London’s Next Generation of Art Foundations

It’s a balmy Tuesday evening in July, and I’m sitting at what Delfina Foundation’s founding director Aaron Cezar calls a ‘family dinner’. Inside the central London townhouse, high-net-worth philanthropists, gallery directors and the foundation’s artists- and curators-in-residence break bread and discuss everything from upcoming shows to contemporary geopolitics. Downstairs is an exhibition by Iranian-Canadian artist duo Freudian Typo (Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi), ‘Condensed Word, Displaced Flesh’, a post-Marxist dissection of debt as a manipulative tool integral to Western economics. Between the main course and dessert, the residents – who hail from Brazil, Taiwan, South Korea, Tajikistan, Cameroon and Chile, among other places – are each given a few minutes to present their practices. The room poses critical questions between each presentation. When I was first invited, the ‘family’ concept struck me as gimmicky; by the end of the evening, I’m close to being convinced. 

A week prior to this, over a video call, Cezar regales me with details of the foundation’s beginnings in 2007, when Spanish-British patron Delfina Entrecanales transformed the Delfina Studio Trust (1988–2006) – an organization renowned for igniting the careers of acclaimed British artists, such as Sonia Boyce, Veronica Ryan and Mark Wallinger – into an international project. The late Entrecanales decided that the Middle East and North Africa, where she had been travelling, should be the starting point, and in particular those artists giving a fresh perspective on the region. 

‘At that time, we were still in the post-9/11 period,’ explains Cezar. ‘There was this very divisive language in the press. Within all of this, it was important for us to think about London as almost a third place, not as the UK, but as a space where the world could gather.’ Partnerships with the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Serpentine quickly gave artists from MENA a voice in the UK, and, after those initial years, the foundation expanded to cover a broader geography. Some key projects include Kurdish-Turkish artist Ahmet Öğüt’s ‘The Silent University’ at Tate Modern in 2012, a collaboration with skilled asylum seekers legally unable to work, and Avani Tanya’s A Selective Guide to the V&A’s South Asian Collection (2017), a published para-institutional dissection of the museum’s archive. 

This actively decolonial remoulding of the London art world relies on a collaborative approach. Cezar is well connected, also serving as a strategic advisor to Chinese patron Yan Du’s Asymmetry Art Foundation, an initiative focused on supporting curators working with East Asian and Sinophone contemporary art. Cezar met Du around 2018, at which time she became a founding member of Delfina’s Asia-Pacific patron network. I am introduced to Du in Bloomsbury for breakfast a week after meeting Cezar. We are close to the location of her new initiative, Yan Du Projects (YDP), under construction at the time of writing, which is opening in early October. YDP, an Asian-focused project space, forms the third wing in her trinity of patronage, joining Asymmetry and YDC – a private collection of more than 800 works.

Born near Beijing, Du has been collecting for more than a decade. She launched Asymmetry in 2020, keen to encourage ‘knowledge production’ and bridge a gap between China and the West, having noticed a lack of Chinese art publications. The foundation, initially nomadic, then based in Hackney since 2022, has relied and thrived, like Delfina, on partnerships: fellowships at Whitechapel and Chisenhale galleries, a PhD scholarship at Goldsmiths University, a lecture series in conjunction with the Courtauld Institute of Art, and, in 2024, support for the appointment of two Tate Modern curators – Alvin Li and Hera Chan – both with specialisms in APAC art. 

Du dispels the notion that YDP is a vanity project. ‘People are always saying, “Yan is opening a space. It is just going to display her collection,”’ she laughs. ‘It’s really about supporting artists to break through with their practice, rather than just beautiful work. I’m interested in artists who think about challenging themselves.’ Her words are ostensibly a statement of preference, but at a time when London is tarred by a non-dom exodus, a funding slowdown and, in the case of some commercial galleries, a turn to ‘safer’ displays, this kind of philanthropy is welcome. ‘I have lots of Chinese communities here,’ she says. ‘So, for me, it’s not a difficult decision to stay.’ 

And even if Du does eventually leave, YDP will continue as more than just a bricks-and-mortar space. ‘I want to keep it flexible,’ she explains; to this point, even the HQ has been envisioned as a ‘temporary’ and ‘modular’ structure located inside a listed Georgian house. ‘It’s like us. We are the diaspora. We come here as outsiders, we unpack and we live here.’

Such a philosophy appears as a throughline with these foundations. A few days after meeting Du, Lina Lazaar, the president of the Kamel Lazaar Foundation (KLF), calls me from Tunisia. ‘London is perhaps the most vibrant and rich city, with an immense diasporic community that has shaped it for generations,’ she says, before adding that while the relationship between the city and its diaspora has been complex, this has no doubt contributed to London’s resilience.

Currently, Lazaar is at KLF’s new residency space, Tilal Utique. I can hear frogs croaking in the background. ‘Sorry, they’ve just woken up,’ she says, laughing. Technically based in London, in reality, she’s always between places – born in Riyadh and raised in Geneva, she worked for Sotheby’s from Jeddah as one of their first MENA art specialists between 2004 and 2015. Lazaar, whose father set up the foundation in 2005, juggles all aspects of KLF – including Jaou Tunis, a biennial she set up in Saudi Arabia in 2012. As part of her role, she’s relaunching MENAled art platform, Ibraaz, which ran as an academic online resource between 2011 and 2017 with Professor Anthony Downey as editor-in-chief. ‘Ibraaz 2.0’, she reveals, will keep MENA front and centre while branching out to include the ‘global majority’ (the world’s nonwhite population) within a ‘culture of hospitality’ specific to the Arab world. 

Ibraaz opens its doors in Fitzrovia in mid-October with an inaugural exhibition by Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama. ‘How do you create conditions for people to think critically like they used to during Ibraaz 1.0, but add that sense of sharing the same space?’ she ponders. ‘Those conditions of gathering are going to be a very important part of our programming.’

Between all these conversations, I also meet with Nicoletta Fiorucci, founder of the eponymous foundation. She too is no stranger to the concept of hospitality, nor international collaboration – albeit through a more European lens. With exhibition spaces in London and Venice, collaborations and projects across Europe, and residencies, including on the Italian island of Stromboli, her organization – founded in 2010 as Fiorucci Art Trust and directed by Milovan Farronato until 2021 – made its name through unconventional media, and wild workshops and performances. Today, the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation continues with the same approach with London as base camp. Why? Because, even though she lives in Venice, Fiorucci proclaims, ‘I feel more of a London-minded person.’ Contradiction as confirmation: for patrons, London remains a global hub. Not to mention a great place for a dinner party.

This article first appeared in Frieze Week London magazine with the title ‘Strong Foundations’.

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^{Main and thumbnail images: ‘Ellipse and Ellipsis’ at the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, 2025. Photograph: Eva Herzog}