This year, London has made real strides in establishing itself as a home away from home for African art.
This October, for example, Somerset House held the 1.54 exhibition - "the first contemporary African Art Fair" - to much international aplomb, while the Tate Modern gallery has been busy hosting the African art series Across the Board in partnership with galleries across Accra (Ghana), Douala (Cameroon), and Lagos (Nigeria).
Elsewhere in the capital, there has also been a flurry of lower-profile exhibitions featuring artists from around the continent, and it perhaps understandable that one word now frequently seen in stories about African art in the media is 'boom'.
However, not everyone sees it quite in these terms.
The latest in the line of prominent African art exhibitions is Tiwani Contemporary's I Always Face You, Even When it Seems Otherwise, and the gallery's director, Maria Varnava, is sceptical about the idea African art has suddenly exploded onto the London scene.
"I am not sure if what we are currently noticing is the 'boom' of art from Africa in London," she says, "but without a doubt there is a strong interest for art from Africa and its diaspora, and this amount of interest has not existed to this degree in the past.
"The challenge and the hope is for this momentum to become sustainable, for the interest to continue, and for the market to develop in a healthy and stable manner to avoid the crash of prices seen by other art markets."
Tiwani Contemporary's stimulating and impressive exhibition can only help in this endeavour.
I Always Face You, Even When It Seems Otherwise is a thoughtful and vibrant collection of work by rising stars Simone Leigh and Njideka Akunyili. Tiwani Contemporary has a deserved reputation for excellent presentation, and in this latest exhibition the gallery space effectively brings together an eclectic range of mediums.
As the title of the exhibition alludes, both artists address themes of cultural identity and history but also perception.
Present in all the work, as the gallery notes explain, is the notion of the 'contact zone', a reference to Mary Louise Pratt's concept of "social spaces where cultures meet, crash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths."
Leigh's work draws on memory and paradigms of identity informed by her research into West African anthropology and cultural histories.
The exhibition presents a range of her sculpture and ceramic work as well as digital platforms that, in her own words, are part of "an object-based on-going exploration of black female subjectivity."
Leigh's Cowrie series of sculptures is particularly powerful in its confident deployment of different cultural narratives.
Historically, the cowrie shell was associated in many cultures with femininity and fertility, but was also used as a currency across West Africa until the mid-1800s, often in the slave trade.
Consequently, Leigh's use of the shells is strongly reminiscent of Luce Irigaray's 'Women on the Market', an essay that explains how societies form around trade or the circulation of women, often reducing women to "objects of transaction" to be used as tools of production, whether in terms of pro-creation or labour.
The Cowrie series gains even more conceptual weight through the process by which Leigh creates the sculptures.
The production of a Cowrie piece begins with the husk of a melon, a politically-charged discriminatory symbol in of itself (again, dating back to slavery), which she uses as a cast to form the cowrie shell.
There is a certain poetic irony to the fact that Leigh co-opts a negative symbol - of race and gender - to create something beautiful and precious.
Her final sculptures are also so finished and polished in diametric opposition to the laborious, if not torturous, history of their concept and creation.
Akunyili's work is similarly conceptually laden and intense, and the title of the exhibition is taken from one of her paintings.
Akunyili is a Nigerian-American and her art is deeply personal, presenting a life between the two cultures she knows and loves.
Akunyili and her husband themselves appear in the large diptych 'Predecessors', and her siblings feature in 'The Beautiful Ones' series.
Akunyili has often mentioned in interviews that her intention is to show the world her Nigeria and her lived experience of growing up in Lagos, rather than simply offer a didactic presentation of Nigerian history and culture.
However, her work demonstrates painterly influence from America too.
The figures in her portraits are incredibly expressive, the contours and shadows that form them gentle and precise, and Akunyili has a gift for capturing the essence of a figure; the relaxed stance of 'Beautiful Ones #2' still looks full of energy, for example, while the 'Predecessors' figure lounges contentedly.
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These paintings of people are placed against enveloping - almost Rothkoesque - blocks of colour, some powerful, some hazy, that draw out the abstract warmth and resonant feeling of the work.
Yet also so striking across all of Akunyili's work is its intensity. Each portrait and panel of colour is over the top of a sea of people, ranging from politicians to generals to pop culture figures.
Akunyili weaves these together in a patchwork of transfers and photographs capturing the different aesthetics of the different eras of Nigerian history.
It is through these we see the Nigeria dear to Akunyili, the Xeroxed photographs acting like kaleidoscopic fragments of memory from Nigerian history that form the backdrop to everyday life, now frozen in one moment.
Njideka Akunyili & Simone Leigh: I Always Face You, Even When It Seems Otherwise is running until 14 December at Tiwani Contemporary, 16 Little Portland St, London W1W 8BP. Open 11am to 6pm Tuesday to Friday and 12-5pm on Saturday.
