Connecting the Dots: A Lagosian Constellation
One of the advantages of experiencing a large exhibition like ARS 11 is that viewers are often compelled to construct their own narratives about the work that they encounter.
Given the exhibition’s focus on Africa, a culturally and geographically diverse continent, there are numerous ways of analyzing work along similar ideas, places, objectives, formal strategies, and concepts. This is especially evident if we take Lagos as an example. As Nigeria’s most populous city with over 13 million people, Lagos has a reputation for being unlike any other place in the world. With its rough contours and contagious vitality, the city is characterized by its irony, its riotous colors and boisterous sounds, its skyscrapers and shantytowns, its writers and artists; it is characterized by both disorder and liberation. And as such, the practices of many artists participating in ARS 11 provide us with interesting ways of engaging the contemporary conditions of Lagos.
SENSE OF CHAOS
The Philadelphia-based artist Odili Donald Odita’s visually and conceptually layered wall painting Time Curve (2011) resonates within the context of Lagos on many levels. The work’s rhythmic repetition of horizontal and diagonal bands of color can be easily associated with the colorful visual landscape of the city.
In Odita’s wall painting we encounter a sense of chaos as the seemingly disparate system of colors and geometric shapes compete with each other in a manner not unlike the designs of West African textile patterns. Yet this sense of chaos is highly ordered and controlled, as the artist strategically selected the palette and specifically rendered the work in relation to the museum’s architectural space. The sense of “orderly chaos” that governs our engagement with Odita’s work is comparable to one’s experience of physically and mentally navigating a mega-city such as Lagos. Underlying the city’s frenetic traffic and lively neighborhoods is a highly nuanced organizational structure that, particularly from a local perspective, makes everything “work.”
We can discern a similar formal structure in Emeka Ogboh’s ongoing sound project, Lagos Soundscape (2008), wherein we hear the bustling sounds of the urban living which defines the artist’s home base. While one’s initial engagement with the sound piece in Helsinki is likely to elicit confusion, subsequently attentive experiences of the piece are bound to reveal the sounds of Lagos bus conductors’ repetitive yelling their routes, or the perpetual shouting of street vendors advertising their wares.
The work’s looping structure enables the listener to gradually make out the sounds, thereby encouraging us to imagine the environs of Lagos. Thus, while our interaction with Odita’s wall painting requires visual and physical methods of engagement, Ogboh’s soundscape demands more imaginative forms of engagement.
EVER-EVOLVING URBAN LANDSCAPE
The liveliness of Lagos is metaphorically present in Abraham Oghobase’sEcstatics Series (2008). In this photographic project, the artist highlights the constant flux of the city’s urban spaces by depicting himself frozen in motion. In these works, Oghobase hovers in midair above buses and cars - objects which themselves are manifestations of mobility - as a way of questioning and complicating one’s relationship to a particular place. The artist thus appears to physically withdraw from the congested spaces of Lagos while still referencing them.
Oghobase’s interaction with his homeland connects with the work of the Antwerp-based artist Otobong Nkanga. In her Alterscape Stories Series (2006) we encounter the uprooting of architectural elements, the flows of toxic waste and the presence of modern architecture. These gestures can be likened to the radical transformations occurring in urban cities such as Lagos. Given the city’s everevolving landscape, it is common to witness the rapid displacement of informal housing settlements, the emergence of skyscrapers and the construction of new roads
In a world where displacement often inspires migration, one’s memory becomes a vital link between the past and the present. It is this idea, among others, that informs Nkanga’s large-scale textile drawing Fragilologist’s Predicament (2010), a work that weaves a complex fabric of relations, which symbolically references the precariousness of ideas and the fragility of everyday life.
That all of these artists were born in Nigeria is not an attempt to delimit our understanding of their work to a specific geographic space, but rather to highlight and connect the diversity of artistic methods conditioning their work.
Their strategies of social exchange, geopolitical critique and interactivity animate our understanding of, and engagement with, the contemporary conditions in Lagos, Nigeria, Africa and the world over. As such, their work and that many other artists in the show, exemplify the penetrating strategies and the conceptual character of today’s contemporary art practices.
Antawan I. Byrd
Writer is currently a Curatorial Assistant at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos. He also participated in putting together the section of J.D. ´Okhai Ojeikere’s Moments of Beauty in the ARS 11exhibition.
