The African Artists’ Foundation encourages the expansion of African art on its continent and beyond – organizing exhibitions, festivals and residencies working to expand awareness of known and unknown African artists. Two new exhibitions focus on raising the voices of contemporary African Art through regenerative co-production.
August 8, 2022 (Lagos, Nigeria) — Lagos-based African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), established in 2007, announces two new exhibitions opening in August 2022. The AAF organizes a variety of exhibitions, both locally and internationally, festivals, and educational activities and community outreach programs to drive social change as its core ambition. Through their programming, the AAF supports emerging and established artists in Africa cultivating and promoting contemporary African art production. Shout Plenty on view from August 13 – October 1, 2022, is a group exhibition featuring over 30 artists from across Africa, taking place at the AAF headquarters in Lagos in collaboration with Alliance Française. Dig Where You Stand on view from September 2 – October 9, 2022, marks the first exhibition of a traveling show, taking place in several locations across Africa. The announced locations include: Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Tamale, Ghana, The African Artists’ Foundation (AAF) Lagos, Nigeria, White Cube, Lusanga, DR Congo, Palais de Lomé, Togo and Hangar Centre, Lisbon, Portugal.
Both exhibitions underline the AAF’s mission to develop and promote contemporary African art through thought-provoking concepts of cultural rebirth.
Shout Plenty
Group Exhibition | August 13 – October 1, 2022
The group exhibition nurtures a dialogue between the individual experience and collective memory as a means of problem-solving generational distress. Seeking to build a story interwoven with distinctive voices, the curators gathered artists across different mediums to deliver a unifying message that nevertheless gives value to individual realities. Taking its name from the revolutionary and provocative Fela Kuti’s 1986 LP I Go Shout Plenty, the exhibition similarly challenges collective struggles through the experience of artmaking and interventions. Pondering the various ways freedom and voice echo through a collective experience, Shout Plenty gives agency to the interior lives of multiple artists, and by extension their communities, crafting a powerful means of protest. Alongside imagination and creative thinking, these artistic interventions produce a unique representation and understanding of socio-political shortcomings of generations. With artists such as Ayogu Kingsley, Isshaq Ismail and Audrey d’Erneville and more, the exhibition studies how art can function as a powerful and revolutionary force to challenge institutionalized systems of control.
Dig Where You Stand
Group Traveling Exhibition | September 2 – October 9, 2022
Dig Where You Stand explores the regenerative potential of art within the region and its diasporas, offering a new model of engagement with the questions of decolonization, restitution, and repatriation, both in the art world and the broader economy on the African continent. Cultivating the reformative potential of art across the region by placing an emphasis on travel, migration and (dis)placement, the exhibition is shifting the decolonial paradigm away from Western museums towards a location-specific, solution-oriented approach, leaving behind a toolkit in each location for commencing regenerative economic processes. The artists and local communities explore the economies of the colonial systems that have historically marginalized vulnerable communities and find new methodologies in the art world, which reverse its value systems and return agency to exploited communities on the African continent. Featuring the works of Ibrahim Mahama, Renzo Martens and The Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) among others, the exhibition curated by Azu Nwagbogu aims to promote contemporary African opus by facilitating a cultural exchange and contributing to communities with ideas rooted in liberation from the ongoing extractive processes in the economy.
Reflecting on both exhibitions, Artistic Director Azu Nwagbogu states that:
“Shout Plenty represents an expression of the exuberant modes of art making through contemporary image making, encompassing broader contemporary visual culture in fashion, media, sound, music and photography. It spotlights the artists identified as change makers using their practice to bring multiple discourses around social justice and fairness.”
“Dig Where You Stand symbolises a monumental shift in the ongoing cultural conversation around decolonization, restitution, and repatriation through the facilitation of pan-African artistic exchange and promotion of local solutions. Connecting key artistic practices from across the African continent and internationally, the exhibition maintains its exclusive modality, engaging artists interested in a circularity of economy around the art world and exhibition making.”
Continuing their programming after a decade of recognizing the artistic potential of its community and actively cultivating it to reach its full potential, the AAF has produced and curated a variety of projects that echo a strong cultural landscape of contemporary African art. In 2010, reflecting the organization’s commitment to engage the community and promote its artists. The first and only international arts festival of photography in Nigeria, LagosPhoto was founded. The annual flagship event’s main goal is to establish a community for contemporary photography uniting local and international artists through images that encapsulate individual experiences and identities across all of Africa.
Additionally 2022 exhibitions and events include: LagosPhoto 2022 Festival, Artist Residencies, including French Artist Delphine Dénéréaz, and another solo exhibition presenting the work French-Algerian Artist Yassine Mekhnache.
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NOTES TO EDITORS:
About AAF
Established in 2007 in Lagos, Nigeria, African Artists’ Foundation aims to encourage the highest standard of art in Africa. African Artists’ Foundation serves a significant role in art and academic communities through organizing art exhibitions, festivals, competitions, residencies, and workshops with the aim of unearthing and developing talent, creating societal awareness, and providing a platform to express creativity. By providing assistance to professional and emerging artists in Africa and support to international exhibitions and community outreach program, African Artists’ Foundation views the contribution to a strong cultural landscape in Africa as a transformative element in driving social change. In addition to a rigorous program of exhibitions and workshops at its gallery in Lagos, African Artists’ Foundation organizes its flagship project, the LagosPhoto Festival, annually.
About Curators
Azu Nwagbogu, AAF Founder & Artistic Director
Azu Nwagboguis the Founder and Director of LagosPhoto Festival, and the African Artists’Foundation (AAF), a non-profit organisation based in Lagos, Nigeria. Nwagbogu was the interim Director/Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in South Africa from April 2018 to August 2019. He created Art Base Africa, a virtual space to discover and learn about contemporary Art from Africa and diaspora. Nwagbogu is on the jury of major arts awards and committees such as the Dutch Doc, POPCAP Photography Awards, the World press Photo, Prisma Photography Award (2015), Greenpeace Photo Award (2016), New York TimesPortfolio Review (2017-18), W. Eugene Smith Award (2018), Photo Espana (2018), Lensculture and Magnum. Nwagbogu also works as an independent curator and culture critic.
Princess Ayoola, Creative Manager & Curator
Princess Ayoola is a Creative Manager at African Artists’ Foundation (AAF). As a graduate of Engineering from the University of Lagos, shespent the early part of her professional career in the sciences and engineering sector. Her transition to the local art and culture space started when she joined the LagosPhoto Festival team as an intern in 2016. Since then, she has engaged in projects and workshops that border on photography, graphic design, writing, painting and so on, under the mentorship of Curator, Azu Nwagbogu. She was the Festival manager of the Lagos Photo Festival 2019, the first international photography festival in Africa, She strongly believes in the use of various art forms to address and effect change as it relates to personal, political and social issues. She lives and works in Lagos.
Jana Terblanche, Curator
Jana Terblanche is an art curator based in South Africa. She obtained her Honours in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. She has recently been appointed as the Head of Development at Southern Guild Gallery based in Cape Town. She also works as a researcher and curator at the African Artists’ Foundation in Lagos, responsible for an extensive art programme on the African continent and abroad. She has curated shows at several art fairs including FNB Art Joburg, Investec Cape Town Art Fair, 1-54 London and Art Rotterdam. She has also curated a multitude of group exhibitions and mentors local emerging artists. Her curatorial practice predominately addresses decolonial theory, intersectional feminism and pop culture. She takes interest in interdisciplinary collaboration, empathy through artmaking and modern intimacies. The curatorial approach she employs amplifies a multiplicity of voices and champions nuanced storytelling.
Image Credits:
1 Left Samson Bakare Dreams and Everything Beyond, 2022; Right Sarfo Emmanuel Annor, Freedom, 2021, Courtesy of African Artists' Foundation
2 Left Zanele Muholi Muzane I, 2019; Right Zanele Muholi, Bester, 2019, Courtesy of African Artists' Foundation