Berlin – Lagos 2018: On exchange, mobility and heritage
Gallery Wedding - Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin, Germany
An Exhibition by Ojudun Taiwo Jacob (feat. Viki Simone), Natalia Orendain del Castillo, Jumoke Adeyanju in the frame of the exhibition UP (Unsustainable Privilges) curated by Solvej Helweg Ovesen and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung.
During their stays either in Germany or Nigeria, Ojudun Taiwo Jacob, Natalia Orendain del Castillo and Jumoke Adeyanju have been working on the overarching theme of the residency programme Berlin-Lagos 2018, which deals with an artistic reflection on questions of what it means today to own privileges, how to lose them or acquire new ones. The three positions come together in a presentation that is set within the exhibition programme »UP (Unsustainable Privileges)« curated by Solvej Helweg Ovesen and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung at Galerie Wedding, Berlin. Current parameters of an artist's journey, including its limitations and possibilities, are considered: the possibilities to travel and move freely across borders seems to be a matter of course from the Western point of view. Restricting and negotiating these freedoms, which are also part of a post-colonial legacy, is as much a part of it as memories and ideas Heimat, as well as the possibility of finding different approaches to foreign places.
Ojudun Taiwo Jacob (Lagos) develops in collaboration with Viki Simone a new video and performance work, which will be premiered at the opening. Based on a decidedly African perspective on the Berlin Conference, in which Western colonial powers divided the African continent into colonial territories in 1884, Taiwo plays through a division of the geographical Europe and thus demonstrates the high degree of external determination of the procedure. In a separate space within the exhibition, Taiwo will visibly perform the division and reorganization of Europe as it was done from 1884-1885, in which there is also a representation of power. (Film: Viki Simone; Music: Pete Nattrass and Blue Saloon; Map: Sebastian Loerscher)
Natalia Orendain del Castillo's (Berlin) artistic research focuses on spatial perception and production as well as sound. She also uses immersive, installative and participatory formats in which she also thinks about the perceptions of the audience. During her stay in Lagos, she researches the port of the city. It uses different forms of cartographic material of trade routes or goods traffic as well as various audio and video recordings. The whole work is more of an interim report of her journey showing her approach to non-objective mapping, which is based on the transfer of certain visual systems to acoustic or vice versa and questions about the orientation of the individual and his access to, as well as his Perception of the world.
Jumoke Adeyanju (Berlin) developed the concept of {{{thirdspace(d)out}}} as a one-day, multimedia performance series during her stay in Lagos. She combines live painting (Thomyyas), live writing (Candice Nembhard & Victor Omere), music (Jack Mensah) and dance (Thomias Radin & Jumoke Adeyanju) to explore the many stages and dimensions of diasporic nostalgia, postcolonial transformative healing and resurrection of lost memories. {{{thirdspace(d)out}}} includes recorded interviews and a soundscape that explore liminality, the in-between, of reciprocal memories. Adeyanju goes beyond African identity markers and focuses on African- and Caribbean diaspora in the world.
Performance by Ojudun Taiwo Jacob 22. November 2018, 6pm Uhr
Lagos – Berlin is a residency programme for young artists and curators from Berlin and Lagos initiated by the Goethe-Institut Lagos in cooperation with the Department for Art and Culture Berlin-Mitte, Galerie Wedding – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst, ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, SAVVY Contemporary and Arthouse Foundation Lagos.
Exhibition Histories
Magiciens de la Terre
Racism: a bigger picture
The Black, Asian and White Racial Triangulation
A conversation with Walter Mignolo
"Decolonial aesthetics/aesthesis has become a connector across the continents"