Alliance Française / Mike Adenuga Centre, Lagos, Nigeria
29 Oct 2022 - 12 Nov 2022
LagosPhoto Festival announces the 13th edition of the LagosPhoto festival, entitled Remember Me – Liberated Bodies, Charged Objects. This year’s LagosPhoto opens to the public on October 29th, 2022 at Alliance Française / Mike Adenuga Centre at 9 Osborne Rd, Ikoyi, Lagos and closes on November 12th 2022. Satellite exhibition venues include Falomo Roundabout (lkoyi). The festival encompasses an engaging program that features exhibitions, workshops, discussions, film screenings and large-scale outdoor installations.
LagosPhoto 2022 presents, Remember Me – Liberated Bodies, Charged Objects as an interrogation of lens based media’s influence in shaping, archiving and ordering memory within the corporal and how these construct community and individual identities.
Exhibiting Artists: Olaoluwa Adamu (Nigeria), Seun Adeniyi (Nigeria), Toyin Adedokun (Nigeria), Adesegun Adeokun (Nigeria), Yusuf Adesola (Nigeria), Jumoke Adeyanju (Nigeria/ Germany), Taiwo Aina (Nigeria), Morenike Ajayi (Nigeria/Canada), Owoyemi Ajibola (Nigeria), Oluyomi Akinnagbe (Nigeria), Taoheed Bayo (Nigeria/USA), Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) (DR Congo), David Dawali (Nigeria), Benson Ibeabuchi (Nigeria), Femi Johnson (Nigeria), Danielle Mbonu (Nigeria), Oyedeji Mohammed (Nigeria), Oke Oluwasegun (Nigeria), Michael Jerry Opara (Nigeria), Adeolu Osibodu (Nigeria), Aghogho .Otega (Nigeria), Dafna Tal (Israel), Ebisike Valentine (Nigeria), Unachukwu Vincent (Nigeria), Hugo Weber (Italy), Reuters Photographers, Through the Lens Collective Photographers
Traditionally ethnographers have indulged in the fantastical and a tribe of contemporary artists working in relation to Africa and its various Diasporas obsess with phantasmagoria and futurity in dealing with contemporary issues. This disavowal of reality is challenged in Remember Me – Liberated Bodies, Charged Objects. We invite the future and the past to collapse into the present. The artists engage the language of photography to evolve a new language for our engagement.
Restitution of cultural artefacts, knowledge, history, memory and the urgency of vigilance in the Anthropocene are the pressing issues of our age. The way we capture and address our most pressing issues and present them for dialogical engagement will determine the way we shape the present and build our futures. The human brain records and interprets factual and fictional instances through the eyes, the camera in-like manner became a bodily extension of the human mind for shaping and sculpting images. First as a faithful documenter of events and happenings from the 19′ century. Then later on as a tool for subjective, fictional narration that trick us into dream-like, imagined worlds.
Unwittingly, the camera became the mental, augment that helps us, remember and dream, share memories, and imagine vivid worlds. While the human mind is the site for the negotiations and fermentation of visual cues. Today, more than ever, humanity has migrated into the visual virtual space where the ocular language is transforming and evolving with rapid pace. These possibilities have allowed us to liberate and possibly augment our bodies, create extensions of ourselves and change the way we live and our capacity for self-expression as a global society. In a time where social media becomes a resource for petitions, affirmative action, social justice, policy or political action. Remember Me – Liberated Bodies, Charged Objects invites us to challenge the subjectivity of (colonial) archives, build and populate sustainable new modes guided by ancestral and contemporary wisdom.