This essay is a short recount of my time in the city of Bloomington in Indiana. In the later part of the essay, I shared lingering thoughts about the dialectics of the future.
Exhibitions must invite the audience to partake in an experience wherein they become co-sojourners on the road conjured by the artist’s proposal. This road is one of myriad, rhizomatic strands for which Africa, in our time, is a story of journeys.
Yesterday, it rained and somewhat doused the sunniness of the city. Yet, it rendered the coal-tarred roads, streets, and pavement glasslike and reflective — like a mirage. There is something about the earth-colour aesthetic prevalent in the city. It lends warmth and cosiness even to a gloomy atmosphere. In the sun’s absence, the sky acts like a giant softbox, the rain a diffuser. Tungsten-lit stalls and shops come alive — like a film set. A framed iconic photo of Nina Simone is placed almost centre frame. I would wonder why it had to be so evident. I didn’t go into the shop to ask. But I allowed myself the thought that the story could be more intimate than meets the eye: “I had a chance encounter with Nina Simone, which changed my life”. You see, here in Barcelona, there is a veil over blackness. That much I have noticed since my arrival. Such a veil makes invisibility and hyper-visibility feel like two sides of the same coin. I still do not have enough appraisal of …
“Truth is bitter” is an all too familiar expression. As it seems to me, the expression borrows its validity from an understanding of “bitter” as the opposite of “sweet” – chocolaty, ice-creamy, sweet – as such, the antithesis of comfort and the comfortable. Many English words and adages ought to be passed through the scrutiny of a renewed gaze if they are to retain in them anything of a life-giving, regenerative meaning. “Truth is bitter” carries within it something of a malediction, an indictment, a condemnation even before Truth is born. Truth becomes judgemental even before it has a space to form itself into a revelation. Truth is bitter because there continues to be a hegemony of Truth, or more leniently, a truth that supersedes other truths. Truth is bitter because it fears being contested and doubted. Truth is bitter because, for a long time, it has been conflated with “facts”. Yet in a world where facts are synthesised and manufactured – like wearables are churned out from sweatshops – and sold for profit to keep …
In beginning this reflection about the collective, I have, ringing at the back of my head, an Igbo saying: Igwe bụ ike which translates to “the collective is power”. This saying is in many ways fundamental to the social psychology of the Igbo people of Nigeria with whom I share a lineage. Elsewhere, Chinua Achebe, the acclaimed Nigerian novelist, and critic, referred to this as the Igbo’s preference for duality as opposed to singularity: “Wherever Something Stands, Something Else Will Stand Beside It”.1 Given that in many African cultures, the place of family and community is, in most cases, held in the highest regard, I can imagine this saying taking on different allegorical and idiomatic forms. Thus if art is to some tangible extent a mirroring of a people’s sociocultural contexts and realities, the notion of the collective as it relates to artistic practices from such places as Africa would be a given – a natural consequence of a way of being. Rightfully so, the collective from time immemorial has served to preserve something of the dignity …
Twenty-four hours prior to hopping into a plane for a fifteen-hour journey, I had no idea I would eventually be making it to Chennai. My Nigerian passport seems to be the gift that keeps on giving where it has to do with being a document that, rather than aid mobility, actively facilities its restrictions. I was informed by the Indian embassy that holders of a Nigerian passport will have to wait six to eight weeks for their visas to be ready. What for! Many applicants of other nationalities are simply applying and printing out their visas online almost as fast as they are in and out a self-service photo booth. “Nigeria did not colonise India!”, I would find myself muttering time and time again. Anyway, all of that was eventually bypassed thanks to the relentless push by the organisers of the Chennai Photo Biennale by whose invitation I would be partaking in “Light Writing”, the International Conference on Photography. Chennai is in South India – if I am to be precise, I would say Southeast …
“The danger of identifying with a stranger is the possibility of becoming a stranger. To lose one’s racialized rank is to lose one own valued and enshrined difference”. In my preoccupation with borders, movement and all the various forms of differences they presuppose, I have, more often than not, encountered the question: how can imagery (and by extension photography) play a useful role in the restitution of our world towards more conscious and correlational human relationships? As an attempt to reflect on this question, I would like to begin with the above-cited quote from Toni Morrison’s The Origin of Others. It would seem, at first glance, that it is a quote about reciprocity. Yes. There is that, yet it goes even further. It is a quote about affecting the gaze. Thus I would, for the purpose of my reflection, argue that everything begins with the gaze: affect the gaze and naturally, the effect reciprocates. In the language of the Igbo people of Nigeria (one that I speak as my mother’s tongue), the gaze is central …
On Saturday, 27th October 2018, Nigerian photographer, filmmaker, writer and visual artist, Emeka Okereke, was conferred France’s prestigious insignia of Chevalier De l’Ordre Des Arts et Des Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the Ministry of Culture of France. The award ceremony took place at the new Alliance Francaise, Lagos. The event was officiated by the Ambassador of France to Nigeria, Mr. Jérôme Pasquier who decorated Mr. Okereke with the medal of the Order. This award was conferred as recognition of his contribution to the discourse on art in Africa, France and the world at large. The Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) is an Order of France, established on 2 May 1957 by the Minister of Culture. Its purpose is the recognition of significant contributions to the arts, literature, or the propagation of these fields. Okereke will be one of the youngest Nigerian and African to be conferred with this honor. He joins the likes of Zanele Muholi, David Goldblatt, Shorna Urvashi, Olafur Eliasson, Tim …
I want to begin this reflection by taking some memory-steps back to my high school days when I was a science student. In our biology class, we were introduced to Amoeba, the shapeless, single-cell organism. As with most students of my age, the only character of this organism I really retained was its shapelessness. How can something be shapeless? I often wondered. The whole premise of materiality, or physicality is form. If something can be seen as much as touched, then it is bound to have a shape. Even as I write, I recall how “shapeless amoeba” became a derogatory expression often employed, as a joke or mean insult, to describe someone’s head whose contours are abnormally disproportionate. But I never got over this contradiction of something being shapeless. Many years after, and with the benefit of hindsight, I would come to understand that my life, almost in its entirety, plays out within the perimeters of this paradox. I will explain. Not too long ago, I was asked to give an artist talk on the …
Is it possible to think from that silence (the silence created by coloniality of knowledge), to undo the colonial differences that “time” contributed to make and contributes to maintain?1 For well over two weeks, the cyberspace has been in a state of frenzy following the latest release of Marvel comics’ blockbuster superhero movie: Black Panther. What is it that makes this film different from the rest of the Marvel comics series? Well, let’s start with the most obvious: it is probably the first time in contemporary history that a movie of its calibre will feature almost an all-Black cast.2If you’ve seen any of the other superhero instalments, you can already imagine how huge a deal this is. I will not dwell on, or continue the rave about, how the dark days of Black are finally over. The internet it sufficiently littered with much of that. Please, be my guest. I am particularly interested in a broader question: how a movie that takes Blackness – and by extension Africanness – as a central theme got tangled …
DIARY OF A BORDER-BEING 