Gender*uck: Online Exhibition
| DR PAULA CALLUS |
https://artop.bmth.ac.uk/
Dr Paula Callus presents Gendering Spaces: Women and Art in Nigeria
WURA-NATASHA OGUNJI | PEJU LAYIWOLA | NGOZI SCHOMMERS | PEJU ALATISE
This presentation emerges from ongoing research for the AHRC funded project titled ArtoP: The visual articulations of politics in Nigeria. The research started in 2019 and has been documenting, analysing and archiving the range of art produced in real and digital spaces that expresses political discourse and the politics of everyday life. Amongst these different and often contested spaces, contemporary women artists create work that explores the politics of gender and identity as played out across the different Nigerian spaces. To talk about culturally located notions of gender in Nigeria, is to understand that Nigeria encompasses multiple identities across the various regions that move and flow between these spaces. There are over 400 languages spoken in Nigeria - whether one is Igbo-speaking, Yoruba-speaking, Hausa-speaking, or Edo-speaking, these identities intersect with the constitution and politics of gender. The material circumstances of women and their political interests ‘are themselves historically [and geographically] specific and, therefore, cannot be framed in terms of gender alone.’ (Mills, 2006). This talk will focus specifically upon the work of four contemporary Nigerian women artists to draw out conceptual connections between space, gender and politics.
PEJU ALATISE
https://www.pejualatise.com
Peju Alatise is an interdisciplinary artist, architect and author of two novels. Her debut novel Orita Meta, chronicling the interwoven path of three women, was nominated for the ANA/Flora Nwapa Prize for Women’s Writing in 2006. She started her professional career as an architect working in an architectural firm along side running a private art studio. Today, Peju is one of the leading contemporary artists on the African continent. Her works challenge the status quo of the African society and also of global affairs. She has been consistent with her experimentation with materials and techniques as a medium to analyse various socio-political issues. Peju has also been an influential voice on the Child Not Bride campaign in Nigeria, with her work regularly feeding into this discourse.
Peju Alatise is a fellow at the National Museum of African Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution and the 2017 winner of the FNB Art Prize in Johannesburg. Her work was exhibited at Venice Biennale’s 57th edition, themed Viva Arte Viva (Long Live Art) in the Nigerian pavilion. Her works were also exhibited at the Resignification of Black Bodies, Manifesta 2018 in Palermo Italy and the 2018 EVA biennial in Ireland and 1:54 Art fair in New York.
Peju Alatise is a fellow at the National Museum of African Art, part of the Smithsonian Institution and the 2017 winner of the FNB Art Prize in Johannesburg. Her work was exhibited at Venice Biennale’s 57th edition, themed Viva Arte Viva (Long Live Art) in the Nigerian pavilion. Her works were also exhibited at the Resignification of Black Bodies, Manifesta 2018 in Palermo Italy and the 2018 EVA biennial in Ireland and 1:54 Art fair in New York.
About the artists
WURA-NATASHA OGUNJI
https://wuraogunji.com/home.html
Wura-Natasha Ogunji is a visual artist and performer. Her works include drawings hand-stitched into tracing paper, videos and public performances. Her work is deeply inspired by the daily interactions and frequencies that occur in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, from the epic to the intimate. Ogunji's performances explore the presence of women in public space; these often include investigations of labor, leisure, freedom and frivolity. Recent exhibitions include City Prince/sses at Palais de Tokyo; A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawings at Modern Art Oxford; and Every Mask I Ever Loved at ifa-Galerie, Berlin. She was an Artist-Curator for the 33rd São Paulo Bienal where her large-scale performance Days of Being Free premiered. She has also exhibited at: the inaugural Lagos Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; 1:54, London & New York; Seattle Art Museum; Brooklyn Art Museum; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Ogunji is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; The Dallas Museum of Art; and the Idea Fund. She has a BA from Stanford University [1992, Anthropology] and an MFA from San Jose State University [1998, Photography]. She currently resides in Lagos where she is founder/curator of the experimental art space The Treehouse.
PEJU LAYIWOLA
http://pejulayiwola.com/bio.php
Peju Layiwola is an artist, professor of art history and head of the Department of Creative Arts, University of Lagos. She is a member of the board of the Lagos Studies Association. She is currently the President elect and Vice President of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, USA. She works in a variety of media and focuses on personal and communal histories which centralise Benin as both an ancient kingdom and a contemporary city. Layiwola's dual heritage of Yoruba and Benin informs her art in diverse ways. Her artistic production has in the past three decades, addressed diverse strains of postcolonial condition exploring media and genre ranging from metalwork and pottery to textile and sculpture. Essentially, in her teaching, writing and art, there is a continuous engagement with the twentieth-century themes of artefact pillage, repatriation and restitution; history, memory and cultural imaginary; gender and cultural heterodoxy; the continually mutable processes of production, et cetera. Her new body of works moves from the emotive space of art pillage in Africa captured in her previous solo exhibitions: Benin 1897.com: Art and the Restitution Question, Lagos, Ibadan (2010): Return, Raw Spot Gallery, South Africa (2018) into a more flowery engagement with cloth and its multiple significations.
NGOZI SCHOMMERS
http://ngozischommers.com/
Ngozi Schommers is a Nigerian/German multi-media artist based in Germany and Ghana. Her work focuses on subjects of identity, equality, memory, culture, migration and colonialism. Schommers uses the body and experiences of the female gender, archival materials and memories of her childhood in tackling these subjects. The artistic outcome is a combination of installation with mediums such as paper, paint, charcoal, fibre, photography and performance. As an artist living between West African and Europe, she incorporates experiences of both locations in her work and further expands the discourse using plants, floral patterns and butterflies. These, she manipulates to draw up new forms and parallel meanings. Schommers’ works have been part of several galleries and museums exhibition including Kunsthalle Bremen, Staedtisch galerie Bremen, Ystad Konstmuseum Sweden.
https://wuraogunji.com/home.html
Wura-Natasha Ogunji is a visual artist and performer. Her works include drawings hand-stitched into tracing paper, videos and public performances. Her work is deeply inspired by the daily interactions and frequencies that occur in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, from the epic to the intimate. Ogunji's performances explore the presence of women in public space; these often include investigations of labor, leisure, freedom and frivolity. Recent exhibitions include City Prince/sses at Palais de Tokyo; A Slice through the World: Contemporary Artists’ Drawings at Modern Art Oxford; and Every Mask I Ever Loved at ifa-Galerie, Berlin. She was an Artist-Curator for the 33rd São Paulo Bienal where her large-scale performance Days of Being Free premiered. She has also exhibited at: the inaugural Lagos Biennial; Kochi-Muziris Biennale; 1:54, London & New York; Seattle Art Museum; Brooklyn Art Museum; and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark. Ogunji is a recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and has received grants from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation; The Dallas Museum of Art; and the Idea Fund. She has a BA from Stanford University [1992, Anthropology] and an MFA from San Jose State University [1998, Photography]. She currently resides in Lagos where she is founder/curator of the experimental art space The Treehouse.
PEJU LAYIWOLA
http://pejulayiwola.com/bio.php
Peju Layiwola is an artist, professor of art history and head of the Department of Creative Arts, University of Lagos. She is a member of the board of the Lagos Studies Association. She is currently the President elect and Vice President of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association, USA. She works in a variety of media and focuses on personal and communal histories which centralise Benin as both an ancient kingdom and a contemporary city. Layiwola's dual heritage of Yoruba and Benin informs her art in diverse ways. Her artistic production has in the past three decades, addressed diverse strains of postcolonial condition exploring media and genre ranging from metalwork and pottery to textile and sculpture. Essentially, in her teaching, writing and art, there is a continuous engagement with the twentieth-century themes of artefact pillage, repatriation and restitution; history, memory and cultural imaginary; gender and cultural heterodoxy; the continually mutable processes of production, et cetera. Her new body of works moves from the emotive space of art pillage in Africa captured in her previous solo exhibitions: Benin 1897.com: Art and the Restitution Question, Lagos, Ibadan (2010): Return, Raw Spot Gallery, South Africa (2018) into a more flowery engagement with cloth and its multiple significations.
NGOZI SCHOMMERS
http://ngozischommers.com/
Ngozi Schommers is a Nigerian/German multi-media artist based in Germany and Ghana. Her work focuses on subjects of identity, equality, memory, culture, migration and colonialism. Schommers uses the body and experiences of the female gender, archival materials and memories of her childhood in tackling these subjects. The artistic outcome is a combination of installation with mediums such as paper, paint, charcoal, fibre, photography and performance. As an artist living between West African and Europe, she incorporates experiences of both locations in her work and further expands the discourse using plants, floral patterns and butterflies. These, she manipulates to draw up new forms and parallel meanings. Schommers’ works have been part of several galleries and museums exhibition including Kunsthalle Bremen, Staedtisch galerie Bremen, Ystad Konstmuseum Sweden.