Invisible Borders video Installation | 56th Venice Biennale of Art
Donate / Keep the work moving
Artists, research and a living archive. Make a one-time or monthly donation.
Project Spotlight Invisible Borders / Radical Field Journal
Re-tracing the Path of Stars
Explore the Road Trip Route, participants, and how the journey works
Partner with us Partnership, sponsorship and collaboration
What Invisible Borders is
A Trans-African artistic project working through movement, presence, encounter and exchange.
For over 15 years, the Invisible Borders Trans-African Project has assembled African artists to engage the question of borders and the limitations of movement within and beyond the context of the inherited colonial borders of the 54 countries of the African continent.
Working through road travel, the artists use their bodies and presence as sites of exchange, thinking, tactile contact, and encounters, for the articulation of stories of journeys.
Founded
2009, Lagos
Method
Road trips, publishing, archive, studio
Position
Trans-African, artist-led
Registration
IT 46825 (Incorporated Trustees)
Register
Corporate Affairs Commission of Nigeria
Status
Active
Invisible Borders is a Nigerian nonprofit arts organisation registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission as Incorporated Trustees.
Invisible Borders is the public and operating name of Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organisation. The project has also worked as Invisible Borders Trans-African Organisation and Invisible Borders Trans-African Project.
Participants at Frederick Lugard’s Rest House
A practice in motion since 2009
Across ten Road Trips completed between 2009 and 2022, Invisible Borders developed a method of moving, making and thinking together. The legacy is not a closed history. It is material that can be brought into renewed relation with the present.
2009
Founded in Nigeria
10
Road Trips completed through 2022
30+
Countries crossed or connected through project activity
190+
Artists engaged through participation and collaboration
2009
A practice begins
Founded in Nigeria and presented at the Bamako Festival of Photography.
2011
Across the continent
The Lagos–Addis Ababa Road Trip extends the journey across West and East Africa.
2014
Africa and Europe in one journey
The Lagos–Sarajevo Road Trip tests the inherited division between the continents.
2015
A Trans-African Worldspace
Presented at the 56th Venice Biennale as part of All the World’s Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor, and listed among Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers.
2016–2018
Borders within, and across again
Trans-Nigerian journeys turn to internal borders; in 2018 the Lagos–Kigali Road Trip crosses the continent again.
2022
Whispers of the Wilderness
The tenth Road Trip travels through Botswana, Namibia and Angola with the National Geographic Society.
2027
The eleventh edition
The eleventh Trans-African Road Trip, Marrakesh to Lagos, travels 23 January — 11 March 2027.
Shared infrastructure, different fronts
The expressions are not departments or sub-brands. They are four modes through which the project locates itself, acts, relates to memory and circulates knowledge.
Enact / Radical Field Journal
Upcoming journey
Marrakesh — Lagos
23 January — 11 March 2027
The eleventh Trans-African Road Trip. Creating, publishing, encountering and responding along the way.
Field photograph / Invisible Borders archive
IBJ / Invisible Borders Journal
IBJ develops selected and commissioned essays, visual essays, podcasts and films. It extends the long practice of writing and publishing from the journeys, while establishing a distinct editorial platform for research, criticism and artistic thought.
EssayPoetryVisual EssayPodcastVideoNotice
Re-member / The Moving Archive
It is not so much about telling a story as it is about demystifying the image. It is not about proliferating images or propagating further stories of crossing. Rather, it is about inhabiting the space between preconceived projections of the world and freshly acquired perception.
Explore the collection / 2009–2022
Thinking from the road
I have found that questions—whys, hows, whats, wheres, whens—help me make sense of this life; helped me navigate the road and the encounters it brought.
Currently featured
Selected works, documents and reflections from—and activated through—the Moving Archive.
Watch · Talk
Invisible Borders as a long-term artistic inquiry into movement, perception and the lived reality of borders — drawn from over fifteen years of Trans-African journeys by road.
Watch · Documentary
Al Jazeera follows Emeka Okereke and a busload of artists and photographers on a Trans-African Road Trip, as they look for new ways to picture the continent.
Read · Archive · Text
Written from the outside, weeks before the borders closed: an argument for what a Trans-African organisation means against the incentive structures of contemporary art.
Enter the Moving Archive → Read the Invisible Borders Journal →
Propagate / The Relational Studio
Knowledge is always context-specific. Our disposition, therefore, is to share and exchange creatively: to inhabit the in-between space—the vortex of paradox that characterises the border condition—and to nurture the conditions for contact and encounter.
“One who questions will not lose their way.”
Igbo proverb / Onye ajụjụ anaghị efu ụzọ
Question What do we not yet know how to ask?
Make What can be discovered through practice?
Exchange What changes when knowledge circulates?
Return How does learning reorient the project?
Built through relations
Journeys and public work are made possible through sustained relationships with organisations, institutions and supporters.
Images, encounters, everyday life
Selected posts and dispatches from our Instagram.
Across places. In conversation.
Explore @InvisibleBordersStay in relation
Invisible Borders is artist-led. Journeys, publications, workshops and the archive are sustained by people and organisations who make the work possible.
One-time / Monthly giving
Your donation helps sustain artists’ welfare, research and production, alongside the journeys, publications and archive we build together.
Interested in partnering, supporting or developing a collaboration with Invisible Borders? View our Institutional Profile for an extended account of our journeys, methods, track record and relationships.
