Lagos Biennial
03.02 - 10.02.2024

Old trees led the way into Refuge, the 2024 Lagos Biennial. Following this path, past disintegrating paddocks and cricket fields, after gaining entry via QR code from the ladies stationed with tablet computers at the registration desk, visitors were greeted by a drone. The security guards and their machine guns stood closer to the shadows, cracking jokes and guiding foot traffic. From the outset, there was a cascade of simultaneities in this experience, but rather than the tension of paradox, the picture presented was an appropriate microcosm of Africa’s complex modernities. Past, present, future, waste, extravagance, potential, hubris, survival, ambition, resentment, and hope all coalesce to tell a story about a place that’s aware of itself as roiling and diasporic. In Lagos, the operative posture is an assurance that everything is, in fact, everything.  

At the opening, locals reminisced about Tafewa Balewa Square, the site on which the Biennial took place – they listed childhood memories of being burnt by the sun during events they were dragged to by their parents, seeing historical moments take place there from their televisions, or more recently, going to watch Davido’s concert. In its former life, the area was called the Lagos Race Course, used to host ‘Empire Day’ parades and later used to celebrate Nigeria’s independence and ‘the lowering of the Union Jack’. In 1997 people paid their final respects to Fela Kuti there.  According to artistic directors Folakunle Oshun and Kathryn Weir, the choice for this site was partially motivated by its key role in FESTAC ’77. The personal and political connections span generations. 

 

This edition of the Biennial was meant to:

[bring] together artists who explore how to create an operative notion of refuge that can offer alternate paths towards constructing renewable communities and work towards ecological justice in this historical moment of systemic crisis. 

And [offer] an opportunity to reassess the promises, disappointments, and ongoing ramifications of the nation-state model with its panoply of modes of governance under the aegis of global capital. 

Did it do all this? 

By and large, yes.  And it is a relief to say so. 

The Biennial had subsections convened by ‘jurors’, under titles such as, ‘Gregarious architectures’, ‘CAPTCHA’ and ‘Worldmade communities’. But these organising principles that edged towards over-curation didn’t really matter. The structures dotted around the grounds formed a collective oasis in which complete repose was near impossible. To engage with the installations was not to escape a reality of tribulation or even discomfort, the “pavilions” and the individual works became methods of engaging with it, of being distracted from its parameters through wonder or humour, and/ or even to see these altogether anew. Rather than art’s aspiration for transcendence, visitors were challenged to art’s capacity for transfiguration.

Bruce Onobrakpeya’s sculptures, formed with bones, beads and auto-parts and over two metres in height, stretched above and below, casting long shadows while making room for themselves on the horizon like a post-apocalyptic Stonehenge. The thoughtful inclusion of an under-appreciated historical artist acted as a beacon of rigour, allaying suspicion that this might be another showcase of current tastes. Ibrahim Mahama’s Yakachana was similarly elastic. This, another of the artist’s jute works, extends through time (it is dated 2012 – 24), and across space. Though dimensions are listed as variable, its occupation of metres by the dozens rendered it obstructive and consequential even as fabric on the ground. This presentation of a voluble flatness made its quiet allusions to how humility with persistence can become a form of assertion. 

Victor Ehikhamenor’s Miracle Central took a more ornate route to the concept of refuge. The installation was styled like an evangelist’s worship tent, fronted by stained glass and cladded with white handkerchiefs said to reference the Nigerian Pentecostal movement. The altar was as a tapestry of rosaries reading, ‘Expect a miracle’ and from above hung chairs and instruments. Gospel music raged on constantly. In his statement, the artist wrote that the work was a meditation, ‘on the hallowed space to be found at the intersections of religion, politics, history, and expressions of belonging.’ Despite the obvious cues for euphoria, the work slipped into a sinister register. The empty chairs floating overhead made absence unnervingly present. In our present times of child martyrs and systemic persecution, this residue of belief appeared as traces of lynchings. Similarly, Feda Wardak’s Hanging Imaginaries, an installation that appeared as an elegant wooden scaffold, simultaneously registered as a jungle gym, obstacle course and gallows. Necessarily, prayer and play ‘under the aegis of global capital’ would be incomplete without articulations of peril. 

However, this is not to say that this edition of the Biennial was an abstracted catalogue of the world’s horrors. Expressions of optimism and tender hopes for the world abound. The Albanian conference, a pavilion made by a collective of artists tethered to locations spanning Nigeria, India, Albania, and Germany included works in the form of chuckle-inducing music videos. Wahala (a Nigerian slang word for ‘problem’) and Freedom by afro-fusion duo DNA were played on a loop to critique ‘public corruption and digital peer-policing’.  Omi Elu, Tabita Rezaire’s relatively diminutive work, comprised of wooden bowls and indigo-dyed textiles, was an offering to ‘Yemoja. Mother of the water, mother of the orishas’. In Nigeria, the cultivation of indigo wells and the process of dyeing is not only aesthetic and ancestral but also part of a set of healing practices. Existing in parts of the region for over 500 years, true indigo is known to have medicinal properties while rejuvenating the soil around it, and Rezaire’s monument acted as a reminder that tribute does not always require sacrifice. 

These textiles appeared again in the pavilion for ‘Traces of Ecstasy’, curated by KJ Abudu, but this time reconfigured through the vision of the non-binary fashion label ‘Lagos Space Programme’. Like these other sites of refuge, the structure was precisely ambiguous. In its circularity the audience was ‘held’ but its maze-like form ensured disorientation; constructed from concrete blocks and wood, we could sit but we were also stained. In the artists’ collective efforts – Evan Ifekoya’s speaking gourds; Raymond Pinto’s performance that moved from elegy to celebration; and moving images by Temitayo Shonibare – tradition and history were, in equal parts, revered and queered.

All this, against the backdrop of the square’s Brutalist concrete ground, aged by a visible patina of time. These oases, as temporary structures, designed for collapse, within an older, fixed stage, appeared to carry the allegory of the individual life in the longer story of the world. Previous editions of the Biennial have lasted over a month and this one was on view for a week – and yet this experiment in impermanence in a ‘permanent’ framework offered a blueprint on how communities can alter the story of their contexts. Em’kal Eyongakpa’s installation, Betok babhi, Babhi betandat, bassem was created with scaffolding, egg cartons and fishing nets. Activated by sonic interventions described as ‘informed mainly by artistic research/reflections in the refugee resettlement camps in Nigeria’s Cross River State’, it seemed to make its wind and shade. The lasting impression was that we too can be briefly barometric in effect.  

Sowing Watermelon Seeds, the project in which I was personally involved, took place after the Biennial hours, a few blocks away, on Ajasa Street. Alongside co-curators Raphael Guilbert, Olukemi Lijadu, Sarah Lorentzen and Tushar Hathiramani, using (also) a scaffold and a tarp, a public cinema of feature films, video works and documentaries came into being. Not unlike Refuge, an idea turned into an incomplete resting place. The ten days of viewings were routinely interrupted by transport lorries and delivery bikes, yet passing tourists, Biennial glitterati and neighbourhood children – the latter sometimes dragged home by their ears for staying outside for too long – sat together, without question, as key constituents of it all. 

Like all places, Lagos is a city of many parts. Yet, all of them move, together and independently.  The desert-driven air keeps everyone in a sweat; wooden carts are pushed past high rises on streets shared by SUVs and chickens. The toasties have mozzarella and tripe, the tacos have salsa and goat, and the market has sections for dictionaries and textbooks. At every turn, contradiction is turned into an opportunity for convergence, and this was articulated in the city’s art events. The ways in which things fell apart was never hidden, and it can’t be forgotten, but simultaneously, the improv of continuance made it clear that we’re never really out of catalysts for the new.