Arthouse Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria, January 27-February 10, 2018

At Work features projects created during the artists’ three-month residencies with the Arthouse Foundation in 2017. These artists produced series that question how we interact and move within the urban environment, and the mythologies that accompany them. 

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Participating Artists:  Kadara Enyeasi, Thierry Oussou, Nengi Omuku, Francois Beaurain, Gloria Oyarzabal Lodge, Christian Newby

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Art Twenty One, Lagos, Nigeria, December 2, 2017-January 22, 2018

ARTOJA, the new online marketplace and creative production company for contemporary art and design in Africa, presented the inaugural portfolio of limited edition fine art prints by Olu Amoda, Jelili Atiku, Kadara Enyeasi, Obinna Makata, Dennis Osadebe and Bob Nosa Uwagboe. ARTOJA produces limited edition fine art prints, offering signed and numbered multiples of artworks by upcoming and renowned visual artists. 

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Red Door Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria, June 2017

In Dennis Osadebe’s series of mixed media canvases, men and women of various professions are dressed in spacesuits. The scenes are at once surreal and absurd, with intricate patterns of Ankara fabric, bold colors and a flattened plane. 

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Odessa/Batumi Photo Days, Ukraine, April 2017

Produced for the Odessa/Butami Photo Days Festival in Odessa, Ukraine, this exhibition presents a selection of new photography in Nigeria. The project was featured during the festival's Evening Screening Nights, April 9-23, 2017, presented as a projection alongside original music composed by Nigerian musician Ré Olunuga. 
 
Participating artists: Aderemi Adegbite, Ade Adekola, Medina Dugger, Thompson Ekong, Kadara Enyeasi, Namsa Leuba, Ima Mfon, Abraham Oghobase, Lakin Ogunbanwo, Adeola Olagunju, Logo Oluwamuyiwa, and Chibuike Uzoma. 

Arthouse Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria, March 18-April 7, 2017

The first edition of Arthouse Foundation's At Work exhibition presented new projects created during the artists’ three month residencies in 2016. These artists question how cultural identity is framed through complex social and political forces, raising issues ranging from economic inequality and government corruption to gender issues and methods of consumption.

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Participating Artists: Tyna Adebowale, Jelili Atiku, Dipo Doherty, Olumide Onadipe

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Art Twenty One, Lagos, Nigeria, April 30-May 22, 2016

Breaking News is a group exhibition that explores the politics and mechanisms of the mass media. Breaking News questions how information is disseminated, fact is constructed, and how social and political life are filtered through the lens of the culture industry. 

Participating Artists: Jakob S. Boeskov and Teco Benson, Obinna Makata, Native Maqari, Abraham Oghobase, Bob-Nosa Uwagboe, Chibuike Uzoma, Uche Uzorka. 

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National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria, September 26-October 16, 2015

In his recent mixed-media canvases, Rom Isichei depicts young fashionable men and women as they pose for selfies in front of their mobile phones. Whether snapping with friends, attending recreational events, or sitting at the family dinner table, the subjects are caught standstill as they gaze into the electronic device below them, engrossed in the reflection of their own image. This exhibition, held at the National Museum in Lagos, featured Rom Isichei's newest mixed media and canvas works. 

Art Twenty One, Lagos, Nigeria, June 29-September 10, 2015

Elsewhere is a group exhibition that explores contemporary notions of fantasy in an interconnected global environment. Working across artistic mediums, including painting, photography, sculpture, and collage, the artists in this exhibition define alternative ways of depicting otherness, not rooted in spatial boundaries but by instability, fluidity, and cross-cultural assimilation. Elsewhere explores the relationship between history, memory, and the creation of new imaginaries, ranging from material manifestations of the afterlife to fake artifacts, cultural reconfigurations, and performative interventions. In doing so, they form new understandings of ritual, transcendence and belonging that are intimately tied to the signifiers of a global economy. 
 
Participating Artists: Joseph Eze (Nigeria), Namsa Leuba (Switzerland), Vincent Michéa (France), Abraham Oghobase (Nigeria), Demola Ogunajo (Nigeria), Paa Joe and Jacob Tetteh-Ashong (Ghana), Yarisal and Kublitz (Switzerland/Denmark)

THAT ART FAIR, Cape Town, South Africa, February 27-March 1, 2015

Namsa Leuba's first solo exhibition brought together her work in fashion photography alongside her theatrical personal projects. 

Lagos, Nigeria, October 25-November 26, 2014

LagosPhoto 2014 examines contemporary photographers working in Africa who negotiate the boundaries and relationships between photography, beliefs, and truths. Incorporating conceptual and performative strategies, these artists imagine different futures and charter fictive worlds, using photography as a catalyst to investigate the changing realities of Africa today.
 

FNB Joburg Art Fair, Johannesburg, South Africa, August 22-24, 2014

This exhibition presented a selection of five artists that were included in LagosPhoto 2014. These artists create photographic fictions as they question ideas of truth and repesentation in photography.

Participating artists: Jenevieve Aken, Namsa Leuba, Cristina de Middel, Karl Ohiri and Rikka Kassinen and Patrick Willocq. 

Lagos, Nigeria, October 25-November 16, 2013

The Megacity and the Non-City explores how the development of urban centers in Africa and the technical advance of photography have transformed our sense of place in a globally connected world. 
 

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FNB Joburg Art Fair, Johannesburg, South Africa, September 27-29, 2013

Phantasms of the Non-City presents a selection from the 2013 edition of the LagosPhoto festival in Lagos, Nigeria. The artists presented in Phantasms of the Non-City adopt photographic practices expanded by technical and performative strategies to reflect the circulation of images in our society, and their mass consumption and capacity to document our world views.
 
Participating Artists: Cyrus Kabiru (Kenya), Karl Ohiri (Nigeria/UK), Uche Okpa-Iroha (Nigeria), Adeola Olagunju (Nigeria), Mouhamadou Sow (Senegal). 

Galerie 23, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 12-June 3, 2013

Mediations presents recent works on paper by Nigerian artists Uche Uzorka and Obinna Makata, two contemporaries who are quickly becoming cornerstones of the burgeoning arts community in West Africa. Uche Uzorka and Obinna Makata are mixed media artists who live and work in Lagos. After attending the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and working as practicing artists in Abuja together, both artists have recently undergone residencies at the African Artists’ Foundation’s Artist in Residency (AIR) program. In these new bodies of work, Uzorka and Makata incorporate similar practices using drawing and collage to comment on the vast changes occurring in Nigeria today, including urban development, the population explosion, and shifting cultural values. Through the mediation of materials, processes, and cultural critique, Uzorka and Makata comment on the social fabric of daily life in the bustling and ever-changing megacity of Lagos today. 

African Artists' Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria, March 8-April 5, 2013

Designing Africa: Appropriating Culture, Mediums, and Meanings presents a survey of the vital yet often under-appreciated emerging tendencies in contemporary design on the African continent. With a particular focus on Nigeria, Designing Africa examines the work of a diverse group of artists in the country who explore avenues of the vast design field, including product design, furniture design, graphic design, typography, and constructed surfaces. While their practices span wide spectrums of art and design, their work shares a commonality in a particular design sensibility, one that can be traced back to a shared interest in process, experimentation, and presentation. 

Participating Artists: Native Almaqri (Nigeria), Chinenye Emelogu (Nigeria), Ifeanyi Oganwu (Nigeria), Alafuro Sikoki-Coleman (Nigeria), THANKSTHANKSAFRICA. 

African Artists' Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria, January 31-February 23 ,2013

Line.Sign.Symbol is the second solo exhibition of Nigerian artist Uche Uzorka. Uzorka’s artistic practice incorporates painting, collage, cutting and pasting, and drawing in an examination of the processes of urban street culture. In Uche Uzorka’s most recent works on paper, which include ink and charcoal drawings, sombre tones of black, grey, and red dominate the colour spectrum, boldly protruding from the white and barren remainder of the blank picture plane. At first glance, these works are best described as abstract drawings, with amorphous shapes and splashes of colour flowing together in an ambiguous and seemingly haphazard rhythm. Yet, at closer inspection, meticulous attention has been made to create a myriad of overlapping patterns, bodies, and signs, tightly congested together to form a dense combination of complex design. The drawings reflect the artist's interest in mapping urban culture, charting the city as a cartographer studies terrain. 

Art Africa Miami, Florida, USA, December 4-9, 2012

Nigeria Now: New Trends of Contemporary Art in Nigeria, was organized for Art Africa Miami on behalf of the African Artists' Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria, December 4-9, 2012. Nigeria Now included the work of eleven Nigerian artists who examine the social and political landscape of Nigeria today.
 
Participating Artists: Joseph Eze, Ike Francis, Taiye Idahor, Obinna Makata, Chike Obeagu, Demola Ogunajo, Richardson Ovbiebo, Alafuro Sikoki, Stephen Arueze Ubaka, Bob-Nosa Uwagboe, Uche Uzorka

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Lagos, Nigeria, October 13-November 11, 2012

LagosPhoto 2012 aimed to capture the energy and vibrance that make the city of Lagos such a unique cultural environment. Lagos is the creative and business hub of Nigeria, arguably even Africa, an urban megapolis with a high population density. The rate of change in the city is also rapidly evolving with improvements struggling to keep pace with the restlessness and innovation of the people. Lagos is the most populous city in Nigeria, the second fastest growing city in Africa and the seventh fastest growing city in the world. A city of extremes and contradictions, Lagos transforms with the fast pace of urban migration and the explosion of development and technology that is dissolving barriers and leading to new types of interactions.

A White Space, Lagos, Nigeria, October 8-25, 2012

The Nigerian Nostalgia Project is an online digital archive of collected photographs comprised of images, video, sound bytes, press clippings, publicity stills, and various ephemera depicting scenes and people in Nigeria between 1960 and 1980. The ambiguous photographs create a mosaic-style of portrait of Nigerian society at the cusp of independence and cultural transition. The exhibition at LagosPhoto marks the first time that the project has left the confines of Facebook and entered three-dimensional space. Intimately scaled prints cover the walls of the exhibition venue to form an encapsulating mural.

Goethe-Institut, Lagos, Nigeria, October 6-30, 2012

Appropriating the signs and symbols of Nigerian street culture, Uche Uzorka encapsulates the psychological energy that defines the city of Lagos. Uzorka's work incorporates collage elements using found imagery, recycled materials, ink drawing, and painting techniques. His work suggests an unwillingness to conform to methods of civic control and an ambivalent attitude towards the urban environment.

African Artists' Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria, September 14-30, 2012

Obinna Makata's mixed media collages incorporate diverse visual elements, such as ink drawing and cut fabric, to form a combination of ambiguous bodies and intricately designed patterns. He uses fabric as a metaphor for cultural identity and evolving social paradigms. His works create narrative associations that deal with quotidian issues in contemporary Nigerian society, including visa queues, modern relationships, and crowded urban environments. 

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