LAGOS.- People in Lagos, Nigerias largest city, are hardly shy. The stereotype runs toward boisterousness, worn as a point of pride. But when artist and poet Precious Okoyomon recorded interviews with about 60 city residents in January for an art project, the unusual questions such as Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother? proved disarming.
Okoyomon is based in the New York City borough of Brooklyn but lived in Lagos as a child and still visits there frequently. Okoyomon was collecting material for a sonic and sculptural installation that will be presented in the Nigeria Pavilion at this years Venice Biennale. The event, one of the art worlds most important, opens for previews next week and to the public April 20.
Okoyomons steel-framed structure, erected in a courtyard, imagines a kind of radio tower, decked with bells and colonized by creeping vines. Motion sensors on the tower activate a soundtrack: It will play in the courtyard and also online, for anyone to tune in. It mixes poems by Okoyomon with music and passages from those interviews, whose respondents range from fellow artists to strangers, someones cook, someones auntie, Okoyomon said.
After some wary first reactions to the intimate 12-question protocol (adapted from another poet, Bhanu Kapil), the conversations grew vulnerable and real, Okoyomon said. The resulting sound piece, was a kind of speaking in tongues, as if tapping the unconscious of the city, Okoyomon added.
Okoyomon is a Venice veteran: In 2022, the artist presented a major installation in the Biennales main exhibition. But this year, Okoyomon is one of the eight lauded artists to represent Nigeria in the countrys second-ever Venice pavilion one of still relatively few African presentations at the Biennale, and one of the most ambitious in concept and scale.
Titled Nigeria Imaginary, the pavilion fills a semi-restored palazzo in the Dorsoduro district with projects that cast an oblique but pointed look at history. One is Yinka Shonibares exacting clay replicas of 150 of the Benin Bronzes that a British expeditionary force plundered in 1897; they accompany a bust of the raids British commander painted in batik patterns and placed in a vitrine, a kind of symbolic restitution awaiting the real thing.
In the most contemporary reference, a sculpture by Ndidi Dike made of 700 police-grade batons, together with photographs from mass protests against Nigerian police violence in 2020 and their bloody repression link popular struggles in the country to the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, Britain and Brazil.
Other projects by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Onyeka Igwe, Abraham Oghobase, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Fatimah Tuggar span drawing and painting, video and photography, even artificial intelligence and augmented reality. They suggest fresh ways for Nigerians, and also the world, to think of the country a behemoth of about 220 million people that is often dismissed as a place of crisis or corruption.
Thus, Ojih Odutolas charcoal and pastel works on linen stage free-spirited, gender-flexible characters in a setting inspired by Mbari houses, once built for ritual in southeastern Nigeria; a linked reference is the Mbari Club, which gathered Nigerian artists and writers in the 1960s. I wanted the space to exist very open and free, Ojih Odutola, who is based in New York and Alabama, said of the suite of drawings. In her imagined Nigeria, she added, creativity is safe; it has room to roam; it has the right to change, to be mercurial.
Adeniyi-Jones, who was raised in Britain and now lives in Brooklyn, has produced an overhead painting influenced by Nigerian modernist artists and Italian ornamental tradition that will hang below the palazzo ceiling.
Oghobase, who works in photography and installations and is newly living in Canada, examines resource extraction in northern Nigeria through original and archival images plus diagrams from a vintage mining treatise.
Tuggar, who teaches at the University of Florida, considers the humble calabash gourd a fruit with myriad traditional uses in West Africa, from drinking vessel to musical instrument to fishing float in an installation that uses augmented reality to visualize alternatives to plastics and other consumer products.
And Igwe, who lives in Britain, researched the Nigerian Film Unit, which produced films during the colonial period. Its archive in Lagos became neglected, and when Igwe visited, she said, there were lots of stopped clocks; it was full of rotting reels. Igwes film No Archive Can Restore You studies this derelict space; a sound installation of speeches, poems and choral music then fills the room differently hinting that colonial archives may be more burden than resource, crowding out other ways to connect with history.
To organize a national pavilion at the Biennale is a kind of history intervention. The pavilion system dates to the early 20th century and maps a hierarchy. There are permanent pavilions owned by about 30 mostly wealthy countries in the gardens where much of the Biennale takes place, many with distinguished architecture. Other countries present their pavilion in one-off spaces, some wedged into the Biennales other major exhibition complex in the Arsenale, others scattered around town.
The African presence has been slender and uneven. (Stories abound of slapdash pavilions underfunded by governments or handed to dubious foreign impresarios.) But recently, it has grown in numbers and rigor. In 2013, Angola won the Golden Lion for best pavilion. Nigerias first and only prior pavilion a solid but smaller affair than this years came in 2017. In 2019, Ghana presented a star-studded show including El Anatsui and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.
This year, 13 African countries are presenting pavilions, up from nine in 2022. The paucity is understandable given more urgent economic development priorities, said Phillip Ihenacho, director of the Museum of West African Art, known as MOWAA, now under construction in Benin City, Nigeria. The decision to do anything in Venice is a difficult one, Ihenacho said. You have to ask yourself, Why spend money on something which could be regarded as a vanity project?
But a strong pavilion sends a message, whether from a government signaling cultural investment, or, in Nigerias case this year, from private backers. Although commissioned by the Nigerian government, as Venice rules require, the pavilion has been organized by MOWAA. The pavilions top funder is Qatar Museums; other supporters include galleries representing the artists, and Nigerian and foreign companies and collectors.
For MOWAA, whose inception was linked to the fraught prospect of many Benin Bronzes returning to Africa, the pavilion conveys a commitment to contemporary art, Ihenacho said. With the first building due for completion late this year, the plan is to bring the Venice show to Benin City possibly after one or two international stops as the inaugural exhibition, he said.
On a hot, dusty Thursday in February, Aindrea Emelife, the pavilions curator, who will also lead MOWAAs modern and contemporary department, was crisscrossing Lagos, finalizing things. She met with Dike, the only pavilion artist living full-time in Nigeria. Although they all have Nigerian roots, the others either grew up overseas, or moved away from Nigeria at some point.
Emelife grew up in Britain. Although she anticipates criticism that the show favors overseas-based artists, migration and sometimes return are part of the Nigerian experience, she said. People are always leaving, and thats important to articulate with presenting Nigeria as a place.
Besides, she added: I dont think you can remove yourself intrinsically from Nigeria. Indeed, if anything, pavilion artists are deepening their ties. Shonibare, for instance, opened a Nigerian foundation in 2019 that operates two residency centers and a sustainable farm.
Emelifes next stop was the home of a local collector to borrow some letters by Ben Enwonwu, an important Nigerian modernist painter, for a vitrine presentation of documents from the 1960s and 1970s in the pavilion. Many artists in that period were invested in connecting the Western canon with local aesthetics, culture and history.
Its important that this is not presented in isolation as a new moment, Emelife said of the contemporary work in the pavilion. Ive met people who had no idea there was a modernist period in Nigeria. (Her concern dovetails, as it happens, with the Biennales main exhibition this year, which curator Adriano Pedrosa has loaded with 20th-century modernists of the Global South.)
With Nigeria Imaginary as the pavilion theme, Emelife makes a scholarly reference to sociological theories of nationhood or to the imaginary in the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, or the stories and illusions we tell ourselves to find structure in our surroundings. In Nigeria, where considerable dysfunction has become normalized (for instance, the widespread use of home generators and inverters to cope with the incessant power outages), that concept seems apt.
But the different projects in the show also make visitors privy, if indirectly, to a national pastime: diagnosing the countrys problems. The trouble with Nigeria, Chinua Achebe wrote in a 1983 essay by that title, has become the subject of our small talk in much the same way as the weather is for the English. (His analysis in a nutshell: bad leadership.)
That habit remains. Everyones the minister of something! Emelife said. Theres so much discussion about what Nigeria needs, or Nigeria should be like. Her wish for the exhibition, she said, was to prompt more expansive dreaming. It will hopefully be energizing, by being honest, but also energizing, by being utopic, she said. After all, she added, Even when were critical, were critical because were optimistic about what a great place it could be.
Dike, the Lagos lifer and detractor of police violence, agreed. Theres always these not-so-positive discussions about Nigeria, she said. But this is a very dynamic cultural catalyst and hub for the continent and the world. Its about time we give Nigeria its due.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.