Ceramic artists Andile Dyalvane and Zizipho Poswa have work included in the group exhibition, Aether Commons: Refracted Cosmologies, currently onat Fundacja Stefana Gierowskiego in Warsaw, Poland (until 18 October 2026).

Curated by founder and director of the African Artists' Foundation (AAF) and the LagosPhoto Festival, and editor of Art Base Africa Azu Nwagbogu, the exhibition presents twenty works across eleven artists in sustained philosophical dialogue with the paintings of Stefan Gierowski, with painting — across traditions, generations, and geographies — at the heart of the exhibition. Gierowski’s six-decade investigation of light as both physical phenomenon and metaphysical force constitutes one of the most rigorous and searching enquiries into luminosity in the history of postwar abstraction.

Paintings by Gierowski are distributed across the Foundation's 450-square-metre space as gravitational forces within a field of active philosophical relation. These works were never finished with their subject and that continue, in the space of the exhibition, to ask something of the contemporary works around them. The dialogue runs in both directions. Gierowski's paintings are not conclusions: they are propositions that the assembled contemporary work extends, contests, and refracts into configurations that could not have been anticipated from either side of the exchange.

Two works from Dyalvane’s 2025 iNgqweji exhibition are presented: Ngcip-ngciphu and Incindi. iNgqweji (meaning “bird’s nest” in isiXhosa) expands Dyalvane’s practice into sculptural installation, drawing on his interest in creating communal spaces charged with spiritual intent – to reawaken the senses, reclaim indigenous knowledge and restore the symbiotic connection between human beings and the natural world. uMameKhaya is Poswa’s piece, forming part of her Umthwalo series(meaning “load” in isiXhosa), recognising the loads that African women carry in their quest to sustain life. The artwork’s title is a fusion of two terms: ‘umama’ (mother) and ‘ikhaya’ (home) – the latter also referring in Xhosa culture to the extended family, homestead and clan as a whole.

"I have always believed that my role as a curator is to create harmony and synergy," says Nwagbogu. "Not to impose a single reading, but to listen — deeply, carefully — to what each practice is doing, and to find the space where they can speak to one another. Gierowski spent a lifetime with light. What moves me is that he never claimed to have finished. Aether Commons is an invitation to continue that openness. The artists here work in paint, in ceramic, in photography, in installation, in glass — and what they share is an understanding that light is not a subject. It is a condition of thinking itself. When you assemble the right voices together and give them enough time, enough care, the sum reveals something none of them could say alone."

Full participating artist list: El Anatsui, Alessandra Carosi, Andile Dyalvane, Olafur Eliasson, Modupeola Fadugba, Mona Hatoum, Satch Hoyt, William Kentridge, Esther Mahlangu, Zizipho Poswa, and Kyu Sang Lee.