Architects of Liberation examines the extraordinary architectural experimentation that accompanied decolonisation in West Africa. Newly independent nations needed universities, cultural institutions, government buildings and civic spaces capable of expressing a future distinct from colonial rule. Architecture became political: modernist forms were adapted to climate, local materials, Pan-African ideals and the ambitions of new states. With hundreds of drawings, photographs, models and films, the exhibition expands the conventional geography of modernism and asks who has historically been included in its story.

The architects represented include African practitioners alongside international figures working within rapidly changing political contexts. Rather than presenting one signature artist, the exhibition reveals architecture as a collective instrument through which governments, architects and communities attempted to build independence into physical form.