Yinka Shonibare, curator of this year's Deloitte Ignite weekend at the Royal Opera House, is an artist who works with provocative, deliberately anachronistic juxtapositions. His Diary of a Victorian Dandy inserts an African man (himself) into dramatic, Hogarthian tableaux. He reimagines English period costumes using brightly coloured "Dutch wax" fabrics, and his Trafalgar Square plinth commission applied a similar idea to the sails of Nelson's Ship in a Bottle.

So his Africa Weekend threw together several art forms and genres with disruptive glee. There were free showings, on a crisp digital screen, of African films in the piazza by the Opera House. Rotimi Fani-Kayode's large-format photographic prints, dense and melodramatic, were displayed throughout the building. The programme also included a club night by DJ Edu and a performance of Tunde Jegede's African Messiah.

However, the event's most impressive and resonant mix of sound, vision and concept was Instrumentos, an exhibition/performance in the beautiful Paul Hamlyn Hall by Angola-born inventor and musician Victor Gama. Each instrument is a beautiful object; each implies a different audio-visual journey that's both ethnic and high tech.

In performance, Gama's meditative solo pieces for the metallic acrux evoked both the Balinese gamelan and Cage's prepared piano, while his studies for the gleaming toha had the sophisticated simplicity of Howard Skempton or Ludovico Einaudi. The toha (or "totem harp") is a gleaming, polished instrument of wood and carbon fibre with myriad strings stretched along a central pole over a shiny resonator. It's like a circular harp, or a steampunk kora – another echo, in this high-arched venue, of Shonibare's alternative Victorian fantasies. Gama was joined by classical harp player Salome Pais Matos (Portugal) and Kula Monteiro (Cape Verde) for some duos and trios.

The weekend began with Nigerian drummer Tony Allen and the Niaja Centric Orchestra, including an expert four-person horn section and three singers. "I'm Afrobeat's preacher," claimed Allen. "I don't play rock, I don't play funk, I play Afrobeat."

Damon Albarn perched quietly behind Allen's kit clutching a red-and-black melodica until strolling out to relate a long anecdote about first working with Allen. Albarn then sang a couple of songs: Poison and Every Season – Allen can put Afrobeat behind anything. Martina Topley Bird also appeared to sing two of her quirky songs, and the night ended with rousing versions of Eparapo and Ise Nla.

Africa Weekend was as fascinating and awkward as Shonibare's own work, Globe Head Ballerina, endlessly rotating in a transparent bubble on a wall of the Opera House.