A residency like no other

The works of these artists depict new contemporary experiments in African arts. In this residency programme in Lagos, these artists prove that they are some of the best. The residency programme enables the artists stay together for a short period of time during which they produce a number of works to justify their stay. The artists are:

ALOKI has held solo exhibitions at Circle Art Gallery in Nairobi, Kenya, and Ebony Curated in Cape Town, South Africa. He has also participated in the Kampala Art Biennale and the Ostrale Biennale in Dresden, Germany. He has completed artist residencies at Le Centre in Cotonou, Benin and Oriel Plas Glyn-y-Weddw Gallery in Wales, UK. Nyamai Kaloki lives and works in Nairobi.

Ade Coker is a photographer and videographer based in London. As a person of Nigerian heritage growing up in the UK, his work explores the duality of diasporic identity. His project in Lagos is the second part of a collaborative series with his sister and fashion designer Tolu Coker. In its first iteration, which was exhibited at the Lagos Biennial in 2019, the project documented diasporic identity in London at the North Kensington Council Housing, alongside the photo archives of their late father and social activist Kayode Coker. In its second iteration in Lagos, the project will trace their heritage and traditions back home, through the lives and accounts of members of the community. Presented as a short film and photo series, the project will bring a different narrative from a perspective of communities within Nigeria. Ade Coker studied at Central Saint Martins and Loughborough University.

Chisom Onuoha is a conceptual artist who interrogates questions of power that are baked into technology. Through text, video, print, installation and computer code, Onuoha explores how computational structures and information systems intersect with social ones. In Lagos, she will continue her project The Library of Missing Datasets, an installation that pinpoints blank spots in data collections. This next chapter uses Lagos as the site of entry for investigating what it looks like to visualize and make work about the data that isn’t being collected around the city.

Onuoha will create a video piece that dwells on the geographic sites of absence within Lagos, focusing on the blank spots that animate the city.

Onuoha received a BA in Anthropology of Technology from Princeton University and a M.P.S. in Art, Design and Technology from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She has completed residencies at Pioneer Works and the Eyebeam Center for the Arts, among others. In 2019, she held a solo exhibition at Haverford College, Philadelphia, USA. Onuoha is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

Marcia Kure is a visual artist who lives and works between the United States and Nigeria. Kure trained at the University of Nigeria and is an alumna of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In addition to solo exhibitions in Nigeria, Germany, the Netherlands, UK and USA, her work has been featured at La Triennial, Paris (2013), the 11th Dak’art Biennale in Dakar, Senegal (2013), the International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville (2006) and the Sharjah International Biennale (2005). She participated in the traveling exhibition, Body Talk, at Wiels Contemporary Art Center (Brussels, Belgium), Frac (Lorraine, France) and Lunds Konstalle (Sweden); as well as the group exhibition Not A Single Story at Wanås Konst (Sweden) and Nirox Sculpture Park (Johannesburg) in 2018-2019.

Marcia Kure is a visiting professor at the Royal Art Institute in Stockholm, Sweden in 2019-2020, and she was a research fellow of the Smithsonian Institution (2008), a visual artist in residence at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (2014), and winner of the Uche Okeke Prize for Drawing (1994). Kure’s work is in the collections of the British Museum, Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Newark Museum, The Hood Museum, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, IWALEWA-Haus, Frac Lorraine and the Sindika Dokolo Foundation. For her residency project in Lagos, Marcia Kure will explore the macro-economies of women traders in Lagos markets, tying in her own personal histories of the marketplace alongside art historical references to Nigerian modernism.

1. FLORINE DÉMOSTHÈNE:  Florine Démosthène explores black femininity against the backdrop of her own biography, working across painting, drawing, collage and installation. Démosthène was born in the United States and raised between Port-au-Prince, Haiti and New York. Using a mixture of mylar, ink, pigment and glitter, her artworks depict voluptuous, curvaceous bodies that reimagine a new kind of mythology around the black female heroine. In Lagos, Démosthène will produce an installation that confronts conflicting ideas on black femininity and the black female body, taking on the persona of a warrior heroine.

Démosthène earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School for Design in New York and her Master of Fine Arts from Hunter College-City University of New York. She has exhibited extensively through group and solo exhibitions in the USA, Caribbean, UK, Europe and Africa, with recent solo shows including a solo booth exhibition with Mariane Ibrahim Gallery at the The New York Armory Fair, Expo Chicago with Mariane Ibrahim Gallery, and The Stories I Tell Myself at Gallery 1957, Accra. She is the recipient of a Tulsa Artist Fellowship, Arts Moves Africa Grant and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. She has participated in residencies in the USA, UK, Slovakia, Ghana and Tanzania.