This publication serves as an independent discursive companion to a transatlantic curatorial project that occurred in Nigeria and the United States—a project involving a site-responsive pavilion, exhibitions, performances, and symposia. Featuring newly commissioned essays, interviews, and reprints, the book includes contributions from leading and emerging theorists, writers, and artists primarily from the African continent and its global diasporas. Oriented toward a refashioned horizon of pan-African liberation suited for the twenty-first century, the publication seeks to model alternative political grammars, technological conditions, cosmological frontiers, aesthetic practices, and forms of life that exceed the statist and colonial-capitalist world order. The publication’s contents respond in critical and poetic, historical and futural, and material and metaphysical terms to a series of urgent themes informing the global present. Incorporating visual documentation of artworks from the exhibitions’ locations, Traces of Ecstasy provides an Afri-indigenous, Afri-queer, and Afri-technological lens to challenge and reimagine dominant discourses on and visions of planetary futures.

KJ Abudu is a curator, writer, and scholar-critic based between New York, London, and Lagos. Informed by anticolonial, postcolonial, and decolonial critique, African philosophy, and Black radical thought, his writings and exhibitions focus on critical art and discursive practices that respond to the world-historical conditions produced by racial/colonial capitalist modernity. Abudu recently curated Traces of Ecstasy at the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, 2024. Abudu is currently an associate curator at Swiss Institute, New York, where he oversees public programs and has curated exhibitions including Nolan Oswald Dennis: overturns (for which he convened the Black Earth Study Club) (2025); Deborah-Joyce Holman: Close-Up (2025); Kobby Adi: Cloisters & Instruments (2024), and Tiran Willemse: Dweller (2026). Other exhibitions include Clocking Out: Time Beyond Management, Artists Space and e-flux Screening Room, New York, 2023; and Living with Ghosts, Pace Gallery, London, and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, 2022. Abudu is the editor of Living with Ghosts: A Reader (Pace Publishing, 2022). His writings have been featured in e-flux, Frieze, Mousse, and numerous other art publications and museum catalogs. Abudu holds an MA in modern and contemporary art: critical and curatorial studies from Columbia University and a BA in philosophy and political science from Duke University. He was also a 2022–23 Helena Rubinstein curatorial fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.