The Pan-African Biennale is the first continental institution dedicated to architecture, urbanism, and spatial practice on the African continent. Conceived, built, and led from within Africa, it marks a decisive moment in the history of global architectural discourse, the moment Africa asserts its own institutional voice, on its own terms, from its own ground.

As an institution, the Pan-African Biennale joins the lineage of the world's great architecture biennales while advancing what none of them could: a platform of continental authorship, rooted in African realities, knowledge systems, and spatial intelligence. It does not position Africa as a subject of external observation or a recipient of imported models. It positions Africa as the author of its own architectural futures.

The Biennale convenes practitioners, thinkers, researchers, and communities from all 54 African nations under a single curatorial framework, renewed with each edition. Each edition is hosted in a different African city, ensuring that the institutional center of this discourse moves continuously across the continent.

The inaugural Pan-African Biennale takes place in Nairobi, Kenya from September 7 to September 11, 2026.

Nairobi is not simply the host city of this inaugural edition. It is an argument. As one of Africa's most diplomatically connected, academically serious, and creatively alive cities, Nairobi is the right place from which to open a continental institutional conversation about the future of African space.

All official information regarding dates, venues, programme, and participation is published exclusively through panafricanbiennale.org and the institution's official communications. Any information encountered through other channels should be verified directly with the Biennale's team at info@panafricanbiennale.org before being acted upon or shared.

The inaugural edition opens under the curatorial title Shifting the Center: From Fragility to Resilience.

The Biennale refuses the external narrative that has long framed African cities and communities through the lens of fragility as weakness, deficit, or vulnerability. In its place, the Biennale asserts that fragility, as experienced across the African continent, has always been a condition of generative intelligence, producing spatial innovation, community resilience, and forms of architectural knowledge that the world is only beginning to recognize.

The curatorial programme unfolds across three thematic strands: Climate Change, which examines how African spatial practice operates within and responds to conditions of ecological pressure and territorial transformation; Vernacular Intelligence, which surfaces the inherited knowledge systems, material cultures, and community-led design practices that constitute one of the world's most significant and least documented bodies of architectural thought; and African Futures, which positions architecture as a speculative, political, and imaginative practice through which Africa authors its own urban futures on its own terms.

No. The Pan-African Biennale does not operate through a national pavilion model. This is a founding curatorial and intellectual position.

The pavilion as a format carries a specific history. It emerged from a tradition of international exhibitions in which nations were invited to represent themselves within a framework designed and governed by others, presenting their cultures, their architectures, and their identities for external judgment and consumption. That model, however transformed over time, retains its fundamental logic: that representation must be purchased, constructed, and submitted to a pre-existing institutional order.

The Pan-African Biennale refuses that logic entirely. This institution was not built to offer Africa a seat at someone else's table. It was built to assert that the table itself belongs to Africa. Within that founding position, the pavilion format, with its commercial structure, its physical hierarchies, and its implicit assumption that nations must pay to be seen, has no place.

Participation in the Pan-African Biennale is determined through curatorial selection. Each of the 54 African nations is represented not through a purchased space but through a practice, a voice, and a body of work chosen for its intellectual and spatial contribution to the discourse this institution is building. The exhibition belongs to the continent that produces it.

All African nations are represented in the inaugural edition. Each nation is represented by a practice, collective, or individual selected through the Pan-African Biennale's curatorial process. The full participant list is published on the Participants page of this website.

The Pan-African Biennale takes place every two years. Each edition is hosted in a different African city, selected through an institutional process that considers geographic, cultural, and curatorial criteria.

This rotating structure is not a logistical arrangement. It is a political and curatorial position. It refuses the permanence of any single institutional center and insists that the continental conversation moves continuously across African geographies, reflecting the full diversity, complexity, and breadth of spatial practice on the continent. The inaugural edition opens in Nairobi in September 2026. The host city of the second edition will be announced in due course.

The full programme of the inaugural edition will be announced in June 2026 and published on this website. The programme runs from September 7 to September 11, 2026 across multiple sites in Nairobi and includes keynote addresses, institutional dialogues, public panels, workshops, screenings, and site-based encounters.

The official programme of the Pan-African Biennale is published exclusively through panafricanbiennale.org and the institution's official communications. Any event, activity, or programme claiming association with the Pan-African Biennale that does not appear on this website or has not been confirmed in writing by the institution's team does not represent the Pan-African Biennale. Please verify directly with the institution at info@panafricanbiennale.org

The Pan-African Biennale is a public institution. Its programme is designed to be accessible to practitioners, students, researchers, policymakers, community members, and the general public in Nairobi and beyond. Tickets and public attendance information are available through the Tickets page on this website. For additional informations isit the contact page.