CCALagos Newsletter IssueNo.8 January April2010

Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA,Lagos) is an independent non-profit making visual art organisation set up in December 2007 to provide a platform for the development, presentation, and discussion of contemporary visual art and culture. It seeks to create new audiences and to prioritise media such as photography, animation, film and video, and performance art which have been under-repre-sented in Nigeria. CCA,Lagos supports the intellectual and critical development of different art and culture practitioners through talks, seminars, workshops and exhibitions. In addition it encourages and promotes the professionalisation of production and curatorship in Nigeria and West Africa collaborating with artists, curators, writers, theorists and national and international organisations.

Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos9 McEwen Street, Sabo, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria.T:+234 702 836 7106E: [email protected]: www.ccalagos.org

Editors: Bisi Silva & Antawan I. Byrd / Contributing Editors: Jude Anogwih and Oyinda Fakeye / Contributors: Ben Enwonwu (1917 – 1994) - Jacob Fabricius - Jens Haaning - Hansi Loren Momodou - Kenneth Montague - Gabi Ngcobo - Gozi Ochonogo - Abraham Oghobase - Sylvester Ogbechie - Richardson Ovbiebo - Petra Szilagyi.Design: Fabrice Lecouffe - witgraphicdesign.blogspot.com / Cover Image: Paul Sika. (Untitled #1) GloGlo Gospel series, 2007 - Courtesy the Artist.Edition: 2000 / Dedicated to the memory of Charles Onwordi and Lamide Fakeye.

CCA,Lagos is published three times a year by Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos - 9 McEwen Street, Sabo, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria / © Centre for Contemporary Art, LagosPlease direct comments and inquires to [email protected] or call +234 0702 2836 7106

Board of Trustees: El Anatsui - Joke Jacobs - Valerie Edozien-NwogbeKehinde Oyeleke - Bisi Silva, Director.

Newsletter [ ]N°8 January–April 2010

CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 1

Become a friend!Become a Supporter! Become a part of our world!

> International Art Photography Residency Programme

> Old News #5 and #6 > Artist Focus: Video and Sound Artist Emeka Ogboh

> On ‘The Studio Visit’ by Gabi Ngcobo > Book Review: Contemporary African Art Since 1980

> Rencontres: Reviews of the 8th Bamako Photography Biennial

> Past and Upcoming Exhibitions > “An African View of Art” by Ben Enwonwu

> City Focus: Accra, Ghana > and more…

Look Inside >

We gratefully acknowledge the support of AECID through the Spanish Embassy in Nigeria.

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CCA,Lagos starts 2010 with a spirit of reflection and optimism during a land-mark year for the African continent. Our yearlong project, under the umbrella title of On Independence and the Am-bivalence of Promise, challenges us to reflect on the past fifty years of post-colonial rule. In so doing, we attempt to chart the possibilities for the next fifty years – for a country and a continent that has experienced a myriad of up-heavals but also achieved great strides. Part of moving forward is understand-ing our culture, our history and articu-lating our aspirations. We hope to do this through the sub-theme of our pro-gramme, which will focus on Art, Fash-ion and Identity.

After a successful year long programme in 2009 – generously funded by the Prince Claus Fund and the Mondriaan

Foundation - focusing on video art which culminated in the first international vid-eo art exhibition in Nigeria, Identity: An Imagined State, in 2010 our focus turns to photography. The year kick starts with an ambitious international art photogra-phy residency programme featuring art-ists and curators from Nigeria, Europe, the Americas as well as participating artists from Cameroon and South Afri-ca, Cameroon and Mozambique. We are excited about the level of dialogue and exchange this affords us.

The first exhibition highlights the direc-tion of our interest in 2010 as we focus on Art, Fashion and Identity and the role of photography within contemporary art. In April we present the work of Turkish artist Pinar Yolacan to a Lagos audi-ence. Her stunning photographic series ‘Maria’ allows us to engage in discus-

sions concerning gender and beauty in unprecedented ways. This is followed by a group exhibition, Pret-a-PARTager, which features the work of over fifteen artists, photographers and fashion de-signers across Africa and from Germa-ny. The Nigeria art sector is slowly be-ginning to accept the blurring of artistic boundaries with collaborations increas-ing across various media, and including artists who will be showing in Nigeria for the first time.

Our international programme sees us at-tending the 3rd Johannesburg Art Fair in March for the second time. JAF allowed us to grow our network considerably last year, and we see it not only as an impor-tant platform for African artists to enter the art market, but also as a way of in-creasing the visibility for their work. This year we are being more venturesome by taking a group of exciting young artists who are at the beginning of their ca-reers. This year’s exhibition will include, among others, a selection of vividly stimulating photographic works by Paul Sika, an Ivorian artist based in Abidjan.

This year we continue to focus on in-house professional development as CCA, Lagos welcomed Petra Szilagyi for a month-long (January – February 2010) internship programme, which resulted in the artist organizing a video art workshop, staging independent and collaborative performances throughout Lagos in addition to pursuing research on contemporary art. We will also wel-come Thom Ogonga, an artist and cura-tor based at the Kuona Trust Art Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. Ogonga is part of the Skills and Knowledge Exchange pro-gramme that will align with our upcom-ing photography residency.

As you might have noticed our news-letter, which has increased by almost

200%, sports a refreshing new design in full colour thanks to support from AECID through the Spanish Embassy in Nigeria. We have also added several new sections, which reflect the gener-ous time contribution of our writers. Ad-ditions include a city-feature on the art scene in Accra, Ghana, introduction to the Canadian Kenneth Montague’s art collection, studio visit by curator Gabi Ngcobo, as well as the reprint of time-less writing by pioneering modern Nige-rian artist Ben Enwonwu. The portfolio section is a shop ‘window’ to present and introduce the work of emerging contemporary artists on the continent. It also serves to encourage the culture

of supporting contemporary art and building a much-needed local and con-tinental collector base.

CCA,Lagos is nothing without the core of its existence – the library. Throughout 2009 we continued to receive an incred-ible amount of donations from around the world adding to the ones that we purchase directly. We say a BIGGG thank you to all the organisations, art-ists, curators, and friends of CCA,Lagos – an innumerable list. We continue to look for ways to increase membership and readership. To encourage the use of the library we have slashed our joining rates by a massive sixty percent despite

zero funding from anywhere. But in the spirit of owambe we will continue to be there.

Welcome to our world.

Bisi SilvaDirector

Welcome1 Paul Sika. (Untitled #1) GloGlo Gospel series, 2007 - Courtesy the Artist.

Welcome to our first issue for the new decade. As we wish you a Happy New Year, we do it in the spirit of owambe. A few years ago Nigerians were ranked as the happiest people on earth. I can only attribute that to our fondness of, and our reputation for, attending at the end of the week the numer-ous owambes (parties) of which weddings are the biggest, most glamorous and at times the most excessive. However, owambe goes beyond just fun to also act as a metaphor for having overcome hurdles and obstacles in what is at times a challenging environment. In that regard, owambe translates as it is all there in Yoruba – the food, the drinks, the people, live bands but more than anything else it symbolises the way in which humanity can bond and endure – to being there.

ContentsNewsletter [ ]N°8

January–April 2010

•Welcome

•International Art Photography Residency Programme •Forthcoming Programmes - 3rd Johannesburg Art Fair - Pinar Yolacan

•Past Programmes •In Memoriam •Professional Development (1)

•Professional Development (2) •Artist Focus: Emeka Ogboh

•Two Re-Views

•On the Studio Visit Gabi Ngcobo •Old News #5 / Old News #6

•Portfolio@CCA,Lagos •Thinking Out Loud

•Wedge Curatorial Projects •Beyond Lagos

•City Focus: Accra

•Art, Fashion & Identity •Book Review: Contemporary African Art Since 1980 •Food For Thought: An African View of Art

•Storehouse of Infinity •The Library •CCA,Lagos announce

•Images from the Archives •18 Books We Love!

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2 CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 3

International Art Photography Resi-dency Programme

In Memoriam

Past Programmes

TRASH-ING: New Works by Kainebi Osahenye

72 Art Hours in Stockholm and a FIAC Encounter in Algiers Jude Anogwih

Professional Development (1)

3rd Johannesburg Art Fair26th–28th March 2010Sandton International Convention Hall.Visit us at Booth No 16

ForthcomingProgrammes

In 2010 the focus will be on Art Photog-raphy. In Nigeria, photography has been practiced for over one hundred years providing a long tradition of the medium in the country. However, practitioners, for the most part, have yet to fully ex-plore the discursiveness of the medium, moving beyond genres like studio, doc-umentary and photo-journalism. This residency program aims to emphasize the conceptual dimensions of art pho-tography, by encouraging participants to examine the status of photography within contemporary visual art practice as a point of departure. This residency allows participants from different artistic backgrounds – painting, sculpture, per-formance art, video art, sound art and photography – to expand their creative potential as they construct new possibili-ties for engaging the photo-image.

The intellectual and conceptual under-pinning of the project questions the lim-its of postcolonial critical thinking and ideas. Furthermore, it considers dreams, realities and possibilities for full inde-pendence that have engaged people and communities across languages, cul-tures and regions. The project attempts to engender new methods of reflecting on the economic, cultural and socio-political concerns of the present as well as questioning one’s relationship to the larger totality. This provides a platform on which artists and cultural practitio-ners can explore new ways of engaging and articulating the conditions of our contemporaneity.

Over the course of thirty days the resi-dency will feature experienced local and international artists, critics, and curators including: Akinbode Akinbiyi (Nigeria/Germany); Miriam Backström (Sweden); Giovanni Carmini (Switzerland); Tam Fio-fori (Nigeria); Marja Helander (Finland); Jide Adeniyi Jones (Nigeria); Heta Kuch-

ka (Finland); Simon Njami (Cameroon); Senam Okudzeto (Ghana/Switzerland); Phillipe Pirotte (Belgium/Switzerland); Rosangela Renno (Brazil); Carrie Sch-neider (USA); Mats Stjernstedt (Sweden); Daniella Wennberg (Norway).

Among the participating artists are Ak-ingbade Adeyinka, Jelili Atiku, Lucy Azubuike, Ndidi Dike, Chidinma Nno-rom, Iria Ojeikere, Richardson Ovbiebo, Folarin Shasanya, Uche Okpa-Iroha, and William West from Nigeria; and their counterparts Landry Mbassi (Cameroon) and Sabelo Mlangeni (South Africa).

Project conceived and developed for the Centre for Contemporary Art,Lagos by Aura Seikkula, Independent Cura-tor, Helsinki, Bisi Silva, Director/Cura-tor, CCA,Lagos. Project Co-ordinated by Antawan I. Byrd, 2009-10 US Fulbright Fellow/Curatorial Assistant, CCA,Lagos.

CCA,Lagos gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Nordic Culture Point, the Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, and AECID through the Embassy of Spain in Nigeria. Further support from El Anatsui’s Afrika Studio, Nsukka, Kelechi Amadi-Obi Studio, Lagos, the Public Af-fairs Section of the US Consulate Gener-al in Lagos, the Ministry of Culture, Bra-zil, ProHelvetia, Office for Contemporary Art Norway, the Kunsthalle Bern and the Swedish Institute. In partnership with PictureWorksExtra, Nigeria and Frame-shopExtra, Nigeria.

For further information please contact:Antawan Byrd [email protected] +234 702 836 7106

The acclaimed Nigerian artist and pre-eminent wood sculptor, Lamidi Olonade Fakeye, passed away in Ile-Ife on Christ-mas. He has since been buried. I am be-sieged by death and have sat the past five days thinking about his passing, in this season of great losses, of friends, mentors and colleagues who have passed into the great beyond. There is no doubt Fakeye’s fame will survive his death and only grow, but his passing leaves a great hole in our universe of eminent artists. He was known at home and abroad, and his fame rested on solid personal achievements: his skill

in wood sculpture as one of the bearers of the 3000-year old Yoruba tradition of ONA, or great art (hence his name Olon-ade --the master artist is among us), which is revered among the Yoruba and their neighbors as evidence of divine blessing. Lamidi Fakeye was blessed and he shared his blessing selflessly with everyone he came into contact with. His works were full of grace and power, and astonished everyone by the supreme skill of the artist. I lament his passing, for we have not had time to do justice to his immense contributions to global contemporary art of his lifetime. And these are immense.

Olonade apoginifun, orun re o!T’o ba d’ohun, ma j’ekolo

Oun ti won ba nje n’ibe ni k’o ba won je!

May his soul rest in peace.First published on Dec. 31, 2009 by Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, on the blog Aachronym (http://aachronym.blogspot.com/2009/12/in-memoriam-lamidi-olonade-fakeye.html).

It is with a deep sense of sadness and loss that I read the news of the passing away of Charles Onwordi. I remember the first time I met Charles, at Yabatech, he was handing out some leaftlets for an exhibition he was taking part in. It had a name which i can’t recall now. I think something like the New Revolutionaries. I asked what was revolutionary about the painting they were doing and why is he using names and words without con-text. He looked at me - I think in a bit of horror, thinking what is this woman talk-ing about and who the hell is she? I went to the exhibition and didn’t see anything revolutionary and said so.

I don’t know how we became friends but I did find out that he was also a graphic designer and that is how our working relationship and friendship began. This was some months before CCA,Lagos opened and I asked him to design the leaflet for the exhibition of Finnish pho-tography I was curating for Bamako Photography Biennale in 2007 and our first newsletter. Even though our design styles were seemed completely oppo-site, he was committed, diligent, patient and a considerate worker with a pas-sion to learn and explore ideas. Even though I was his client, we had more of

a mentorship relationship as I and my colleagues - notably Hansi and Antawan - who worked closely with him sat with him throughout all the design for the CCA,Lagos newsletter. I was a tough mentor and did my utmost to push him in his design and in his business. And he rose to the challenge. One only has to look at the first design of the newslet-ter and the final one he did for us.

Over the past 2 years and 6-7 editions of the CCA,Lagos newsletter, Charles has designed all of them sometimes at very very short notice. In that respect he showed 110% commitment to our absurdly short time delays. He also de-signed flyers and invitations and was al-ways there for CCA,Lagos whenever we needed any help.

Charles was a caring human being. I remember once he called me at 10pm as he was worried about CCA,Lagos’s longterm survival. I have rarely encoun-tered such acts of kindness and consid-eration. At other times he will call with business strategy I should think about. Sometimes it seemed he worried more about CCA,Lagos than I did. We also used to talk about his business and how he can develop and grow it and about marketing strategies he can em-ploy. Charles formed part of the inner workings of CCA,Lagos. We will not be who we are and where we are without his generosity of time, his patience, his concern, his care, his understanding. I am saddened by his loss, but I am more angry with a country that refuses to pro-vide the necessary healthcare for those who need it. Charles should not have died and in any other country he would not have died. But we know his pres-ence on this earth was not in vain.

May his gentle soul rest in perfect peace. May God grant his family the strength to persevere. Amen.

Kainebi Osahenye’s recent solo exhibi-tion at CCA, “Trash-ing,” sparked a great deal of dialogue about the status of painting in contemporary Nigerian art. The exhibition, which was on view from September 9 – October 10, 2009, man-aged to disturb the uneasily calm and conservative waters of the Nigerian art scene, prompting viewers to re-consider not only the aesthetic merit of the detri-tus in their environments, but also the viability of appropriating such material as a form of political and socio-economic critique.

Osahenye’s exhibition was composed of six large-scale works, ranging from the subtle and poetic series of black paint-ings on newspaper, Blackout, 2009, to more overwhelming installations like Causalities, 2009 an evocative array of hundreds of soda cans which hung verti-cally from the ceiling and gave way to tex-tured heaps reminiscent of bodies. The exhibition was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, wherein Professor

Sylvester Ogbechie, UC, Santa Barbara and Professor Frank Ugiomoh, University of Port Harcourt contributed insightful es-says that elaborate critically Osahenye’s practice. Also supplementing the exhibi-tion was a dynamic “artist’s talk” session that afforded viewers an opportunity to engage with the artist.

Identity: An Imagined StateThe final part of the yearlong video art focus, which included two workshops – OneMinute and Linha Imaginaria culmi-nated in the first international video art exhibition in Nigeria, Identity: An Imagined State. It was also the first curatorial proj-ect by Jude Anogwih and Oyinda Fakeye – with the help of Hansi Momodu (Former Arts Project Co-ordinator). Taking identity as the point of departure with a focus on how it is constructed, the exhibition high-lighted sub-themes that ranged from mo-bility, uncertainty, struggle to belonging.

The final selection of artists was the re-sult of an open call and invitation process that resulted in the presentation of twelve video works by emerging artists such as Emeka Ogboh, Uchay Chima Joel and Lucy Azubuike to more established in-ternational artists such as Berni Searle, Grace Ndiritu and Bouchra Khalili.

The exhibition was well received and widely attended with audiences from French expatriate groups, to secondary schools. The substantial feedback re-ceived was positive as was the interest from educational and media organiza-tions over the course of the exhibition. As part of CCA,Lagos’ ongoing collabora-tion with P.A.G.E.S organized by Aderemi Adegbite, part of the public programme included readings and discussions with two Nigerian writers Jumoke Verissimo and Teju Cole that expanded on the exhi-bition’s theme.

Art-iculate

The yearlong lecture series, which brought renowned art professionals such as Prof. Yacouba Konate of University of Abidjan, Monna Mokoena of Momo Gallery, Johannesburg, Solange Farkas of Museum of Contemporary Art, Bahia ended with a befitting guest speaker Sha-hidul Alam of Drik Photo Agency, Dhaka. His talk highlighted the need to under-stand and use photography as a power-

ful tool for self-representation and com-munication. He emphasised the urgent need for the ‘majority-world,’ who come from the global south to take ownership and control of images of themselves. He went on to outline the humble birth and steady growth of Drik Photo Agency one of the largest independent photo agen-cies in South East Asia. This includes developing different educational, presen-tation and income generating sections such as the photo agency, a school and a photo biennale Chobi Mela, which have resulted in the long-term sustainability of the organisation.

The resounding standing ovation Alam received in the room packed with mainly photographers, artists and friends of CCA,Lagos struck a chord in the imagi-nation of all present. For CCA,Lagos it was a befitting second year celebration as well as an appropriate anticipation of our focus on photography in 2010. We acknowledge the support of the Prince Claus Fund in the realisation of all the Art-iculate lectures.

Old News #5 and Old News #6When artists were invited to participate in the Old News No. 6 project between June and July 2009, the recurring ques-tion most of the artists asked was ‘what is artistic in newspaper clippings?’ The artists were encouraged to think discur-sively about the material and its potential to facilitate self-expression in unexplored manners. Once the participating artists re-alized such possibilities, the contributions started pouring in. We received collections of clippings and collages, all expressing ex-plicit emotions. This included disappoint-ments, silliness, gossips and the peculiar-ity and incompetence of sociopolitical and economic structures in Nigeria.

The artists explored most Nigerian news-paper publications, providing through the Old News No. 6 project a creative portal for information gathering, sharing and exchange. The format of the exhibition enabled each participating artist to en-gage, through old news, with 31 artists in Malmö, Sweden, as their clippings were linked with the clippings of Nigerian artists according to dates and arranged chronically in a calendar-like structure. Also available to the public were previous issues of the Old News project: #1, #2, #3 and #4, offering viewers an opportu-nity to experience profoundly the many ways in which archival material can as-sume new forms of relevance.

Accompanying the Old News #6 exhibi-tion was Old News #5, a solo project by the Copenhagen-based conceptual artist, Jens Haaning. The artist offered his own take on old news by focusing ex-clusively on a feature in the sixth largest Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet. Since 1976, the daily newspaper has featured profiles of local Danish girls, known as Page 9 girls that include semi-nude pho-tographs and personal profiles. Haaning selected 33 Page 9-girls, reproduced their photographs and translated their profile text into English in order to broach the portrayal of women in the media, particularly in Denmark.

The presence of artist Jens Haaning and Jacob Fabricius, curator and director of Malmö Konsthall allowed them to pres-ent their artistic and curatorial practices before an interested audience.

When Eva Holström of the Swedish In-stitute sent me an email inviting CCA, Lagos to participate in an art showcase in Sweden, from the 16 – 19 September 2009, it occurred to me that this was another professional opportunity to rep-resent the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos in another major international project in Sweden.

The major focus of the Swedish Institute is to showcase Stockholm’s leading gal-leries and museums–both public and private art institutions–by presenting an exclusive programme of Swedish con-temporary art to international curators, critics, directors and collectors. Such an endeavour ultimately provided a unique opportunity for art professionals to gain insight into Stockholm’s diverse con-temporary art sector.

I was quite eager to experience what it is that makes Stockholm’s contemporary art scene so unique and appealing. I found the project professionally valuable and inspirational, especially the studio visits and interactions with some of the Swedish artists. It was an interesting op-portunity for me to learn advanced skills in strategic and innovative art presenta-tion, project coordination/management and what I will refer to as a ‘360° art motion’ that is, from conceptualization to actualization of art projects.

I also discovered how Swedish artists and art institutions promoted their art activities and programmes – passion-ately, and in line with global realities, experiences and issues. As we moved from one Konsthall to the other, I had the opportunity to gain a greater aware-

ness of the rich possibilities in publish-ing catalogues and exhibition materials.

On the whole, I found that Sweden’s emergence into international contempo-rary artscape is a result of her resolute sustenance and promotion of purpose-ful artistic encounters such as residen-cies, easy accessibility to grants and art-ists’ education.

I was delighted to meet and discover the work of artists like Sean Snyder, whose installation work at INDEX, the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, focused on the use of photography, video film and text, and investigates media, archi-tecture and the urban environment as representatives of economic and politi-cal structures. Among the many galler-ies we visited were Magasin 3, Moderna Museet, Stockholm Konsthall and Bon-nier Konsthall.

Sthlm! Sthlm! Sthlm! definitely lived up to the triple repetition of its name as it provided multiple opportunities for par-ticipants to network and lay the founda-tions for future collaborations and com-munication.

IICCA,Lagos was also invited to partici-pate in the First International Festival of Contemporary Art in Algeria, which was organized by the Ministry of Culture and The Museum of Modern and Contempo-rary Art, Algiers. Starting from the 17th November 2009 to 28th February 2010, the exhibition aimed to focus on many of the topical and salient issues in contem-porary art across Africa and around the world such as the environment, migra-tory influx, art markets within and out-side the continent and art in the centre of ideological conflicts.

I participated in a roundtable discus-sion among international art historians, curators, critics and artists that supple-mented the festival’s primary exhibition, which featured over thirty contemporary artists from Africa, South America, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. The exhibi-tion featured work by two Nigerian art-ists: Bright Eke and Amarachi Okafor. During the roundtable, we all shared the same task of contributing to the theo-retical discourse on both the condition of, and necessity for, contemporary art

– specifically in Algeria, but also glob-ally. Ultimately, much attention was paid to examining how contemporary forms of expression articulate critical issues that relate to humanity and the environ-ment.

My presentation during the festival was on contemporary art, the environment and the migratory influx. Titled Art Pace and Change, the paper underlined the revolution of contemporary art in Africa, specifically Lagos, the many possibilities for creative minds to share knowledge, network and discover artistic avenues that eloquently describe, interpret and present a spectrum of works that en-gage the challenges of climate, nature and impacts of global conditions in Af-rica. CCA,Lagos was also brought to fore as a major platform for presentation of art projects, exhibitions and artists such as George Osodi and Kainebi Osahenye, whose work explores issues that relate to the environment.

Pele Antawan I. Byrd

I do not think that it would be difficult to come up with a list, spanning a page or two, of particulars about Nigeria that I find to be striking for their novelty. This is considering that I came to the coun-try for the first time five months ago. On such a list, I would mention the way in which Nigerians routinely – and to me unfamiliarly – invoke the word “sorry” as an expression of sympathy. On several occasions, walking throughout Lagos, I have tripped on curbs and have fallen a few times; I have spilled beers and once, a bowl of pepper soup. In most of these instances, anyone nearby would remark “sorry” or pele, which means, among other things, sorry in Yoruba. But this is no longer that surprising. My experienc-es living here have acquainted me with the reality that Nigeria is an incredibly intimate place, everyone is someone’s uncle or aunty, ma or brother, and when I fall it is not simply my business but also

that of the nearby stranger cum relative. I mention all of this as a way of reflect-ing on my experiences as a US Fulbright fellow, a post bestowed upon me by the US State Department with the mission of fostering cross-cultural understand-ing through my studies of contemporary art here in Nigeria.

Much of my professional experiences here have been influenced profoundly by this sense of intimacy. There are no cubicles or departments at CCA; every-one helps everyone else to do every-thing necessary in fulfilling the centre’s mission of being one of Nigeria’s fore-most independent art institutions. With-in days of my arrival at CCA, I was selling exhibition catalogues and serving wine to guests at Kainebi Osahenye’s solo ex-hibition, “Trash-ing.” And before I knew it, I found myself publishing exhibitions reviews, editing a newsletter, coordinat-ing an exhibition catalogue, visiting art-ists’ studios, traveling to Bamako, Mali to see and write about a photography biennial, giving a talk on digital media art at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, meeting with Prof. El Anatsui and visit-ing his studio, organizing CCA’s upcom-ing photography residency programme and coordinating our forthcoming par-ticipation in the 3rd Johannesburg Art Fair. This is all in addition to beginning a book project of artists’ interviews and writings on the rising temperature of Ni-geria’s art climate.

While work in Nigeria can be challeng-ing, it can also be good, especially at CCA where my experiences have illuminated invaluably the virtues and benefits of collaborative thought and cross-cultural engagement. Having the opportunity to be in Lagos, to look at works of art intently, to engage with artists, and to interact with people who are intellectu-ally curious about art’s potential, has enabled me to realise first-hand the im-portance of context and how it shapes knowledge. I am reminded of this rela-tionship every time I consider the abun-dance of inaccuracies regarding Nigeria that circulates within the global imagi-nation, perhaps especially in light of the recent terrorist attempt and Nigeria’s subsequent blacklisting. Pele.

Safaa Erruas, b. 1976 reduces space to its simplest form of expression through her monochromatic wall drawings, paintings, and installations. Her beau-tiful, silent presentations are powerful artistic articulations that use seemingly everyday objects such as needles, pins, razor, thread and silk. Through their de-ceptive simplicity they invoke complex emotions such as pain, pleasure and healing as well as making reference to issues of history, tradition and gender. She studied Fine Art at the Academy of Art in Tetouan. Erruas lives and works in Tétouan, Morocco.

Kemang Wa Lehulere’s (1984) artistic practice investigates a variety of issues, such as the looming precariousness of identity and race relations in post-apart-

heid South Africa. Working across an array of media including performance, video and painting, Wa Lehulere, is a founding member of the artists collec-tive, Gugulective, which considers art’s potential to transform social spaces through public interventions. He lives and works in South Africa.

Kainebi Osaheyne, b. 1964. Osahenye’s practice fluctuates seamlessly between the metaphysical and the physical, from the unreal to the real, foregrounding is-sues related to religion and identity and expanding on others such as globalisa-tion, consumerism, man’s inhumanity and the environment, thus forming the nodal focus of much of his work. The artist’s recent work signals a departure from his well-known, large-scale, neo-

expressionist paintings towards the incorporation of more conceptual con-cerns through a format that increasingly borrows from an installation orientated process work that can be read on many levels formal, aesthetic or contextual - revealing layers of stories, visuality and materiality. Osahenye received degrees from Auchi Polytechnic in 1986 and Yaba College of Technology in 1989. Osaheyne lives and works in Lagos and Auchi, Nigeria.

Paul Sika, b. 1985 Sika’s vibrant and brilliantly lush photographs effortlessly oscillate between the realm of commer-cial photography and fine art photogra-phy. His meticulous images are carefully conceptualized and implemented to

express erudite narratives deriving from the artist’s imagination and life experi-ences. The artist explores rigorously the digital potential of photography, through post-production, in order to construct new ways of perceiving the everyday. He studied Software Engineering at the University of Westminster, London, UK. He lives and works in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire.

Lucy Azubuike 1972 uses photography and video art to explore the relation-ships between African traditional cul-ture, religion and patriarchy and their subsequent influence on the lives and experiences of women. Azubuike re-ceived a Fine Art (Graphics) degree from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She also has a postgraduate diploma in Gender Studies from the University of Abuja. She lives and works in Abuja, Nigeria.

Yinka Shonibare MBE, 1962. is per-haps best known for his appropriation of batik fabrics in sculptural tableaus, Shonibare’s artistic practice explores both the current and historical effects of race, colonialism, globalization and class on our contemporary present. The artist interrogates our ambivalent and contradictory attitudes toward these issues across diverse forms of media such as video, installation, photogra-phy, drawing and painting. Shonibare earned an MA from Goldsmiths College, London University in 1991. He lives and works in London, UK.

The fair will be taking place from March 26 – 28, 2010. Check out Portfolio@CCA on Page 7 for a selection of work to be featured at this year’s JAF.

1 Installation view of CCA’s booth at last years Joburg Art Fair.

2 Yinka Shonibare. ‘Climate Shit Drawing 1,’ 2008Four colour litho. prints with silkscreen glaze, collaged with fabrics and foils and die cut 50.4 x 34.4cm (19 3/4 x 13 1/2in). Framed: 57 x 41.3 x 3.8cm (22 1/2 x 16 1/4 x 1 1/2in)Edition of 200 + 20ApsCourtesy of the artist and the Stephen Friedman Gallery.

3 & 4 Pinar Yolacan Untitled, 2007. Courtesy of Artist.

1 Sabelo Mlangeni. Low Prices Daily, 2006. Courtesy the Artist and Michael Stevenson Gallery.

The Centre for Contemporary Art,Lagos in fulfillment of its ob-jectives, has over the past two years presented an innovative programme of exhibitions, talks, seminars, workshops and events that engage audiences both locally and internation-ally. In light of this, we are pleased to present our 2010 pro-gramme, On Independence and The Ambivalence of Prom-ise. We start this landmark year for Nigeria and the African continent with an ambitious and innovative art photography residency program that presents an opportunity for emerg-ing contemporary African artists to explore critically the ever evolving aesthetic, conceptual, and technical possibilities of art photography.

Last year CCA,Lagos was invited to the 2nd annual JoburgArtFair in South Africa. This endeavour was rewarding in offering an invaluable opportunity for networking, and increasing the visibility of contem-porary art from across the continent. Once again, CCA,Lagos continues in its objectives of bringing es-tablished and emerging artists to a South African audience. The works of Safaa Erruas and Kemang Wa-Lehulere connect through similar yet highly individual aesthetic and formal concerns that use the painterly form as the point of departure. In the work of Paul Sika and Kainebi Osahenye the everyday is foregrounded in their urban portraits whilst the theme of identity - political, historical or sexual - is brought to the fore in the works of Yinka Shonibare and Lucy Azubuike. Through their works these art-ists articulate their points of view on a myriad of issues that impact on us individually and collectively.

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Pinar Yolaçan ‘Maria’ 17th April – 29th of May 2009As part of the year long focus on Pho-tography and Art, Fashion and Identity, CCA,Lagos is pleased to present Turk-ish artist Pinar Yolacan’s critically ac-claimed series “Maria”, (2007) a stun-ning collection of 22 stunning life size portrait photographs of African-Brazilian

women emerging from stark black back-grounds. Taken over a twelve month period in Itaparica, Bahia, Yolaçan’s images are evocative of Old Master por-traits, possessing the psychological and emotional immediacy of the Romantic genre. But in this series the artist sub-verts regality by dressing her sitters in elaborate hand sewn couture costumes

with trimmings of ‘unusual’ materials such as velvet, satin, tripe, placenta and sheep’s testicles. Through this series Yolaçan engages with issues of beauty, the body, colonialism, and death as a way of broaching the “impermanence of things.”

Pinar Yolaçan was born in Ankara, Tur-

key in 1981. She attended London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Chelsea School of Art and Design, and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Cooper Union in New York City. She has participated in several international exhibitions including most recently Dress Codes, the 3rd ICP Trien-nal of Photography, International Cen-tre for Photography, New York, (2009), Tracking Traces KIASMA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, (2009) In the light of Play CCA,Lagos at Durban Art Gallery, Durban, and 2nd Johannes-burg Art Fair, South Africa (2009), Turk-ish Realities: Positions in Contemporary Photography from Turkey, Fotografie Fo-rum International Frankfurt, Germany (2008).She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Istanbul, Turkey.

Pinar Yolaçan

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1 Swedish Artist, Johan Thurfjell presenting one of his sculptural works at Gallerie Nordenhake. Photo: Jude Anogwih.

2 Antawan giving a talk at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

1 Kainebi Osahenye, Casualties, 2009. Photo: Jide Alakija.

2 Shahidul Alam giving a lecture. Photo: Iria Ojeikere.

3 Old News #6 at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria.

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Lamidi Fakeye 1928 - 2009

Charles Onwordi 1968 - 2009

4 CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 5

Professional Development (2) Artist Focus:

Emeka OgbohTwo Re-Views

On Amsterdam and Lisbon Oyinda FakeyeEach year the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam organises an annual curators’ meeting, which brings international cura-tors together with cultural producers ac-tive in Amsterdam. In October 2009, I was invited alongside Koyo Kouoh (Senegal), Didier Schaub (Cameroon), Simon Njami (France/Cameroon), Nontobeko Ntombela (South Africa) to participate in this pro-gramme. SMBA had been focusing on rep-resentations of Africa within the sphere of contemporary art, with the aim of finding alternatives to predominantly stereotypical media representations and the research project was been designed to engender critical discussion. The visit was designed to include visits to institutions and artists with a particular interest in contemporary Africa. This was supplemented by a host of public programmes, which included a seminar, a lecture and a video screening.A semi-public seminar by British cultural theorist, Kobena Mercer presented a criti-cal overview of key issues arising from the reception of international exhibitions of African art over the last decade, whilst the public lecture by Simon Njami,‘Times of Confusion’ reflected on the idea of the ‘Af-rican artist’. As a participant I was asked to give a short presentation about CCA,Lagos and some of our recent projects. Prior to my trip to Amsterdam I was asked to submit work from video artists engaging in issues around globalisation and its rela-tion to contemporary Africa. The selections resulted in the screening entitled ‘Africa Reflected on Video’. The final selection comprised of the works by Leo Asemota, Lucy Azubuike, Theo Eshetu, Salifou Lin-dou, Vincent Meessen, Marcel Odenbach, Vitshois Mwilambwe Bondo, Guy Wou-ete, Emeka Ogboh and others; they were screened in conjunction to a presentation by Vincent Meessen. The programme was curated by Koyo Kouoh (Dakar) and Didier Schaub (Doual’art) and myself; it was host-ed by the Netherlands Media Art Institute.Reflecting on the works seen during my stay in Amsterdam, it is safe to say that this is a country where video art is a medium used by many artists and that there was a large platform for it to be seen. The Africa Reflected research project was initiated by Jelle Bouwhuis and Kerstin Winking of SMBA.December saw me heading to Lisbon, Por-tugal to take part in a two-day conference designed to develop and discuss pos-sible programming objectives for Africa.cont, a cultural centre in the process of being built in the city. Africa.cont is con-ceived as a platform for the development of relationships encompassing commu-nication, cooperation and interaction be-tween Europe, African countries and their Diasporas. Over the course of the two-day conference a panel of renowned curators, artists and cultural theorists debated and discussed issues that would be pertinent to developing the new institution. The is-sues discussed were: Cultural Centres as a Place for Debates, Culture and Diplo-matic Policies, African Cultures, Modernity and Contemporaneity, Portugal as a Place for Africa.cont.The idea of what or who is an African was debated heavily, as were issues concern-ing what or whose stories should be told within the centre. The method of dialogue between Africa.Cont and similar organisa-tions on the continent were also discussed. I put forward the need for dialogue be-tween the two, which could include host-ing exhibitions that were curated in Africa instead of always in the West.The conference highlighted several work-ing methods, theories and ideas for what Africa.cont could be and in which direction it could begin to develop its programming. There was however a sense of caution in that, being the first organisation of its kind in Portugal – the expectations might be too high.

From whence cometh my interest; A curatorial journey started at CCA, Lagos Loren Hansi MomoduWhen I first came to the Centre for Con-temporary Art, Lagos in June 2008 as Project Co-ordinator, I was overwhelmed to find such a rich resource for art, culture and learning. Given my background in Literature and Cultural Studies, from the moment I stepped into CCA,Lagos I felt inspired by the scope of the library collec-tion. This was a place to spend hours delv-ing into new worlds, and engaging in the most poignant contemporary art discus-sions. I have always been interested in the

potential for art to motivate and engender positive change; CCA,Lagos gave me an opportunity to gain direct involvement in this kind of dialogue.

My passion for and my understanding of contemporary art was born during the time I spent there. Instead of looking from Eu-rope outwards with a myopic vision, I be-gan my career from outside the so-called ‘mainstream’ with a different perspective, placing me in an enviable position as an aspiring curator in the UK.

On my return to London I completed an in-ternship at October Gallery- a gallery that has consistently supported art from out-side the West. Armed with the knowledge, skills and experience gained at CCA,Lagos I took advantage of the opportunity to take my interest in curatorial practice to the next level with a scholarship at the Royal College of Art, London to pursue the MA in Curating of Contemporary Art (Inspire). This prestigious course has produced an impressive roster of internationally estab-lished curators. I am happy to be part of the first intake for the Inspire scholarship of placement based students.

In this class, Nigeria is possibly the most well represented as three out of the thir-teen students (myself included) are of Ni-gerian heritage- a very positive precedent for contemporary art in Nigeria, which will inevitably go some way to raise the aware-ness and appreciation of visual art not only from within the country but also from across the continent.The two-year post graduate course re-quires me to work as a Curatorial Assistant at the Turner Contemporary, an art orga-nization in Margate, and attend regular study blocks at the RCA in London, provid-ing me with both the practical and theo-retical knowledge that will undoubtedly prepare me as a curator of contemporary art. The unique experiences I had while at CCA,Lagos, not to mention the diverse range of artists, creators and cultural pro-ducers I met, has been influential in lead-ing me to the further study of contempo-rary art- and I am certain that it will lead me back at CCA,Lagos in the near future to share that learning.

Visual Art Internship at CCA,Lagos Petra SzilagyiPetra Szilagyi is currently majoring in stu-dio art and will complete her BA degree in June 2010 at Williams College in Massa-chusetts, US. In January 2010, she will be undergoing an internship at the CCA,Lagos organizing and facilitating the third video art workshop. Petra will focus on her own art practice by exploring the city of Lagos and collaborating with local artists like Jeli-li Atiku. She says, “I’m really excited about engaging with local artists to explore the possibilities of video art, sharing ideas and hashing out concepts.” She chose to work in Lagos at the CCA in order to take advan-tage of the city’s cultural heritage and its international reputation as a mega city. “I’m interested in understanding how local artists interact within their socio-political environment, and how such engagement influences their own art-making.”Szilagyi began exploring video art three years ago as a second-year undergradu-ate at Williams, and has concentrated on the medium ever since. Originally from Los Angeles, she was brought up in an atmo-sphere of self monitoring and performa-tivity. Being so close to the film industry and a city of aspiring actors, she has al-ways been fascinated by video-recording, namely the choice to perform and record the self as ‘oneself’ or as someone else. She often acts as the subject in her own films which are concerned with performed identity and the influence of environment and institutions on the construction of self. She is also a painter, illustrator and instal-lation artist.

EO: I have to admit I do get this loner feeling now and then, but I’ve never felt completely isolated because I’m still able to discuss my work with a couple of Nigerian artists who are thinking in the direction of new media, for example Jude Anogwih. My first sound installation was actuallya collaboration with painter Bob Aiwerioba. He painted from the field recordings I made. I do frequently get in touch with Nigerian professionals who work with sound, but in the music indus-try. I connect with them for sound produc-tion tips and collaborative ideas.

The Internet has connected me with some international new media artists who work with sound. This connection has helped me deal with this isolation and I’ve had the opportunity to collabo-rate with some of these artists. Viennese artist Harald Scherz and the Macedonian

artists Dimitar Dödövşki and Aleksandar Grozdanovski were part of my ‘This is La-gos’ Exhibition.

Through the internet I joined some online sound forums like the World Listening project and the Locus Sonus where I got acquainted with sound artists like Eric Leonardson and Jerome Joy. I really ad-mire their works and their commitment to sound projects. Eric Leonardson gave me a list of books to start up with and I’ve invested quite a sum in getting some of these books. I started off with Audio-Vision by Michel Chion, On Sonic Art by Trevor Wishart, and Sound Design by David Sonnenschein. Last October, I took time out to go to Vienna for a studio visit, where I spent time with my mentor Har-ald Scherz at the Nucleo studio. This visit ended with the media monster sound project which is currently in the works.

EO: Attending the 2009 CCA Video Work-shops was one of the best things that happened to my art career. I had the op-portunity to work with professionals in the field of video art like Miguel Petchkovsky, Goddy Leye, Eustaquio Neves and the One Minute Foundation team, and Selby Gildemacher and Heerko van der kooij.

My first OneMinutes video, after the workshop, ended up being exhibited with the OneMinutes train at the Venice Bien-nale 2009. This motivated me to experi-ment more in this field and explore ways of combining it with my sound works. I’m currently shooting and building up my vid-eo archives. I’m also working on the idea of making an unscripted short film on La-gos…sort of like a Lagos video blog.

EO: In February 2008 I attended the media class at the Fayoum international winter academy in Egypt. The focus of this class, which was facilitated by the Vi-ennese new media artist Harald Scherz, was on sound and video. On my return to Lagos, I started experimenting with sound, recording and listening to the mega city’s acoustic ecology and trying to understand its composition.

This experimentation led to the Lagos soundscapes project (www.lagossound-scape.com), which is an ongoing mul-timedia (sound, web and digital maps) project that explores acoustically Lagos as a mega city. The project involves re-

cording and collecting sounds that make up the different aspects that character-ise the city of Lagos and I incorporate these field recordings into my sound in-stallations and sound art pieces. A sig-nificant aspect of this project involves observing the effects of the ongoing in-frastructural developments on the Lagos soundscape.

Currently, I’m working towards setting up a live microphone feed in various parts of Lagos and streaming the emergent sounds of the city live online 24/7. This plan has been in motion for a while, but is being delayed by the lack of funding. But hopefully we’ll pull it off soon.

EO: I exhibited the Lagos soundscapes for the first time at the African Artists’ Foundation in February 2009, and then at the Coningsby Gallery London in Feb-ruary and April 2009. The shows were titled ‘This is Lagos’ and my work con-sisted of speakers and earphone instal-

lations. I have to admit it was pretty tough trying to sell the idea of sound as an art form to the local audience in Nigeria. A lot of people are still sceptical about new media art, nonetheless they seem to ac-cept it as something fresh and innovative in the local art scene.

EO: The 2007 AMALA was the inaugu-ral workshop of media art organized by Magdy Moussa, an Egyptian multi-media artist. It had about twenty international and Egyptian artists attending. It was a major eye opener as I spent three weeks with a community of different artists, discussing our works and art practices which ranged from video, sound, instal-

lation and photography. It afforded me the opportunity to interact, learn and network with these artists. It has proved a valuable network and I have had the opportunity of collaborating on some projects with some of the artists. Cultur-ally speaking, AMALA was also a unique experience.

EO: Well, lacking in confidence is not exactly the word. A more apt way to put it would be that the Nigerian art scene in the early 2000s had no accommoda-tion for the sort of work I was invested in. Back then I was creating digital il-lustrations and motion graphics. There was no platform in Nigeria back then to exhibit or discuss these and other ‘new

media’ artworks. However, I had set up a website www.artistswithattitude.com, now defunct, with a very close friend and collaborator, mainly to present works of other artists who shared a similar posi-tion and who were working against the grain of the convention in Nigeria at that point. By convention I mean conventional art practices of painting and sculpture.

Emeka Ogboh: Being a graphic designer has always been interesting but I was left with this void. I didn’t feel fulfilled as an artist, since my works were dictated by the advertising industry. I have always created works of art but was never confi-dent enough to show it. In October 2007 I

applied for and got accepted to take part in the Alexandria Media Arts and Lights workshop (AMALA). Attending the work-shop not only boosted my confidence but connected me to an area of art where my heart lies: New media art.

BS: Apart from the soundscapes what are the other themes you are exploring or will be exploring in your work?

EO: For now I’m still on the soundscapes, it’s a vast theme! But I’m considering exploring the dynamics of public spaces and I’m 100% open to collaborative ideas and projects.

BS: I don’t know other artists working in sound in Lagos or even the rest of Nigeria, which means you must feel artistically/professional isolated?

BS: In 2009 you took your work a step further by taking part in the video workshops at CCA,Lagos. How has that impacted on your work and its future direction?

BS: Have you had an opportunity to exhibit your Lagos soundscapes? If so what has been the response of the local art community?

BS: One of your first major works is the soundscapes of Lagos. Can you talk about it? What led you to develop the work?

BS: What was the experience of attending AMALA?

BS: Why did you not feel confident enough to show your early art work?

Bisi Silva: You studied Graphic design? When and how did you venture into the visual arts?

This biennial is a platform to get respons-es to one’s work and also to meet with curators and most importantly to share experiences with fellow colleagues. This often results in long conversations about the challenges artists from Africa face in terms of how the general public responds to our art, not accepting it the way it is in Europe, which leaves us in a very precarious position. There’s always a constant struggle for artists trying to create opportunities and awareness for Africans to see, buy and understand our work, in the hope that it will t affect policy makers and also add economic value.

The process of getting to Mali was quite complicated – getting my flights sorted out as well as connecting from Lagos to Abidjan to Ouagadougou and finally to Bamako. It’s sad that there are no direct flights between Nigeria and Mali, while travelers from France or coming from Eu-rope have that privilege – a reflection of borders within my continent, What really is the concept of ECOWAS?

The Bamako Encounters opened on November 7th at the Musee National du Mali with the pan-African exhibition, ‘Borders’, where my series, Lost in Tran-sit, was exhibited in a multimedia format. It was an overwhelming experience for me engaging with artists working both in Africa and the Diaspora, in terms of how they practice and what we share. I figured that as Africans we need to tell our stories but we lack the ability to tell them in more conceptual ways - beyond, for example, the documentary genre.

The biennial offered an opportunity to relax, but also to reflect on what we’re doing in our practice – with exhibition openings, roundtables, workshops and portfolio reviews being held across the city in venues such as the Musee du Dis-trict and the Palais de la Culture. The Brit-ish photographer Martin Parr gave quite an interesting presentation, which took us through his evolution as a photogra-pher by reflecting on the unique ways in which he approaches his subject matter.

The Bla Bla Bar in Bamako, a trendy hangout spot, was a biennial favourite that offered opportunities for artists to end each day discussing their experi-ences over rounds of Castel beer. I re-member a particularly stimulating con-versation with Cameroonian artist Bili Bidjocka - who lives between Paris and Brussels - wherein he mentioned his im-pressions of the works that were exhibit-ed at the biennial and his preference for those artists that were pushing boundar-ies and experimenting with their forms of expression and presentation.

The language barrier for me, as an Anglophone participant, was another ‘border’ I faced. As much as we tried, conversations with French-speaking photographers and curators were quite limited, save for the few opportunities featuring a bi-lingual translator to bridge the gap. Communicating with taxi drivers (many of whom were native Bambara speakers and had even a limited knowl-edge of French) was also a challenge, given the language differences but also the fact that many didn’t even seem to know how to get us to the hotels and other event venues of the biennial.

There was a strong Nigerian presence in Bamako, with five Nigerian artists show-ing in the festival; it was very exciting for us to see a friend and fellow photog-rapher, Uche Okpa Iroha, winning the Grand Prix Seydou Keita – the biennial’s main prize.

Ultimately it was a great experience be-ing back in Bamako. I look forward to seeing how my work and that of my peers evolves as a result of the 8th Encounters and the week-long personal ‘encounters’ we had on many different levels.

Abraham Oghobase is a Lagos-based artist.

This article was first published in 234Next on December 7, 2009. It is re-printed here with the permission of its author.

This year’s biennale attempts to cross its own curatorial and organisational border. Curated by Cameroonian Simon Njami for the last four editions, the quiet Malian city is fast becoming what many people consider to be a strong contend-er as the image capital of Africa. The newly appointed artistic directors Mich-ket Krifa and Laura Serani are charged with leading the biennale towards a ‘bold’ new future. Taking ‘Borders’ as their curatorial framework Krifa and Se-rani open wide the discursive and aes-thetic interpretations through the works of 40 photographers and 13 video art-ists. The presentations range from the slick large-scale fine art photographs of international artists including Zineb Sedira’s Shipwreck (2008) an picto-rial elegy to a cemetery of ships in the desert city of Nouadhibou, Kader Attia’s Square Rock,(2009) an architectural articulation of space and time about the place Algerian youths go to dream about a better life across the water, to emerging artist Mohamed Bourouissa’s Periphery (2006) of staged images of power dynamics and tension among youths in Parisian suburbs.

Documentary style photography domi-nates the pan-African exhibition in which issues of displacement, migration, per-secution, personal and collective alien-ation and trauma feature overwhelm-ingly. These narratives include Jodi Bieber’s Going home,(2001) Mohamed

Camara’s Malians in Paris, Armel Lou-zala Broken Houses,(2008) Lebohang Mashiloane Somali Refugees, and Bau-douin Mouanda’s The Aftermath of the 1997 War, (2008). Whilst these are worthy stories the pervading similitudes in style and content becomes some-what monotonous. However, respite is to be found in personal reflections such as Abraham Oghobase’s Lost in Transit (2008) and Berry Bickle’s video, On the Wire (2009) as well as Raison Naidoo’s video The £5 pickled money order re-ceipt (2009) which provides one of the few insights into the historical underpin-ning of migration of indentured Indians to South Africa. The few conceptual en-gagements with the theme and the me-dium include Alistair Whitton’s Patmos and the War at sea (2009) presented as a series of diptychs using Braille and images to make us question ways of seeing, whilst Saidou Dicko‘s World Mosaic (2005-2009) is an utopian call for world unity consisting of 600 3in x 4in images.

Other works that rupture the sense of uniformity include Zanele Muholi’s Ms D’Vine (2007) and Andrew Esiebo’s video Living Queer in Africa, (2008) which highlight the societal taboos that impinge on one’s sexuality identity. This thread of threatening cultural taboos is continued in the portraits of Albinos by Seydou Camara in Bibianae (2009), Alain Turpault’s black and white images

Albinos, (2007) shown at the French Cultural Centre and the Nalik Nejmi’s Twins Series (2009) documenting a home in Madagascar for twin babies abandoned from birth which captures the melancholy of innocent victims of cultural superstitions.

The failings of ‘Borders’ is counterbal-anced by the tightly curated mono-graphic and small thematic group ex-hibitions in various venues across the city. Of note is the venerable Malick Sidibe’s New York fashion photogra-phy commission (2009) featuring local Malians modelling in his studio clothes designed by leading western designers such as Christian Lacroix, Prada and Marc Jacobs and thework of emerg-ing photographer Baudouin Mouanda whose ongoing series Sape, A Congo-lese Chronicle (2008) portrays the way in which African Dandies use fashion to express another way of being. Both artists works are seamlessly integrated within the magnificient permanent dis-play of the textile section at the National Museum.

The monographic exhibitions at the Mu-see de Bamako include Fazal Sheikh’s award winning series A Sense of Com-mon Ground (1992) that documents the Sudanese refugee camp in Kenya is a tour de force of humanity and in-humanity that left many viewers emo-tionally affected and even distraught. The excellent archival photography of J.K Bruce Vanderpuije from his Deo Gratias studio set up in the 20s in Ac-cra presents a fascinating portrayal of Ghanaian aristocracy at ease with their modernity providing an appropriate, al-ternative representation of Africans in the first half of the 20th century images to the habitual exotic images or ones of a continent in states of perennial crisis.

The 8th Encounters is a welcome first at-tempt by the curatorial duo through the diversity of the exhibitions, projects and public programmes s on offer. Whilst the biennale continues to show a lack of commitment and interest in provid-ing a platform for critical debate crucial to the development of a theoretical dis-course on photography it nonetheless opens up different paths leading to a journey of discoveries.

1 The photographers and writer were Amaize Ojeikere, Emeka Okereke, Ray Daniels Okeugo, Lucy Azubuike, Nike Ojeikere, Uche James Iroha, Chriss Aghana Nwobu, Unoma Giese, Charles Okereke, Uche Okpa-Iroha.

1 Museum’s Mayan-inspired, Jean-Loup Pivin–designed building. Photo by Padma Ugbabe.

2 S.DICKO (Burkina Faso), Le voleur d’ombres, 2005-09, exposition panafricaine© Saïdou Dicko.

3 F.SHEIKH, Abdia Abdi Khalil with her son Hameed, Somali refugee camp, Mandera, Kenya, 1993©Fazal Sheikh.

At Home in BamakoAbraham Oghobase

8th Encounters of Bamako, African Photography BiennaleBisi Silva

I felt like I was home with this years 8th edition of the Bamako Encounters African Photography Biennial, which took up the theme of “Borders” as its focal point. I participated in the 2005 edition, a new experience that enabled me, as a pho-tographer, to interact with other artists from different parts of the world. Being back in this year, I have come to realize that not much has changed in West African, Francophone country of Mali.

As part of the 8th Encounters of Bamako, African Photogra-phy Biennale, (7th Nov- 7th Dec 2009) photographer Emeka Okereke initiated the Lagos-Bamako project. With 9 Nigerian photographers and writers1, the group embarked by road across the borders of Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Burkina Faso and into Mali. The extent of superfluous barriers en-countered -official, economic, linguistic and cultural - makes the ambitions of West African integration by supra-regional body ECOWAS almost delusional. The group’s contribution Invisible Borders presented as a slide and audio show aptly embodies the biennale’s thematic premise.

Emeka Ogboh (1977) He lives and works in Lagos.Emeka Ogboh joins an increasing number of visual artists in Nigeria confi-dently exploring and employing the use of technology in their work. Whilst the ‘old’ medium of photography has a long tradition in the country, few artists consider digital or mobile technology a valid tool for artistic experi-mentation. Ogboh uses ‘new’ media technology in his work as a way of analyzing the structures of cities in developing countries. Taking cities, es-pecially those in societies in transition as his point of departure, Ogboh fo-cuses/highlights them as a construct whose fabric is defined by its acous-tic character. By fusing art and technology in his new media interventions, he provides a critical insight on the pulse of a city temporally and spatially. The architectonic of Lagos as a mega city, for example, opens up a mul-titude of discursive possibilities including cultural narcissism, harmony, destabilization, chaos, uniformity, homogeneity and heterogeneity.

Emeka Ogboh received his B.A in Graphic Arts from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 2001. He has participated in exhibitions and media workshops both in Nigeria and internationally. Ogboh’s work was recently featured in the One Minutes Train video exhibition at the 2009 Venice Bi-ennale as well as Identity:An Imagined State at CCA,Lagos 2009. He also participated in the group exhibition, This is Lagos, at the African Artists Foundation, Lagos and the Coningsby Gallery, 2009 London. Ogboh par-ticipated in the video art workshops Linha Imaginaria, CCA,Lagos, 2009; the One Minutes Foundation video workshop, CCA,Lagos, 2008; and the Doualart video art workshop, Douala, Cameroon, 2009.

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Portfolio@CCA,Lagos

CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 7

Prior to arriving in New York, I worked as curator for seven years in South Africa. During this period, I visited artists’ stu-dios often. Not to mention the fact that I myself once worked out of a studio as a practicing artist. But the studio method of working only recently caught on in South Africa, with many artists still having no option but to work out of their homes. It is not uncommon for artists to work out in the streets either. This sense of informality differs radically from the estab-lished, systematic method that defines the practice of studio visits in places like New York City. And yet, despite this, some of my most memorable studio visits are precisely those that are of an informal nature.

1 Old News #5, A solo presentation by Jens Haaning.

2 Old News #6 at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Copenhagen, Denmark.

3 Old News #6 at the Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden

4 Old News #6.

5 Old News #6 at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria.

Old News #6 shows the choices and voices of 31 Lagos re-lated artists and 31 Malmö related artists, and how they ex-perience the news during the month of august 2009.The selected articles in Old News #6 have been displayed and distributed as free newspapers the last few months at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning, Copenha-gen, Denmark, Centre for Contemporary

Art, Lagos, Nigeria and Malmö Konsthall, Malmö, Sweden. Here is how Old News #6 was in the three exhibition spaces:Old News updatewww.orldnewsnews.org

Old News #6 Jacob Fabricius

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On the Studio Visit Gabi Ngcobo

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In South Africa, if the street can be a studio, than the dinner party offers the most elaborate studio visit imaginable. The artist Berni Searle has perfected the art of the dinner party/studio visit, so much that I have learned more about her work whilst eating her curries and her famous rotis, than I probably have through any other avenue. About to For-get, 2005 a three-screen projection of a poetically rendered reflection of a frac-tured narrative is my favorites of Searle’s work; I only know it, however, through her illuminating reflections on the work and the personal/political narratives that in-spired it. Searle counts this work as her favorite, or at least she did at the time of that one dinner party.

Dineo Bopape is afraid of rats and yet in New York City there is no shortage of them. When leaving her Harlem studio, which is often late at night, to go to her apartment, which is also in Harlem, she rattles her keys as an attempt to scare the rats off. I find this quite entertaining to watch, as the rattling somehow also seems to resonate with her work. Her vid-eos installations often incorporate found materials and actions that resemble a clatter/clutter. A good example is the vid-eo “Under All Means Necessary” in which Bopape is seen shaking her braided head vigorously from side to side invok-ing a fervent refusal or dissent. Bopape’s studio is located in a building where sev-eral Columbia University MFA students also have studios; at the corner of 125th street and Broadway. Fortunately for her hers has a large window that lets in a lot of light (a rare thing in New York city) and overlooks a busy McDonalds restaurant. I have known Bopape for a while now; we are good friends, so I try to frequent her studio as often as possible. We met in Durban, South Africa several years ago and we both came to New York to study at the same time – I at Bard’s Center for Curatorial Studies, and she at Columbia. Though, given our friendship, I am not sure that my visits to her studio would count properly as “studio visits,” as I see them more so as informal opportunities to “catch up” on both work and life.

Another memorable studio visit took place with Robin Rhode in Berlin. I was quite surprised to learn that Rhode made work in a studio; this is consider-ing that much of his performance-based work is based outdoors. Rhode’s earlier work, in fact the essence of his practice as a whole employs the barest means (a piece of chalk) to create make-believe documented performances on pub-lic surfaces, walls, floors or children’s

playgrounds. We agreed to meet at his home and proceed to the studio from there. He packed a basket with some goodies; champagne, wine, cigars and snacks. There was another curator with us, Andrea Bellini of Artissima and P.S.1. After a short cab ride, we arrived at the building where his studio is located and began our ascent up a seemingly never-ending staircase. Finally, there was the studio. There were works everywhere, on the wall, on the floor, on table sur-faces; it was a typical studio if there is such a thing. At this point Rhode’s work had become more complex, requiring some aspects of it to be made indoors. These included the black and white shoes molded from chalk and charcoal to be worn by a dancer or Rhode him-self in order to make calculated marks on floors or exhibited to resemble piano keys. Rhode played hip-hop music and we helped ourselves to the provisions while talking about the joys and frustra-tions of the art world and the market. The 5th edition of the Berlin Biennale had just opened with not a single artist from Africa. Rhode expressed his disapproval and his decision to “boycott” the event. We didn’t say much about the work sur-rounding us, but the visit still managed to somehow endow me with a highly in-sightful entry into Rhode’s practice and thought process and the direction his work was taking at the time.

Having said all that, I think it is impera-tive for artists (in Africa), given the con-text of their location and resources at their disposal to professionalize their practice, especially their interaction with curators and art historians who might not only open up platforms for their work and historicize their practices but also give much needed feedback that may assist them with unlocking recurring ten-dencies that may no longer be useful in their work. If this does not happen art-ists may find themselves creating, and remaining, in isolated oblivion, never to be heard of. Making work is only one as-pect of an art career, getting ones work to be seen and experienced is another, and takes up as much time and requires just as much effort.

Gabi Ngcobo is a South African curator of contemporary art currently based in New York.

Old News #5 Jens Haaning

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For further information about the OLD NEWS Project see Past Programmes on page 3, or visit oldnewsnews.org

1 View of Dineo Bopape’s studio. Photo: Gabi Ngcobo

An article in the Wall Street Journal on the 3rd of February declared that, “collecting contem-porary art is the new cocaine.” That is one addiction that we are wont to support! Portfolio@CCA,Lagos is a new initiative developed to encourage and facilitate interest and knowledge in contemporary art from Africa by presenting the work of mainly emerging artists. We hope that this initiative will stimulate the new, but growing generation of collectors on the continent.

Considering the rising global interest in contemporary art from African, and tak-ing advantage of our wide network of cu-rators, writers, artists and other art pro-fessionals, we are pleased to introduce to a wide audience exciting new works by emerging artists from across the conti-

nent. This pilot edition presents the work of four artists with a steady but growing visibility not only within their countries but also internationally. Safaa Erruas (Morocco), Lucy Azubuike (Nigeria) and Kemang Wa Lehulere (South Africa). More information can be found in the

forthcoming programme section.

For further information, please email: [email protected]

In this new section we invite artists, critics, curators and other cultural operators to contribute their thoughts and/or comments on specific aspects of contemporary art that in-terests them.Notes on Dialogue in Contemporary ArtAntawan I. Byrd

Already it has become commonplace for discussions concerning contemporary art to pivot around the discourse on globalisation and the related potential, or reality, of a global contemporary art world. It seems to me that much of this thinking has to do with our recent em-phasis on off-centering the art world; do-ing away with the once-prevailing myth that it is, or has been, centered in one

hemispheric region and represented by cities such as New York or Paris. In-deed, we are witnessing something of a global cultural revolution, where talk of the marginal or peripheral now seems trite. Some oft-cited indications of this restructuring vis-à-vis the art world, in-cludes the proliferation of international biennials and art fairs, the diversifica-tion and reorganization of museum

collections, the radical altering of art historical canons and the emergence of new art markets. Enabling these structures are interesting forms of dia-logue – both within the configuration of artworks themselves, and also through their presentation – that are indicative of our contemporary condition. What fol-lows are some thoughts on these forms of dialogue.

Whenever I think about the dialogi-cal impulses at work in the structures of artworks, I immediately think of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and his ability to subtly manipulate common objects to highlight their aesthetic ap-peal and poetic potential. His “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers), 1987-1991 is a pair of

store-bought clocks each measuring 14 inches in diameter, and mounted side-by-side with their frames touching. It is among my favorite works of art, and yet the more I contemplate it, the more suspicious of its beauty I become. My way into this work was personal first and then political, but I always considered the ways in which the work is in dialogue with itself. Both clocks, literally, tick to-gether; they tell the same time. This ges-ture, nicely betrays the reality that we live in a world of clocks, of different time zones, where dialogue is dependent, to some degree, on a coterie of factors such as time, space and language.

The sameness of Perfect Lovers also resonates with me as an ‘American’ in

Nigeria, how does one ‘tick’ the same in two separate spaces? I often wonder if Torres, as a Cuban living in America, considered these notions of the self when conceptualizing the work.

Three years ago, the London-based artist Katie Paterson had an exhibition that provided viewers with the mobile number, 077 58 225698. By calling the number, viewers were connected to a rapidly melting glacier known as Vatna-jokull, the largest glacier in Europe. In actualizing the work, the artist installed a waterproof microphone into a lagoon so that callers could listen to the de-caying glacier – imagine sounds of ice debris splashing into water. The glacier was only able to ‘talk’ to one caller at

a time. I enjoy immensely the thought of this work, particularly the way that it disrupts the dialogical expectations of communication by alienating the caller/participant. The work’s global and envi-ronmental implications are obvious, but there is also something quite distress-ing about the work’s dialogue of the death sentiment. It is such sentiments that drive my current interests in art-works that are at once really subtle but also overwhelming aggressive; in mind is work by artists like Doug Wheeler, Kara Walker and Safaa Erraus. I never saw (or heard) Paterson’s work, and thus I am indebted to the artist Carrie Schneider for bringing it to my attention during a recent conversation.

Thinking Out Loud

1 Kemang Wa Lehulere. aMagata ‘Zali pass, 2009.61cm x 86cm. Ink and Acrylic on PaperCourtesy the artist.

2 Kemang Wa Lehulere. aBa mokoli, 2009.94cm x 150cm. Ink and Charcoal on PaperCourtesy the artist.

3 Safaa Erraus. Untitled 1 (Series of 5), 200924cm x 33cm. Cut Paper and Metallic ThreadCourtesy the artist.

4 Safaa Erraus. Untitled 2(Series of 5), 200924cm x 33cm. Cut Paper and Metallic ThreadCourtesy the artist.

5 Lucy Azubuike. Before and After (Diptych) 60cm x 160cm (overall). C-PrintsEdition of 10 + 2ApsCourtesy the artist.

6 Lucy Azubuike. Amado Uwa George (Triptych)60cm x 120cm (overall). C-PrintsEdition of 10 + 2ApsCourtesy the artist.

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Kemang wa Lehulere

Safaa Erruas

Lucy Azubuike3 4

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Conversation PiecesThe following is an excerpt from a re-cent interview between Dr Montague and Wedge Collection artist Brendan Fernandes (born in Kenya, raised in Can-ada, and now living in New York). Bren-dan’s emerging art practice explores his hybrid identity through complex works about communication and performance, authenticity and display.

Kenneth Montague: I wanted to begin with a quote from a new book, Contemporary African Art Since 1980 by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu. I picked up the book at the Musée du Quai Branly (Paris) on the way back from the 8th Bamako Encounters African Photography Biennial in Novem-ber 2009. The book had just come out and I found it interesting as a collector to see how the writers organized the work. There was something that really made me think of your art practice, Brendan, and it was the chapter on “hybrid ma-chines: the human and the animal”.

The artists that they discussed fuse hu-man and animal forms in their practice and I immediately thought of your work. I wanted to ask you where you see your-self … are you a part of this movement around hybridity found in contemporary African art? Does your work fit into this?

Brendan Fernandes: I think that it definitely fits into this con-cept of hybridity in the way in which I look at myself as being born in Kenya, so a Ke-nyan, but one who is of Indian heritage, one who now lives between Canada and the US. I always posit the idea of me be-ing all of these — not just one of them. That, in a sense, is my idea of hybridity. In my work, I use a lot of tropes of African culture — I want to preface this reference to Africa culture by putting it into quota-tion marks, “African Culture,” because I deem it to still be this cultural monolith prescribed, and marginalized, by the me-dia as being this place of the “dark con-tinent.”

With regards to hybridity and the animal and the human, I think right away of the work Neo Primitivism II where I’ve taken the mask — the façade of the face — as a cultural object that is supposed to hide identity and then I place it on top of a deer decoy, which is a fake deer used to attract real deer so that they can be killed. When you place that mask, a reproduction of an “authentic” African object made in white plastic, on top of that deer, it creates a new hybrid creature. Almost like a diffus-ing of the human face placed on this qua-si-animal and it makes a new ambiguous creature where you’re not sure if it’s from the future or from the past.

In a sense, this is how I consider my identity — it is always ambiguous, always changing, and always in flux.

KM: It’s also interesting that the deer is the North American …

BF: … white tailed deer …

KM: … and the mask obviously comes from Africa — a fusion of different places …

BF: … and the mask as well is spe-cifically a men’s Maasai mask but it has become such a typical mask now in the “souvenir” industry, which makes it just a trope — you can find these masks anywhere. I actually have a collection of them that I’ve bought at garage sales in London Ontario when I was living there. I’ve also got some from Kenya — just a very typical mask and so that’s what I use as the basis for this work.

I guess the other thing about hybridity in my work is that these objects have be-come consumer objects — I think about hybridity in terms of capitalism and con-sumer culture being something in line with humans who are producing for this sort of market industry, which also mar-kets and constructs the idea of how we consider and view “African culture” with regards to it still being seen as exotic or unknown. In a sense, the tourism indus-try wants to perpetuate this because it needs that mystery to entice and create an appeal for its audiences. “The Tourist” is something that I also often question in my work, this idea of the tourist, which again is a place of hybridity for me as, since leaving Kenya, I have questioned

my identity and what I have become now and how I might react back in that place. But also in this sense: what do I look to-ward when I think about Kenya — I don’t think about going to school, being picked up by my parents and taken to my piano lessons. Instead, I think about watch-ing images of going on safari. When I came to Canada, I would watch these documentary films about Kenya — this narrative that is given to North America that depicts stereotypical imagery of the exotic and primitive that perpetuate the

constructed space that is deemed “Af-rica.” These images are what I turned to and what became nostalgic for me.

This is an excerpt from an interview be-tween Dr Kenneth Montague and Wedge Collection artist Brendan Fernandes that took place on December 29th, 2009 in Toronto, conducted and transcribed by curator Emelie Chhangur of the Art Gal-lery of York University, in Canada. For the full conversation, please visit www.yorku.ca/agyu

8 CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 9

Wedge Curatorial Projects

City Focus: Accra Bisi Silva

Beyond Lagos International Upcoming EventsChris Ofili: Tate Britain, London27 January – 16 May 2010

Afro Modern: Journey through the Black AtlanticTate Liverpool, Liverpool UK29 January – 25 April 2010

Ângela FerreiraMichael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town 11 March - 17 April 2010

William Kentridge: Five ThemesThe Museum of Modern Art, New York24 February– 17 May 2010

Aubrey Williams: Now and Coming TimeOctober Gallery London, Walker Art Gallery, Na-tional Museums Liverpool04 February–03 April 2010

Africa Now: Contemporary African Art Bonhams, New York 10 March 2010

Chris Ofili’s intensely coloured and intricately ornamented paintings are on show at Tate Britain in a major survey of the artist’s career that brings together over 45 paint-ings, as well as pencil drawings and watercolours from the mid 1990s to today. One of the most acclaimed British painters of his generation, Ofili won the Turner Prize in 1998 and represented Great Britain at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. Tate Britain

Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic explores the impact of different black cultures from around the Atlantic on art from the early twentieth-century to today. The exhibition takes its inspiration from Paul Gilroy’s influential book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness 1993. It features over 140 works by more than 60 artists. Tate Liverpool

For this exhibition, Ferreira has conceived a new work, which takes as its starting point the Werdmuller Centre in Claremont, designed by Roelof Uytenbogaardt and completed in 1976. Ferreira notes that the conception, and failure, of this controver-sial building provokes many searing questions about modernism and the use of this international language in Africa, as well as the profound impact of apartheid on the functioning of the modernist aesthetic in South Africa. The exhibit will be the result of an investigative process and inquiry into the building and will comprise a large-scale sculptural work as well as photos, collages, drawings and text. Also on view will be two video works.Michael Stevenson Gallery

This large-scale exhibition surveys nearly three decades of work by William Kentridge (b. 1955, South Africa), a re-markably versatile artist whose work

combines the political with the poetic. Dealing with subjects as sobering as apartheid, colonialism, and totalitari-anism, his work is often imbued with dreamy, lyrical undertones or comedic bits of self-deprecation that render his powerful messages both alluring and ambivalent. This exhibition explores five primary themes in Kentridge’s art from the 1980s to the present, and un-derscores the inter-relatedness of his mediums and disciplines, particularly through a selection of works from the Museum’s collection. MOMA

Born, in 1926, in Georgetown, Guyana, Aubrey Williams remains one of the great enigmas of twentieth-century painting. He can be seen as a colossus, bestriding the Atlantic, with feet firmly planted in two very different worlds. Yet his brilliant career remains unknown to many, unacknowledged by all but the most insightful of art critics and art historians. His work will be featured in two major exhibitions, in two different cities. October Gallery, London and Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool, have joined forces to produce two linked and overlapping solo exhibitions of Williams’ work together with the publication of a new catalogue providing fresh insights into one of the twentieth century’s great.October Gallery

The sale will included the very best of post-war and contemporary art from across the African continent in various media including painting, sculpture, and drawing. Of particular interest are works by artists including El Anatsui, Marlene Dumas, Ji-moh Buraimoh, William Kentridge, Romauld Hazoumé, Ben Enwonwu, Georges Lil-anga, Dumile Feni and Bruce Onobrakepeya, Cheri Samba, David Goldblatt, Zwelethu Mthethwa, and Guy Tillim among many others. Bonhams

1 William Kentridge. Drawing from Stereoscope 1998–99. Charcoal, pastel, and colored pencil on paper, 47 1/4 x 63” (120 x 160 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

1 Artists Alliance.

2 Dei Centre.

3 Nubuke Foundation 1.

4 Nubuke Foundation 2.

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Since 1997, Toronto’s Wedge Gallery (now known simply as “Wedge”) has presented annual solo exhibitions, premiering some of the world’s most acclaimed photographers such as James VanDerZee, Tony Gleaton and Seydou Keïta, whose dynamic and innovative imagery capture the beauty and grandeur of African cultural and artistic heritage. These images provide vivid testimony to the existences and ideas of their creators as well as their subjects, exploring the complex diversity of people of the African diaspora at key historic moments. The works are linked by the impetus to represent, remap and reinvent contemporary black subjectivity in order to detach it-self from fixed inscriptions and provide new positions and ways of seeing through the photographic image.

Over the years Ghana has earned the reputation for not hav-ing much going for it in terms of contemporary art. In terms of visibility the recurring names seem to barely go beyond Koffi Setordji, Ablade Glover, Atta Kwami and Ato Delaquis. On several visits to the city - personally and professionally – I have not found it easy to get a feel of the pulse of the art scene in Accra the capital city where most of the art activi-ties take place. The last two curatorial visits over the past five years yielded little. I visited Accra at the end of December 09 and didn’t expect to do much art related interaction aside from visiting the much talked about Artists Alliance and the Nubuke Foundation.

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Revealing the unexpected realities of the contemporary world through a shared creativity is what drives Wedge and its director and curator, Kenneth Montague. Montague’s vision is evidenced by the work he has collected for many years – an impressive range of photographic portraits by Canadian and international artists taken in varied contexts and styles, from archival, documentary and studio portraits to street photography and conceptually staged tableux. At the centre of this unique curatorial project is a specific and assertive impetus towards cultural affirmation – inserting a diasporic African presence in the contemporary Canadi-an arts landscape through the ambiguously charged relation-ship between the black body and the photographic lens. Pamela Edmonds, from Prefix Photo 13, Volume 7, Number 1

Canadian photography collector Dr. Kenneth Montague

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Over 3 years ago, Ablade Glover took me to visit Artists Alliance which was still in the early stages of construction. At that stage, I had no inkling of the impressive structure the building was to become un-til I entered through the front door into the high ceiling sparkling white space which displayed the works of several art-ists interspersed with some ‘coffin art’. Apparently there are several interested potential buyers. Artists Alliance is on 3 floors and is run more like a commercial gallery/shop than contemporary visual art organisation. All of the works on dis-play – traditional, modern and contem-porary are for sale and it would not be inappropriate to say that the building is bursting with art dominated by painting. Artists Alliance has been serving as an outlet for artists to show their works, sell the works and make a living from their art for decades. Ablade Glover is an art-ist and a prudent and successful cultural entrepreneur leaving behind an impor-tant infrastructural legacy built over a thirty year period that few of his con-temporaries can match. Though cutting edge contemporary art is unlikely to be seen at Artists Alliance, they have none-theless organised some important and noteworthy landmark exhibitions in the past two years. Of special mention are ‘Pioneers of Contemporary Ghanaian Art’ featuring works loaned principally from local collectors which included rarely

seen works by pioneers such as Vincent Kofi, Oku Ampand more recently the ex-hibition ‘At home and Abroad’ featuring the work of expatriate Ghanaian artists such as El Anatsui, George Hughes etc. A wonderful opportunity for local artists to see, interact and engage with some of these artists and their works. Both exhi-bitions are accompanied by substantial publications.

I never finished visiting the entire cen-tre as I met another artist there, Akwele Suma Glory who, until proven otherwise, I tend to tag the most prominent female artist I know in Ghana. Coming from a background in jewellery design, her for-ay into the visual arts though sporadic has created some interesting installa-tion pieces. As we found a corner in the gallery to sit and catch up Prof. El Anat-sui walks through door. What a great surprise! We exchanged greetings for five minutes before Prof. Ablade Glover walked in to take him on a tour of the building. I opt out to catch up with Glory who subsequently invites me to give an informal presentation about CCA,Lagos to a group of artists on the 31st of De-cember at the Foundation for Contempo-rary Art, Accra. My curiosity to meet more artists in Accra clinched the deal at such short notice and on the last day of what had been an exhausting year.

The event was full of surprises that al-most 30 people turned up, that they were surprised at the political and so-cial nature of CCA,Lagos’ exhibition programme and my surprise that few if any Ghanaian artists touched on politi-cal issues. There was also a huge inter-est in curatorial practice especially the professional development aspect of CCA,Lagos. The FCA was set up in 2004 and runs from a small office at the W.E B. Dubois Centre, Accra where it also houses a growing reference library. They have a strong ‘art in public’ programme as well as a mentorship programme tar-geting children. They work in collabora-tion with other spaces to organise exhi-bitions throughout the year. Founded by the late Prof Joe Nkrumah, it is now run by two young and dynamic artists in their early thirties Adwoa Amoah and Ato An-nan. FCA is developing the future skills and knowledge base that should act as a catalyst for a vibrant future.

And it does seem as if a new generation is positioning itself with an interest in and the realisation that they have to gain curatorial experience alongside their ar-tistic practice. My next visit was to the Dei Centre where I was met by about 3-4 young fellows (interns) who took me the inaugural exhibition ‘Nsoroma’ featur-ing portraits of late Professor Joseph Nkrumah an internationally renowned conservator and curator. The exhibition features the work of established Ghana-ians such as Kofi Dawson, Ato Delaquis, Benjamin Offei-Nyako, Glen Turner, Rikki Wemega-Kwawu, Wisdom E. Kudowor, Larry Otoo, as well know expatriates such as El Anatsui, Senam Okudzeto, Godfried Donkor and other artists such as Lyle Ashton Harris (US), Virgina Ryan (IT), Samuel Olou (Togo) and Akirash (Nig). Also included are a younger gen-eration of Ghanaian artists such as Kofi Adjei, Adwoa Amoah, Tei Mensah Huage, Kwabena Antwi-Danso, Irene Oppong- Peprah, and Michael T Sowah.

The exhibition presented a diversity of media – photography, video, painting, mixed media and installation. It is ob-vious there is a lot of art activity going on in Accra and in other major cities of the country. The strategy of collaborat-ing with expatriate and diasporean art-ists will go a long way in regenerating the art scene and encouraging a continuous flow of ideas. Dei Centre’s point of de-parture is the art belonging to one of Ghana’s largest art collectors Seth Dei. The centre is a collaboration between the Dei Foundation and New York Univer-sity’s Africa House based in Accra. With internationally renowned American Artist Lyle Ashton Harris as director and with his team of enthusiastic young fellows, the possibilities are immense.

My final stop was at the Nubuke Founda-tion www.nubukefoundation.org set up by art and cultural enthusiast and art patron Odile Ogare. Housed in a large, beauti-fully renovated bungalow surrounded by a large garden, the Foundation is a perfect refuge for artistic contemplation away from the bustle of the city. Nubuke states its mission is ‘to capture, record and promote our history and culture for future generations. This Foundation will collect, collate and display our heritage, promote and help develop contemporary art and, lastly, leverage our history to en-courage interest, especially for the ben-efit of future generations.’ They have an ecletic exhibition programme that varies from experimental art by young artists, to historical exhibitions about Ghana to history of textile cloth from Upper Volta which was on view when I visited. As in Nigeria many of these spaces are the initiatives of individuals who are com-mitted and passionate about art and cul-ture. In the absence of public funding they are dipping deep into their pockets and their time to put Ghana on the Afri-can and global cultural map. Don’t touch that dial.

1 Malick Sidibé, Portrait of Kenneth Montague, 2007. Courtesy of Dr Kenneth Montague / The Wedge Collection.

2 Dawit Petros, Proposition 1: Mountain, 2007. Courtesy of Alexander Gray Associates, New York and Dr Kenneth Montague / The Wedge Collection.

3 Brendan Fernandes, Primal Scream V, 2009. Courtesy of Dr Kenneth Montague / The Wedge Collection.

10 CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010 11

Art, Fashion & Identity

Book Review: Contemporary African Art Since 1980 Petra Szilagyi

Food For Thought: An African View of Art Ben Enwonwu

The collaboration came about when Richardson presented his works during Pecha Kucha Night Vol. 1 in Lagos, which Ochonogor hosted. There she fell in love with Ovbiebo’s Is This A Shoe, 2009 and

subsequently invited the artist to design some sculptural jewelry pieces for her re-cent exhibition/fashion show in Lagos. Gozi Ochonogor is creative director for the fashion-as-art brand U.Mi-1, a Japan

based fashion label, which collaborates with home grown artists.Richardson Ovbiebo is a Lagos-based artist who works primarily in sculpture and installation.

As an artist, I was delighted by the book. I can spend hours perusing the pages, looking at beautiful images of highly experimental works created by African artists currently working in the field. This selection of contemporary African art is bold and transgressive, from the ethereal to the somber to the abject. The art works vary in media from sculpture, installation, digital imagery, video and photography to painting and illustrations. The colors are as shocking and complex as a West African textile, literally in the case of Shonibare, yet the themes incorporate the white gallery walls, electronics, manipulated bodies and expressions of dejection and apathy I am accustomed to seeing when I walk into a gallery in the States. In fact, most artists in the book have shown in major contemporary art museums and publi-cations over the past 10 years, artists such as Chris Ofili, Marlene Dumas, Wil-liam Kentridge, Yinka Shonibare, Ghada Amer, El Anatsui and Candice Breitz. There were few artists whose practice I had not encountered State-side.

The forty pages of text that preceded the images provided an insight to theo-retical haze that surrounds ‘Contempo-rary African Art’ as a concept, namely is it a style, a place or a period? To very briefly summarize their conclusion it is all three. Although they go into some depth regarding the contentious atti-tudes toward African art throughout the twentieth century, its alleged demise with the introduction of modernism and

the difficulties Western curators have had conceptualizing African art from its traditional roots to today (Does it go in the African or contemporary art sec-tion? Is it craft or art?) They often reach the very post-modern assessment that contemporary African art is nothing and it is everything: post-modern, post-colo-nial, post-ethnic and yet very concerned with modernity, colonialism and ethnic identity.

The book emphasizes the central theme of decolonization in artists’ work as a unifying factor. The text suggests a mul-tiplicity of cultural spaces, and between the images a diverse and complicated array of connections and networks are implied in the arrangement, yet the au-thors chose not to provide the specifics. There is some dialogue about common themes in the text, mostly regarding cu-ratorial and categorical practices, but after the text concludes, the ensuing pages of images are largely left to speak for themselves. As one who doesn’t like to be told too much about what I’m look-ing, at this is a blessing. However, the nagging archivist in me would like more information about the artists them-selves; small bios certainly would have been helpful, or at least some indica-tion of where the artists come from and practice.

All in all it is a beautiful book, and the most recent in a growing field that it continuing to garner attention interna-tionally. It is a satisfying introduction to those looking for a brief and colorful overview of the world of contemporary African art and it is sure to pique the in-terest of those who have had limited ex-posure to the field. The more seasoned African art aficionados may be wary of the somewhat institutionalizing nature of the text and predictable selection of artists, but will no doubt enjoy looking through the pages of works, which are astonishing in quality and sheer quan-tity. Be sure to look for the shout-out to the CCA,Lagos in the introduction!

Petra Szilagyi is an intern at CCA,Lagos, and undergraduate student at Williams College, Massachusetts, US.

The role of art in African society is an important one for all who are concerned with the advancement of African culture, African thought and the African person-ality. It should also concern the present generation of Africans whether they are interested in art for art’s sake or not. In fact, no emergent African state today can afford to ignore the urgent role of art. We march towards renaissance. For the art of Africa is no longer looked upon as “fetish,” as it had been during the early days of European exploration

of the continent; it is no longer treated with the patronizing attitude that was the case when the first missionaries, anthropologists, and travelers collected old pieces of “objets d’art” and mixed them up with what was genuine; nor does African art only enjoy the reputa-tion of its influence as a result of its his-torical impact upon modern art.

The terms African negro art, African tra-ditional art, primitive art, tribal art, and all such aesthetic clichés which have

become the currency of aesthetic evalu-ation of works of African art, must now be reconsidered in the light of the pres-ent Africa view. These clichés, together with the influences that exert on the critical mind, should now be regarded as part and parcel of the evangelical, educational, social, economic, and even the political chapters of the colonial past; because art in present-day Africa is seeking a new role, and this role that must be given to it by the Africans them-selves will determine the form that it should take as the mirror of the aspira-tions of independent African peoples.

Art is not static. Like culture, art changes its form with the times. It is setting the clock back to expect that the art-form of Africa today, must resemble that of yesterday, otherwise the former will not reflect the African image. But it now ap-pears that the young African painter and sculptor distorts his work deliberately so as to achieve Africaness, or else, that if he does not do so, his work will be imita-tive of European art. The craftsman art-ist on the other hand struggles between reality only with what he possesses of the old technique. This situation repre-sents the psychological effects of colo-nialism. It has no African directive.

In the passing African social context, the African view of his art was a view, which was identified with other aspects of African life. It was not an objective or an analytical view of art. The first time that we Africans received the word “art” as applied to creative imagery of out ancestors, was at the beginning of European colonization of the African continent. The word has its limitations when defined, to mean the same sense as for instance, the Ibo word nka. Art is defined in the English dictionary as “hu-man skill as opposed to nature; skillful execution of an object in itself; skill ap-plied to imitation and the design as in painting etc.; think in which skill may be exercised; certain branches of learning serving as intellectual instruments for more advanced studies as Bachelor, Master of Arts, one who has obtained a standard of proficiency in these; black magic, practical application of any sci-

ences; industrial pursuit, craft, guild; company of craftsmen; finesse, those in which the mind and imagination are chiefly concerned; knack; cunning; stratagem.” Art so defined, provides di-vergent meanings none of which is the same thing as the word nka.

Nka may be understood to mean “mak-ing”: of which doing; the making of; do-ing; of a particular kind; the object of which is specifically artistic; and mak-ing; is personified, i.e., the professional of nka; and so particularized; the object of nka is specific, and so does not refer to any other kind of making, or doing; it is strictly art, only by professional com-petence; again, nka bears a traditional significance as an art handed down from generation to generation - thus it is inheritable of family or even village groups such as in the known case of Be-nin; nka does not mean human skill as opposed to nature, but does imply iden-tification with the nature of doing, or of image. Art is subjective and therefore in-finite. Nka is an objectification of image more through the senses than through cunning of hand. Such definitions of art as the art of running, swimming, black magic, of photography, stratagem, or as the art of doing anything do not refer to nka.

The prefix ome further explains the identification of a second person, i.e. ome-nka - he is the maker of nka. Both the maker of, and the art of what is be-ing made. Nka, strictly speaking, has traditional and religious associations. Thus the field of so-called African art is really the realm of the ancestral world of images so confined as it were to cre-ativity in a spiritual sense.

In terms of reference then, African art is not really art in the Western context, but an invocation of ancestral spirits through giving concrete form or body to them before they can enter into the hu-man world.

© The Ben Enwonwu Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria. Reprinted with permission. Photo: Courtesy the Ben Enwonwu Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria.

The following text was initially published in the catalog ac-companying the Second World Black Festival of Arts and Cul-ture (FESTAC), which took place in Lagos, Nigeria in 1977. It is one the largest cultural events ever to take place on the African continent with more the 17,000 participants from more than fifty countries. The text is reprinted here, as food for thought, with the intention of inspiring critical reflection on the history of art in Africa.

Storehouse of Infinity Teju Cole

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1 Jacket and denim pants by U.Mi-1.

2 Jumper and denim pants by U.Mi-1Images © U.Mi-1.

3 Jewelry by Richardson Ovbiebo. Courtesy the Artist.

4 Richardson Ovbiebo. Is This a Shoe?, 2009. Mild Steel. Courtesy the Artist.

1

I received my first degree at a small liberal arts college in the American midwest. The real work of surviving those years took place in the dorm; that was where I did my all-nighters, watching the clock hands slowly dizzy themselves as I struggled through each day’s assigned readings, notes and problem sets. In the dorm room, my table lit with the single bulb of a goose-necked lamp; I was all focus and clarity. I confronted the given tasks, and, precisely because of the spartan conditions, did what had to be done.

Preeminent art scholars Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu published Contemporary African Art Since 1980 this September, 2009 to much anticipation from those interest-ed in the field. The large size of the 368 page book and its dark cover featuring Yinka Shonibare’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, announce the book as an authority on the subject at hand: contemporary African art. Inside, the book is divided into two parts, a series of essays followed by 300 pages of vivid high quality images, 470 plates in total, with an added appendix.

I studied in my room because I couldn’t do so in the college library. It was a smallish library by American university standards; contained only half a million volumes. The main reading room, walled in by plate glass, and dominated by broad, gleaming, honey-coloured tables, was like a continuation of the quietness of the campus. There was something monastic about the college itself, with its brick cloisters and well-kept lawns. The library, more than the school cha-pel, was the center of that quietness: a long, low building through which librar-ians flitted like nuns.

I loved it, and would spend hours there every week. I discovered that the real purpose of the library was to distract me and educate me in matters unconnect-ed to what I was studying in class. The college library contained much more than books, and I almost always went in with no clear plan in mind. There were compact discs, video cassettes, laser discs, newspapers, academic journals and all kinds of magazines. Sometimes, I read the Paris Review, Transition, and Granta.

At other times, it was the Daily Times (which was always a month or so out of date by the time the library received it). Occasionally, I sat at the listening booths and listened to classical, jazz or world music, or went into the little view-ing rooms in the basement to watch films I’d never heard of in languages I couldn’t understand. I became adept

at reading subtitles, and fell in love with Kieslowski and Malle.

One chilly evening, I watched “The Dead,” John Huston’s fi-

nal film, in one of those little darkened booths in the

library basement. It was a gentle and humane

cinematic version of James Joyce’s long

story of the same name.

The film ended, as Joyce’s story does: with

an epiphany experienced by Gabriel Conroy as he looks out of

his window into the Dublin street at the snow “falling faintly” and “faintly fall-ing” all over Ireland. That night, I recall, I came out of the library just after sunset and discovered that it had begun snow-

ing while I was inside. It was the year’s first snow. Already, it had covered the grounds, and more of the white flakes were floating out of the sky. I felt myself swept up in an epiphany like Conroy’s. It was as though the snow had spilled out of the tiny television set in the base-ment.

The peculiar power of libraries, whether they be municipal collections, national book depositories, or study collections appended to major museums, comes from their being ordered spaces. They are not like Borges’ fictional Library of Babel, which contains all possible books arranged at random in an incomprehen-sible infinity.

Real libraries contain only a few, easily-searchable books: even the New York Public Library’s twenty million volumes are still considerably fewer than infinity. What is infinite is the satisfaction they promise, the possibilities kept in trust on behalf of the intellect. I feel lucky to have known many grand libraries, but the one that excites me most at the mo-ment is a small one right here in Lagos.

The Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) is on McEwen Street in Sabo, not far from the roundabout where Herbert Macau-ley’s statue stands. On the top floor of the centre is a library. This collection of books, magazines and videos, set in a cosy air-conditioned room, among com-fortable tables and chairs, is open to the public. It is an oasis in the middle of Lagos. You walk in, your breathing be-comes more regular, the stresses of the outside world fall away.

I think of a good library as being similar to a permanent exhibition. Even small li-braries, like the one at the CCA, typically

contain more books and more deeply specialised knowledge than any of us can afford in our own homes. Books are in themselves works of art, and to revisit a library is to deepen a relationship with particular works. At a certain point, on a certain shelf, you know you will en-counter a certain book. On each visit, there are new books to be discovered, but more importantly there are those books that have been discovered be-fore. There’s an odd comfort in knowing they’ll be there, waiting like old friends.

It inspires me to know that, if I set aside the time, I can head to Sabo and spend time with Okwui Enwezor’s “The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994,” or with Glendora Books’ “Lagos: A City at Work.” I can read John Berger, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. I can learn more about the African-American sculp-tor Martin Puryear or see the work of the Malagasy photographer Pierrot Men for the first time.

There’s the gratitude in discovering vol-umes like Emeka Okereke’s “Unspoken Hero,” a book of photographs about his uncle. Kennedy Chukwuemeka Okereke was a 36 year old physician who died around the time his nephew Emeka, a member of the collective Depth of Field, was making a photographic essay about him. Emeka Okereke included photos of the wake and burial in the eventual essay. This small, finely-bound volume, more moving because it is of such lim-ited scope, wouldn’t have come to my attention had I never visited the CCA’s library.

The curator of the CCA, Bisi Silva, re-cently told me that the biggest chal-lenge faced by the library isn’t funding or space or materials. It is that people don’t visit the library, or take advantage of its facilities. Each time I’ve visited, I have found the library virtually empty, and though I take some pleasure in hav-ing the place to myself, I think it would be much better if more people made use of it.

Annual subscription fees begin at N5000, and there are day memberships as well. For everyone interested in con-temporary art, photography, film or the humanities, this is a small investment in something that can increase one’s knowledge ten-fold. Equally importantly, it can be a place of repose from the relentlessness of the city. In my view,

there are simply too many artists and creative-minded people in Lagos for the CCA library to be lying fallow.

We need this library, and this library needs us. It is small in size, but stores a kind of infinity on our behalf, and I can only hope that on my next visit I will see many more people in it. Perhaps, on that next visit, someone would even

have taken my favourite volumes off the shelf, compelling me to seek out new favourites.

This text was first published in 234Next on December 12, 2009. It is reprinted here with the permission of its author.

1 The Short Century ed. by Okwui Enwezor. [Prestel, 2001].

In anticipation of CCA,Lagos’ upcoming focus on Art, Fashion and Identity, we invited the fashion designer Gozi Ochonogor and artist Richardson Ovbiebo to present images from their recent collaboration.

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3 4

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 by Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu.[Damiani, 2009].

The LibraryThe Library

12 CCA,Lagos / Newsletter issue No.8 / January - April 2010

Images from the Archives

1st Art-iculate Talk.

Grange School Visit.

Member of the audience at the Picha exhibition launch.

Brendan Wattenberg, of the Museum for African Art, NYC, visits the library.

Jude Anogwih and Oyinda Fakeye.

Monna Mokena Art-iculate talk.

Like A Virgin.

The World is Flat launch.

Bisi Silva, Oliver Enwonwu, Sokari Douglas-Camp and Oyinda Fakeye at CCA,Lagos booth at the 2nd Joburg Art Fair.

Identity An Imagined State.

Miguel Petchkovsy, Uchay Chima Joel, El Anatsui, Jude Anogwih, Bisi Silva, Jelili Atiku and Estaquio Neves.

Like A Virgin Installation by Lucy Azubuike.

Portfolio review by TT Fons and Kola Fayemi at the 9th Lagos Book and Art Fair.

Didier Schuab gives a lecture at CCA,Lagos.

Lucy Azubuike’s Tree’s series, Like A Virgin Exhibition.

18 Books We Love! Emeka Okereke: Unspoken Heroby Emeka Okereke [Africultures, 2007]

Seven Days in the Art Worldby Sarah Thornton [W.W. Norton, 2008]

Brief History of Curating by Hans-Ulrich Obrist [Zurich : JRP / Ringier ; Dijon : Les Presses du réel, 2008.]

Critical Focus: Photography in the Interna-tional Image Community by A D Coleman [Nazraeli, 1995]

Perform by Jens Hoffmann; Joan Jonas [Thames and Hudson, 2005]

All Images of an Anony-mous Person by Miriam Bäckström; Carsten Höller [Moderna Museet, 2005]

50 Photographers You Should Know by Peter Stepan [Prestel, 2008]

Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers by Kobena Mercer et al [INIVA/MIT Press, 2008]

Hello, My Name is Jens Haaning by Jens Haaning, et al [les Presses du réel, 2003]

NKA: Journal of Contempo-rary African Art #24 [NKA Publications 2009]

Encounters of Bamako 2009 [Cultures France Éditions, 2009]

Robert Gober: The Meat Wagon by Matthew Drutt; Robert Gober; Menil Collection (Houston, Tex.) [Menil Foundation, 2006]

Anja Franke: Installations by Anja Franke; Sanne Kofod Olsen; Mikkel Bogh [Pork Salad Press, 2007]

Birth of the Cool by Barkley L Hendricks; Trevor Schoonmaker; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. [Nasher Museum of Art, Duke Univer-sity Press, 2008]

Between Past and Future: New Photography and Video from China by Wu Hung, et al [Thames & Hudson, 2004]

Meryem Maria by Pinar Yolaçan, et al [Yapı Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2008]

Marlene Dumas: Measuring Your Own Grave by Marlene Dumas; Cornelia H Butler et al. [LACMA, 2008]

Anthology of African and Indian Ocean Photography by Pascal Martin Saint Léon [Paris : Revue noire, 1999.]

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