Assistant Editor (Arts) OZOLUA UHAKHEME writes on the life and times of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) founding Artistic Director, Olabisi Silva, who died on February 12, in Lagos after a protracted battle with cancer. She will be buried tomorrow after a funeral mass at Trinity Hall, Victoria Island, Lagos.
The celebrated independent contemporary African art curator, the late Bisi Silva, 57, returned home after an academic sojourn abroad with a strong desire to enrich the intellectual content of contemporary visual art and artists. That was in 2000.
She partnered founder, Mydrim Art Gallery, Ikoyi Lagos, Mrs. Sinmidele Adesanya, to run the Institute of Visual Art and Culture (IVAC), a precursor to Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos (CCA). The platform’s activities, IVAC Talks, were more of intellectual discourse.
Among speakers at the events were Katy Deepwell, Edie Chambers, the Zambian painter William Miko and South African art historian Colin Richards.
Seven years later, the late Bisi re-engineered her plans to reposition contemporary art. This gave birth to the CCA in Yaba, Lagos. The centre is aimed at promoting research, documentation and exhibitions related to contemporary art in Africa and abroad. She took the unfamiliar path to raise awareness for contemporary art by organising art exhibitions skewed towards installation, mixed media, and photography, among others.
Her choice of artists for exhibition at CCA was also informed by these media as well as her preparedness to embrace the new thinking. Soon, the centre became one of the leading art centres in Nigeria as well as choice venue for young artists, especially those who can experiment.
Bisi, who studied Languages and Foreign Civilisation at University of Dijon, France, between 1985 and 1989, returned to Camden Arts Centre, North London as arts administrator.
She had her primary education at St. John’s Nursery and Primary School, Onipanu, Lagos but studied at Lowther College, North Wales, UK, for her secondary education. Her interests were travel and culture. The passion for culture influenced her to enrol for a Masters in Visual Arts Administration: Curating and Commissioning of Contemporary Art at Royal College of Arts, UK in 1993. Her thesis was on Black (Visibility) in the visual arts: Looking Back and Moving Forward.
She recalled: “When I relocated to Lagos in 2002, I couldn’t find a space that would allow me to develop this expanded notion of curatorial practices. Most of the galleries were commercial and as far as I knew, there were no non-profits.”
In her 17 years of practice in Nigeria, she focused on working with emerging and mid-career artists. She was a good orator, though with some oyinbo (foreign) accent. Her fluency in French language was handy for her to navigate the global art community. Bisi’s contact list is one of the richest among the galleries, to the extent that even government cultural agencies always use her network to spread information to stakeholders.
CCA’s first major show was Lemi Ghariokwu’s solo exhibition, which included the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti’s (AbamiEda) album sleeve designs dating back to the 70s. Apart from regular exhibitions, Bisi executed some important projects that further sold Nigerian art to the globe. Apart from being co-curator of The Progress of Love, a transcontinental collaboration across three venues in US and Nigeria between October 2012 and January 2013, co-curator of J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere: Moments of Beauty, she also co-curated the following art events: the second Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece, Praxis: Art in Times of Uncertainty’ in September 2009; Dakar Biennale in Senegal 2006; and in collaboration with the Portuguese art critic Isabel Carlos, she selected artists for the third Artes Mundi prize in Wales. She also curated Contact Zone: Contemporary Art from West and North Africa October 2007 and an exhibition titled Telling … Contemporary Finnish photography in the Seventh Biennial of African Photography in Bamako in November 2007.
In October 2014, she launched a pioneering initiative that published over 200 compelling photographs from Ojeikere’s vast archive spanning over six decades of Nigeria’s history. It explored themes ranging from traditional hairstyles to sartorial portraits and architectural studies, a stunning collection of high-quality black-and-white photographs, a collection of critical essays, an in-depth interview with the artist, as well as an updated exhibition history, bibliography, and timeline of Ojeikere’s career.
The book is a major contribution to the history of African photography. Contributors included artists Jide Adeniyi-Jones and Don Barber, art historians Antawan I. Byrd, Erin Haney, IkemOkoye, and curators Aura Seikkula and Bisi Silva.
A year later, she was appointed Artistic Director, Bamako Encounters Biennale of African Photography, Mali, with the theme: Telling Time. It was the biennale’s 10th anniversary.
She founded Asiko International Art School to give access to information that could lead to meaningful dialogue, exchange and collaboration. And the school which is nomadic in nature has engaged about 80 participants from 15 countries.
No doubt,Bisi’s large tribe of fans will miss the quintessential curator who until death, has strong opinions on most artists and art issues, sometimes to the extreme of being pessimistic about the dysfunctional state of the nation’s culture agencies. While many felt she opened fresh vistas for development of Nigerian art, others thought she brought strange ideas that insist on ‘stuff that is not art to be art’
Until her death, Bisi was on the editorial board of N Paradoxa, an international feminist art journal and was the guest editor for the Africa and African Diaspora Issue of N.Paradoxa (January 2013), @ Lagos, Nigeria. She has written on contemporary art for international publications, including Art Monthly, Untitled, Third Text, M Metropolis, Agufon and for newspapers, such as ThisDay.
She was in the league of renowned curators, such as Okwui Enwenzor and Olu Oguibe.
Bisi’s death leaves an incredibly empty hole that will be difficult to fill. US-based Nigerian art scholar, Prof. Dele Jegede, said this of the late Bisi: “To have done so much to place Nigeria on the world map is not to have died. She did not die who recorded remarkable deeds with relatively little in very difficult, even stressful and underappreciated contexts. She is alive who breathed a new life to visual culture and empowered authors to become collectors of ideas and propagators of individuated texts. Bisi, you did not die; you simply could not; cannot. It is admittedly difficult to wrap my brain around the indisputable fact that direct access to you is now permanently denied. But, your work continues to immortalise you. What to do without you in those critical spaces where you’ve always loomed? That’s too cruel a fate to contemplate!”
Former Director, Goethe Institut, Lagos, Marc André Schmachtel, who worked with Bisi for many years in Lagos was sad but urged the artists and CCA to keep her legacy alive. He recalled: ‘’A few months ago, I spoke to her. She was still in the hospital in Hamburg and her voice was weak. She complained about the German food and was looking forward to get back to Lagos. But, she had so many plans! Now she is gone, a terrible loss for her family and for the Nigerian and international art world. The energy she had! She needed it as well, to break into a male-dominated Nigerian art world and to establish the CCA as the leading art centre of the region. Over the years of working with her, my respect for her achievements and her resolution grew bigger and bigger. I don’t know the artist she didn’t know and didn’t have an opinion on. There is so much more to say about her and I hope better skilled people than me will do this.”
If you called Bisi a feminist or an apostle of gender parity, especially in the art, you were right. She saw that the narrative of visual art had been constructed largely around the male artist at the expense of female artists, who are not visible. However, she was glad that despite this lopsidedness, most of the leading art galleries and events in Lagos were run by women, believing that these ‘’emerging female run outfits would reverse the tone of the narrative’’.
Notwithstanding her pessimism about creative industry, she was never found wanting when the opportunity presented itself to promote art and artists outside this nation’s shores. In fact, she was an incredible ambassador of Nigeria on the globe. She demonstrated this at many major art events in Paris, Dakar, Bamako, Jo Burg and Abidjan, among others, where her views on global art issues were held in high esteem.