Dani Chukwuezi: ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ at Venice Biennale 2024
Venice Biennale
Nigeria Imaginary
DPS alumnui Dani Chukwuezi recently worked on the Nigeria Imaginary Pavilion at Venice Biennale in her current full-time role working for MOWAA. Museum of West African Art are dedicated to the preservation of heritage, the expansion of knowledge and celebration of West African arts and culture. MOWWA are a catalyst for deepening connections between contemporary arts and culture and the rich cultural heritage of West Africa, and a centre of excellence creating opportunities for African and Diaspora artists and scholars. To do this, MOWWA provide exceptional infrastructure and programmes for the preservation, display, research, learning and exchange in arts and culture from a world-class campus in the heart of the historic district of Benin City, Nigeria. For more information, https://www.nigeriaimaginary.com
The concept of Nigeria Imaginary came from two points of departure. It explores the role of both great moments in Nigeria’s history—moments of optimism—as well as the Nigeria that lives in all of our minds: a Nigeria that could be and is yet to be. Nigeria Imaginary presents different perspectives and constructed ideas, memories, and nostalgias of the country, including an intergenerational and diasporic lens, to imagine a Nigeria for the future. Works range in many differing mediums, including painting, photography, drawing, installation, sculpture, AR, sound, and film.
Venice Biennale
Articulated through many fields of reference and artistic disciplines, Nigeria Imaginary is a restless investigation of the past. It looks back at some of Nigeria’s historic moments and artistic creations, explores the present, and defiantly imagines what is yet to come.
The exhibition also features curated common areas featuring historical artefacts, ephemera, and colloquial objects relating to Nigeria’s historical past and contemporary present. Elaborated upon in the cross-sectional themes, it seeks to provide an immersive viewer experience and provide a visual, intellectual scaffolding for the exhibition. In many ways, the exhibition itself evokes the sensibility of the Mbari Clubs of post- independence Nigeria, which sought to be a centre for cross-disciplinary cultural activity. Aligned in the present, the exhibition at once invites us to question similarity of what came before and revel in the optimism of the future unknown as Nigeria’s collective cultural excitement comes to the fore, once again.
The Nigeria Pavilion, curated by Aindrea Emelife, features new site-specific works by eight artists. In some ways, the Nigeria Pavilion acts as an Mbari Club-- a centre for cultural activity established by African writers, artists, and musicians that was founded in Ibadan, Nigeria (1961) by Ulli Beier, with the involvement of a group of young writers including Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. This school of artists – often called The Art Society – sought after a “laboratory for ideas” – a sentiment and mission, too, for the Nigeria Pavilion. Mbari, as a place and a mission, was a testament to both collective and artistic imaginaries. It was a site for the paradoxical entanglements of myths, experiences of colonial modernity, moral education and utopian fantasy. The Art Society had a patriotic rhetoric. They believed art not to be a game but a duty to the nation, a public matter. It is in these sentiments-- where Mbari and the Nigeria Imaginary shake hands – that the latter takes on this duty, with a new school of artists, and re-imaginings.
The school of artists associated with Mbari were interested in how Nigeria sat within a global context. They conjectured if European Modernism looked to traditional African art, for subject matter but also to develop new formal solutions, then the contemporary artists of the time, too, should reference themselves: their history, their tradition. https://www.nigeriaimaginary.com
Venice Biennale