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The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos continues the yearlong celebration of its 10th anniversary with a series of projects and collaborations that take the unique collection of the CCA, Lagos library and resource centre as the catalyst for its current exhibitions, research projects and workshop programmes.
Publishing Against the Grain
April 18–May 19, 2018
With key contributions by: Art Against Art (Germany) / Bisagra (Peru) / CCA Lagos (Nigeria) / Chimurenga / The Chronic Curatorial Dictionary (Hungary) / East of Borneo (United States) / Exhausted Geographies (Pakistan) / Fillip (Canada) / Glänta (Sweden) / Makhzin (United States / Lebanon) / Our Literal Speed (United States) / Pages (The Netherlands / Iran) / PISEAGRAMA (Brazil) / Raking Leaves (Sri Lanka) / SALT. (United Kingdom) / Start Journal (Uganda) / Stationary (Hong Kong) / Tráfico Visual (Venezuela) / White Fungus (Taiwan) and many others.
Publishing Against the Grain is a traveling exhibition that provides a space for reading, thinking, and conversing, where slowing down can become a form of intellectual resistance. It invites visitors to discover new perspectives while connecting differing and analogous spheres of contemporary art, highlighting the current state of publishing and art criticism as it exists in small journals, experimental publications, websites, and radio, as well as other innovative forms. It is organized around projects that connect theoretical, social, political, and aesthetic questions with a focus on community, whether understood in relation to a particular place, or defined in identitarian or diasporic terms.
A selection of key publications were drawn from ICI’s international network of collaborators. These curators, artists, and scholars involved in independent publishing are represented in the exhibition through their own projects and those of others who have influenced their work and school of thought. CCA, Lagos has nominated and will be including issues of New Culture to continue onto the international tour.
Publishing Against the Grain is an exhibition organised and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and initiated by ICI’s Alaina Claire Feldman and Becky Nahom. The presentation in Lagos has been organised by Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, Associate Curator, CCA Lagos.
The exhibition was made possible with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum.
The Editing Room: Art Criticism, Curating and Publishing
May 14–16, 2018
A Critical Writing Workshop
The session is led by Paris-based curator and writer Caroline Hancock
The development of modern art has been driven by the compass of a critical tradition. Critics played key roles in identifying, naming, questioning and shaping the numerous art movements and styles that have emerged since the late nineteenth century. In Nigeria, artists and writers like Ben Enwonwu, Frank Aig-Imoukhuede and Dele Jegede among several others, have played a significant role in the development of modern art in the country through writing and publishing relevant critical texts. The exponential growth of contemporary artistic practice in Nigeria is yet to be matched by sufficient critical documentation that engages the numerous activities and presentations emerging from across the country. It is, therefore, important that thesector is supported with the prerequisite level of theoretical and critical narratives that contextualize the vibrant and dynamic activities that have been taking place for nearly two decades.
Editing Room aims to introduce participants to the different platforms for publishing criticism as well as to writing/publishing as a curatorial practice. Participants will discuss and explore possibilities of online and print publishing platforms and propose future projects. The various aspects will use CCA Lagos’ current exhibition Publishing Against the Grain, as a case study, during the programme.
Editing Room is initiated and organised by Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, Associate Curator, CCA, Lagos. The workshop has been developed in partnership with the Embassy of France in Abuja.
Women on Aeroplanes #2
May 23–26, 2018
Search Research:Looking for Colette Omogbai
“The aeroplanes they travel with are real. But sometimes they stand still or land themselves.” Kojo Laing
The point of departure for the research project Women on Aeroplanes comes from the title of Ghanaian writer Bernard Kojo Laing’s critically acclaimed second novel Women of the Aeroplanes, written in 1988. With his ironic deconstructive syntax and his implosion of genres, he sets the tone for a historic narrative enfolding in the present tense, in which subordinate subject-object relations are deleted. His method of a speculative fiction writing can be seen as a making of theory with other means. Consequently using Laing as one of the reference points might help to design a new grammar that contributes to making possible re-visiting and re-writing of history.
After the first iteration of “Filter – Editing Room” in December 2017 at IFA, Berlin the second edition of Women on Aeroplanes takes place at CCA Lagos. Search and Research: Looking for Colette Omogbai will comprise of a series of lectures dedicated to unfolding and mobilising different ways of theoretical and artistic, academic and non-academic strategies of investigation and thus to centre the presence of women out of their non-representation in the history writing process. The art and life of pioneering Modern Nigerian woman artists such as Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, Afi Ekong, Colette Omogbai, Theresa Luck-Akinwale and Ladi Kwali, remain unknown or incomplete, and unpublished though their work is crucial for the understanding of modernist art in Nigeria. Not only are they absent in the wider narrative around their contemporaries such as Ben Enwonwu, Uche Okeke, J.D.‘Okhai Ojeikere, Demas Nwoko and Bruce Onobrakpeya, this invisibility is being repeated in the lineage and reference to today’s art practice and histories. Consequently how do we address the void? What new art historical methodologies can be developed in a context where the history is determined by an absence? In finding them what could changes can take place in determining the narrative? Artists and art historians, archival researchers and writers, philosophers and curators, will speak about the processes of research in their specific locale and the transnational outreach of their ‘detective’ work.
Participants include: Garnette Cadogan, Rahima Gambo,Lungiswa Gqunta, Gladys Kalichini, Maryam Kazeem, Jihan El-Tahri, Fabiana Lopes, Seloua Luste Boulbina, Nontobeko Ntombela, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and Nadine Siegert
This iteration is co-ordinated by Bisi Silva, Director CCA, Lagos and Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, Associate Curator, CCA, Lagos
Women on Aeroplanes is a research-based project curated by Annett Busch, Marie-Hélène Gutberlet & Magda Lipska coproduced by Iwalewahaus, Universität Bayreuth, funded by the TURN Fund of the German Federal Cultural Foundation in collaboration with Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos / Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw / The Showroom, London.
*This is the second time that Omogbai’s Agony is being shown in Nigeria since her first solo exhibition on August 3, 1963 at Mbari, Ibadan, Nigeria.
