Africa Basel

unx-art is pleased to announce its participation in the inaugural edition of Africa Basel, taking place alongside Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland, from June 18 to 22, 2025. The exhibition will present works of the introspective Nigerian artist Helen Ogochukwu Nzete and the visionary Togolese artist Clément Ayikoué Gbegno. unx-art’s presence at Africa Basel is styled in collaboration with Africana Couture—a Pan-African brand grounded in craftsmanship and excellence, community, and culture.

About the Artists

Helen Ogochukwu Nzete, trained in sculpture and based in Abuja, creates deeply introspective works exploring memory, resilience, and repair. A keen observer of social intricacies, Nzete's mixed media practice merges personal experience with structural critique, examining character psychology and social dynamics.

Her recent series, The Year of Knots, is composed of plaster-and-rope reliefs that meditate on the bonds we inherit — and the possibility of gently unravelling them. Untying a knot becomes a gesture of healing: a movement toward clarity, forgiveness, and renewed connection.

Clément Ayikoué Gbegno is a key figure in Togo's emerging art scene, focusing on themes of being and disappearance. After training in Abidjan and Nantes, he sold his ancestral land to dedicate himself to art. His work emphasises cycles of dissolution and renewal, highlighting the provisional and evolving nature of forms.

Using layered textures and a restrained chromatic palette, he renders visible what resists representation: traces, absences, and shifts between material and memory. Life and death are understood not as opposites but as successive stages in a continuum.

unx-art will show Glimmer of Hope, a mixed-media work in which two figures appear in a moment of fragile exchange, caught between persistence and release. The work invites contemplation without resolution, proposing an experience where presence is felt rather than declared.