Emeka Ogboh: Stirring the Pot

Emeka Ogboh’s first solo exhibition in a French institution is being held at la Friche la Belle de Mai for the duration of the summer, with multisensorial works and multidisciplinary events. There will be dinners prepared by Chefs from different African countries, new craft beers, DJ sets and radio sessions, as part of Saison Africa2020.

Stirring the Pot is an invitation to combine different components of cosmopolitan spaces. Though culinary in origin, it also denotes other realities in which we can move things around and break down borders, with nuanced semantic depth. Emeka Ogboh is generating multiple proposals, and reinterpreting historical relations through the prism of the here and now.

This internationally-renowned artist, living and working in Berlin and Lagos, looks at migration, and specifically the links women and men forge with the places where they live, through memory and displacement. He uses different media: sound and video, but also comestible products that serve to illustrate and elucidate cities in their cosmopolitan, migratory, globalised aspects, including the dissonances they trigger. He proceeds by sampling and arranging, willingly blurring the frontiers between artistic disciplines as well as mental categories and geographical entities in search of sensorial links, conditioned by the power of the present and the interpretation of history. Places, people and panoramas stand out as fleeting apparitions of distant memories that syncretize the suspended time of art with the frenzy of the contemporary world.

Emeka Ogboh has participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the Biennale of Dakar, 2014, the 56th Biennale of Venice, 2015, documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, 2017, Skulptur Projekte Münster, 2017, at the Tate Modern in London, 2018, and Fiac in Paris, 2019. He also co-founded Video Art Network Lagos. In 2016 he was awarded Bremen’s Böttcherstraße prize, in 2018 he was a finalist in the prestigious Hugo Boss prize for contemporary art, and in 2019, jointly with Otobong Nkanga, he wins the Sharjah Biennial Prize. More about Emeka Ogboh here.

Producers: Fræme, I.C.I. Les Grandes Tables de la Friche
Coproducer: la Friche la Belle de Mai
Institutional partners: Ministère de la Culture - Direction régionale des affaires culturelles Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Région Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, Conseil départemental des Bouches-du-Rhône, Ville de Marseille.
Sponsors: Compagnie Fruitière, Fonds de dotation Compagnie Fruitière, AG2R La Mondiale, AfricaLink, Marfret
Media partners: Radio Grenouille, Réseau Plein Sud, PAC, France Bleu Provence, RFI, France 24, MCD, France Média Monde, La Provence, Le Bonbon, Libération, Something We Africans Got
Saison Africa2020 organizers: République Française, Institut Français, Agence Française de Développement
Saison Africa2020 sponsors: La Fondation Gilbert et Rose-Marie Chagoury, Orange, Total Foundation, Axian, Groupe Sipromad, JCDecaux, Pernod Ricard, Sanofi, Société Générale, Vinci, CFAO, Engie, Thales, Thomson, Véolia.

Press contacts
France & media partnerships: CLOSE ENCOUNTERS PR Agency, Nadia Fatnassi, nadia [​at​] closeencounters.fr, T +33 652 086 908