Tiwani Contemporary presents Mirrors & Echoes the first collaboration between Mary Evans and Emeka Ogboh.

A dialogue between Evans and Ogboh was first established through a radio broadcast during Art Dubai 2013, in which Ogboh (who currently resides in Lagos) and Evans (who left the city as a child), discussed the rapidly evolving landscape of the Nigerian megacity. Evans’ recollection of the sites of her childhood merged with Ogboh’s current observations on his hometown to form a portrait of an ever-changing city, crossing space and time.

Mirrors & Echoes starts where the radio conversation ended, and further investigates notions of memory in relation to place, taking as its particular focus the interface between sound and image.

Mary Evans, Held. Courtesy Tiwani Contemporary

The exhibition presents entirely new works, many of them site-specific. These include a number of individual works by Evans and Ogboh, as well as a large-scale collaborative installation, which forms the centrepiece of the exhibition.

Comprising paper cut-outs, video, sound and sculptural elements, this multi-faceted collaborative work creates an imaginary space based on the artists’ recollections and current experiences of Lagos. Evans and Ogboh stitch together disparate elements in a multitude of ways, layering media and ideas so it becomes difficult to separate them. In doing so, they create an experience that highlights the intersections and instabilities of memory, history, subjectivity and place, as they evolve over time.

Private View: Thursday 13 November, 6.30 – 8.30pm

www.tiwani.co.uk

Born in 1963, Mary Evans moved from Nigeria to England at a young age. She currently lives and works in London. The interplay between memory and history is central to Evans’ practice. Her pattern, signs, symbols and pictograms are borrowed from popular culture and articulate her research focus, which is centered on the social, political and historical frameworks of diaspora, migration, and global mobility and exchange. Working in a variety of media such as paper, rubber, paint, print and digital, Evans makes site and research-specific installations that go beyond the decorative to explore the interrelation of ‘fine art’, ‘craft’, ‘decoration’ and ‘ornament’. Evans studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths College and the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam. She has taken part in numerous exhibitions in the UK and internationally, including solo exhibitions Cut and Paste, Tiwani Contemporary, London (2012); Meditations, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, USA (2008); as well as group exhibitions such as Africa Utopia, South Bank Centre (2014);Where do I end and you begin, Edinburgh Art Festival (2014); Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art,Blaffer Art Museum, Houston University, USA (2013); Art Dubai Commission (2013), Farewell to Post- Colonialism,3rd Guangzhou Triennale, Guangdong Museum of Art, China (2008). She has been the recipient of several residencies and awards, including Arts and Literary Arts Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center (2014) and The Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, National Museum of African Art, Washington DC, USA (2010). Evans teaches as an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.

Born in 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, Emeka Ogboh lives and works in Lagos. Ogboh’s work takes broad notions of listening and hearing as its main focus. He works primarily with sound and video to explore ways of understanding cities as cosmopolitan spaces with unique characters. Based on field-recordings, these sound and video recordings highlight processes of spatial and cultural change in the globalised city, as they manifest themselves over time through sound. He has produced a corpus of work entitled Lagos Soundscapes, which captures the ever-changing sounds of Africa’s most populous city – what he calls the “history and aural infrastructure” of Lagos. A graduate of the Fine and Applied Arts Department at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Ogboh has had work exhibited in numerous venues in Nigeria and internationally, including Dak’Art 2014, the Dakar Biennale; The Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria; Menil Collection, Houston, USA; Whitworth Art Gallery and the Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, Massachusetts, USA; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland; and Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne, Germany. Ogboh is a DAAD 2014