle somewhere, who owns it? You have locals who will also claim it as their ancestral land, and then the question becomes how we negotiate those situations, how we come to a solution that doesn’t end in conflict or war. Those are the kinds of branches we’re expecting ‘To Have and to Hold’ to address. We also want to shed light on quiet stories happening within our communities that we don’t even hear about. Those are the things we’re hoping to share through contemporary art, through fashion, and through the discussions that will be had at the festival.

Fashion, Art, and Craft

Q. Another misconception is about how KAFART blends its mediums. Some people come expecting just a fashion show, others expect just visual art. How does KAFART actively blend these together — and how does it blend Northern Nigerian craftsmanship with contemporary art?

Honestly, over the years we’ve learned a lot about these two disciplines. In our earlier editions, people would ask why we were showing a painting in the same space as a fashion piece, as if they didn’t belong together. We’ve come to realise that fashion can also make an artistic statement — fashion can perform more than just the function of being worn. That’s something we’re emphasising in this edition: a fashion exhibition that allows people to think about fashion beyond just ‘how can I wear this,’ but what does this piece actually say — what is the designer trying to do beyond just clothing someone?

We’ve always had a fashion show as part of our programming, one that people really enjoy, and it’s something I want to continue, because it’s an interesting way for us to engage our audience. This year, we’re taking an intergenerational approach — inviting artists and designers across maybe two or three generations to interpret this theme and see how each generation views and interprets it differently. Sometimes when people come just for the fashion show, they leave thinking KAFART is only a fashion event, which feels like a bit of a letdown — it means we haven’t quite gotten across that this is an art and fashion festival, a multidisciplinary festival, not something that fits in just one box.

On craftsmanship: an artist called Abdulrazaq Ahmed once showed a cyclic installation at KAFART using the wooden slate that children use to write Arabic texts in Tsangaya schools — taking a craft that’s still practised in the North and using it to create contemporary art that speaks to an educational system that’s highly misunderstood and heavily under-supported. I wish there were more of that kind of craft adoption happening in contemporary art in the North — more artistic practice here leans toward painting without incorporating traditional craft in the production of their work. But we do have artists like Faith Shemfe, a batik textile artist based in the North, who uses her skill in tie-and-dye — drawing with wax on textile — to tell stories about women. We’ve shown her work at KAFART in previous editions and hope to again.

In future, I’d love to see what contemporary artists do with calabash carving, or the making of things like the hula weaving, and similar crafts — I’d love to see more work around that. Even in fashion, a lot of designers now work directly with artisanal and craft communities, to make pieces that speak beyond aesthetics, to represent how they’re preserving their culture and heritage. And I find that it trickles down to support those craft communities — the people I know who work with them make sure they’re paid fairly and treated fairly too.

Q. Still on misconceptions — what’s the one thing people constantly get wrong about the creative community in Kaduna, or the North more broadly, that KAFART is actively trying to prove otherwise?

Like I mentioned, a lot of people look at the North from a one-dimensional perspective, and I think if given the opportunity, artists based in Northern Nigeria are able to tell very interesting stories with their work — stories that reveal a lot more about the North than people expect. And sometimes the artists don’t even create work that directly speaks about their cultural heritage — some of them talk about personal, familial, historical legacies, rather than ‘this is generally about the North,’ painting the obvious. There are artists based here who look into the deeper, often unseen or unspoken stories. I think that’s one thing a lot of people need to know about artists from here — they just need the space, because we do have artists from the North doing very interesting things elsewhere, for instance in Lagos, where there’s more infrastructure and community supporting their growth. Williams Chechet is one — he does a lot of pop art that draws from cultures here in the North, and it’s truly inspiring.

If more artists were given that kind of opportunity and support, they’d definitely create something spectacular. In the North, artists don’t really get that much support, so they end up taking more commercial work. But I’m sure that with the right support — residencies, funding, opportunities to meet people who can elevate their careers, they’ll be able to create more objectively — that’s one thing KAFART is working on. As much as we say we’re not a fair, we’re also committed to making sure artists come to this festival and leave having met someone who can help them, someone who can guide them in the right direction, someone who can give them an opportunity that changes their trajectory for good.

Inside the Sixth Edition

Q. Let’s talk about KAFART 2026. Can you give us a sneak peek into how the days are broken down and what to expect?

The first day is meant to be the opening day, where we have all our partners, all the artists, everyone who’s an integral part of the festival, gathering to open the event. Invitations for that day are still in progress, but we’ll definitely share more information closer to the time. We have some interesting exhibitions planned — we’re collaborating with the National Museum Kaduna, with creative communities elsewhere, in Lagos and even in Cairo. We’re having an artist based in Switzerland come and share research he did on the donkey-skin trade in the North. Fashion designers will also show their work — a lot of these things are still being placed into specific days.

Then we’ll have a fashion runway, our usual public programming, and some very interesting film screenings — we plan to take some of those screenings out of the venue and into specific communities, to bring the festival to them too. There’ll be public installations in public spaces as well. And finally, we have a sound system night planned, because we believe people always find a way to want to dance at our festival — so we’re being very intentional about having a sound system night to close the festival.

Q. I understand you’re being incredibly strict with vendor curation this year, focusing specifically on craft communities alongside the exhibiting artists and designers. Why was that so important?

KAFART has always been interested in how it can support craft communities, and this edition presented the right opportunity for us to centre them — to make them the majority of our vendors. If you look at ‘To Have and to Hold,’ craftspeople are the ones responsible for keeping so much indigenous knowledge alive today, and we wanted that at the forefront, to further ground the theme of the festival. We have a collaboration and a discussion planned with the World Craft Council, because KAFART is part of the council, around craftsmanship as resistance in African communities — how craftsmanship has helped communities survive disruption and survive difficult situations. So centring these craft communities as vendors is very essential to what we’re doing this year.

Q. On the selection process — I understand the target is around 12 artists and designers, with a strong focus on domestic Nigerian talent this year, as opposed to previous years, which included more international names. What’s the straightforward expectation for this year’s lineup? What are you looking for when selecting artists and designers?

I’ve mentioned that we’re focusing on artists and designers based in Nigeria, but honestly, if an artist from elsewhere wants to be part of this and has work with a strong connection to our communities, they’re welcome. Usually we run an open call for people who wish to be part of the festival — for artists, we’ll be looking for work that says something about their identity, or a collective identity, something about their history, familial legacies, in the same context as ‘To Have and to Hold’ — work that gives people different insights into what that theme unfolds to be. There’ll be an open call with a proper description of what we’re doing and what we hope artists can bring, and some artists will also be invited directly. The same process applies for fashion designers.

A Permanent Home

Q. KAFART is reportedly working on something bigger this year — a space that’s ultimately KAFART’s own. Can you tell us a bit about the vision for this space, and what a permanent home would mean for the creative ecosystem in Northern Nigeria as a whole?

Gazelle Creative Foundation, the organisers of KAFART, will be launching an art space in the coming year. It is supposed to be an experimental space where we welcome different artistic disciplines — whether you’re in fashion, painting, or other art forms — where we support you to show your work, support you to create work, support you to engage with the public through your work, and even to do research, because we plan to have a library within the facility where you can access information that’s useful to you. We just wanted to support the creative ecosystem in Kaduna, because we feel we need more of these spaces — more intentionally set up spaces for the arts in the North. That’s what we’re working on, and we hope to unveil something for everyone visually at the festival, so you can see what we’re about to launch.

Q. Finally — what feeling or realisation do you want every attendee, every artist, every vendor to walk away with?

We want people to have a good time, in general. We’re going to have a safe zone at the festival, where people can come and raise any issues affecting their experience — we’ll have designated people around for that. And beyond that, we want people to walk away feeling like they’ve learned something, that they’ve connected with a deeper part of themselves through the different kinds of artworks they’ll see at the festival. That’s what we want people to walk away with.

Questions from the Floor (Audience)

Q. Is KAFART open to someone who isn’t in the art space at all — can anybody attend? And is there a way KAFART helps someone coming from outside the art world appreciate art more, or understand what’s going on? — Ibrahim Garba

KAFART has always been a platform that welcomes multidisciplinary perspectives, so no matter what discipline you’re coming from, there’s something for you to connect with. And thankfully, we’re also opening up more understanding of art and the need for art in our communities, for people who don’t have the context to understand it. We’re going to have a conversation titled ‘What is the Role of Art in Our Society?’ — a very simple question, but one that will travel miles, especially for people to really understand why we’re doing this and what the need for art even is in our community. I believe if you attend this year’s edition, you’ll get a lot of understanding through that conversation.

Q. Is there anything you expect from fashion designers — a design style or pattern? Honestly, thinking about it, I haven’t really incorporated anything about the northern part of Nigeria into my work — what I do is mostly modern fashion, things that are going on now. If I’m going to participate, I wanted to know if there’s something you’d be expecting in the designs. — Wunni Jacob

You don’t have to bring in something culturally from Northern Nigeria specifically. You just have to bring something that’s really honest to you, a story you’d like to share — something that revolves around maybe something historical you’re conversant about, a familial history, a personal thing, your identity. It doesn’t have to be ‘culture, culture, culture’ — it can be something that comes out honestly from your work, informed from a genuine place. You said your work is modern, that you just do things that are going on now, but how about doing a little bit of research — is there anything that’s particularly interesting to you, that if you represented it in fashion, a lot of people would learn from, based on that research?

[Wunni Jacob, a crochet designer, said she’d try — that it’s been hard for her to connect her mostly modern practice to her roots, but she’d see how she could tell a story through it.]

Since you said you use crochet — that’s a material. You can read something about the material itself, take a deep dive into crocheting: what were people doing before crocheting, or has crocheting always been there? Think about it from that angle, and then expand further — it might not even relate to the material you’re using, it might be about a style, or if you take a deep dive into fashion history — look into what was happening there, what people were wearing at the time, or what people are wearing now that’s still connected. People wear a lot of ankara now, for instance, and those fabrics were being produced when the Kaduna Textile Ltd mill was still running. So do research on anything interesting through your work, and you can share it — get us to see crochet differently, in a way people don’t already know.

[Phoebe Sodangi, who exhibited at KAFART’s 2024 edition, used part of the open floor simply to say thank you: “I’ve been going back and forth on what to do since I saw this year’s theme, but I’m so grateful for this session — I’ve gotten a lot of clarity on where to channel my energy and what to focus on.”]

Q. I love the ‘To Have and to Hold’ theme for this edition — as artistic director, how are you planning to evolve the exhibition’s experience over the four days, to keep the energy fresh rather than static? — Halima Bello

What we’re curating for this year is very expansive — it gives people a lot of room to explore different things, and I feel like a single day isn’t even enough to completely take in what we’ve put together. We’ve built in conversations we believe are must-listens, ones we think people will really engage with and learn from through the speakers. We’ll also make sure the programme of events goes out well in advance, so people can plan how they want to engage with the festival in a way that works for them. Bringing in the craft communities is going to really energise the audience too, I think — people will be curious to see craft items they don’t normally have easy access to, brought to them in that way, and that contributes to the festival’s energy. And then on the closing day, we’ll have that sound system night, engaging people in a more energised way than we’ve ever experienced before at the festival. Each day is meant to present something fresh — that’s what we can assure everyone. Each day has something very interesting happening, and I think that helps maintain the momentum of the festival.

KAFART’s sixth edition, “To Have and to Hold,” opens later this year in Kaduna. Follow @kafart_ng and subscribe to both KAFART and Moveee magazine newsletters for open calls, the full programme, and artist and designer spotlights.