Tiwani Contemporary Lagos opens the 2024 programme with artist Délio Jasse, and the exhibition Caducado. Six years ago, Jasse was a participating artist in the first edition of the Lagos Biennial: Living on the Edge, and we proudly align our selected solo survey during the fourth edition of the Lagos Biennial, Refuge.

Caducado features eight photographic installation series executed between 2014 and 2023 that affirms Jasse’ commitment to early analogue photographic processes, techniques and printing that prefigures the materiality and formation of the photographic print as an object that evokes questions around the provenance of images, the dynamics of the gaze and observation, shifting architectural and civic histories, and subjecthood.

The exhibition title is taken from the Portuguese expression, caducado which is alsothe name of his latest series of 2023 cyanotype works, Caducado and Series Registo, which refers to the existence of expired or discarded ephemeras such as documents, passports, personal effects, archives that have been abandoned and reclaimed by the artist from flea markets. Jasse has selected early to mid-20th century group portraits; that one can only imagine having once belonged to private individuals.

Jasse enters a process of re-imagining the images; his interventions recast figures anew, proposing new questions that are inimitably officiated by his use of a stamp motif or amended with cursive writing layered onto the pictorial surface, re-establishing a new image and encounter with these visual documents. Es Se Mais Mundo Houvera (2021) and Sem Valor (2019) share similar stylistic approaches on textile and Fabriano paper.

Included in the survey are earlier series Terreno Ocupado (2014), Series Urban landscape(2017), Multi Business (2018) and Cidade em movimento (2016) which collectively are fleeting portrayals of the populous, metropolitan, port city of Luanda, Angola; capturing everyday life, economic precarity and prosperity and the tenacity of its citizens held in amongst the urban sprawl of post-colonial, and new commercial architectures.

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