During Lagos’ vibrant art, photography, fashion, and design season in November, Artpedia presents an exhibition titled Home is Here and There, exploring issues of Migration, Movement, and Mobility within the African continent.
Home is Here and There examines how Africans move within the continent; from one country to another, within the same country, from rural to urban. It explores the concept of home when the sense of place is ever changing.
The exhibition draws its title from Marc Aufraise’s statement in his 2014 essay Identities, “Seizing control of one’s history, understanding it, pushes one to take on the back-and-forth between past and present, here and there”.
Making an account of a trajectory – that of Africa – from the past to the present-day realities as expressed by the very agents and witnesses of this perpetual evolution, the concept of migration is beyond moving out of the continent; it also involves the movement of Africans within their continent. While this exhibition acknowledges the historical evolution narratives of the African diasporas, and the various waves of migrations that make up the constitution of the African community outside the continent, Home is Here and There examines cultural connections, and intellectual movements within the continent through centuries of interactions. It presents the rich legacy of these connections, and how it has forged the continuity of the Africans as a people. The exhibition aims to present an erasure of geographic borders, sense of nationality, and notion of territories in the mind of viewers. The exhibition rather draws attention to the connections and values that weave us together as Africans, thus presenting a cosmopolitan African continent.
Home is Here and There invites three African artists – Nathalie Djakou Kassi, Bamidele George Agbezin, and Ben Osondu Onuorah – to explore the concept of home when the sense of place is ever changing. It poses the question, ‘where is home’?
The exhibition is curated by Nigerian art curator, Favour Ritaro.