- Calls for Fellows
The “Connecting the Dots” project (2023-2025) aims at facilitating community engagement with public museums in Nigeria through the establishment of a young scholars museum fellowship program, a museum conversation series and a youth education program.
It is implemented by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria and supported by The Ford Foundation. Six Nigerian Museums are participating in the programme: Slave History Museum, Calabar; National Museum, Kaduna; Benin City National Museum; CRIMMD Photo History Museum, Lagos; Colonial History Museum, Aba and the Natural History Museum, OAU, Ile-Ife.
This project is a way forward in facilitating engagement, education and enjoyment of historical and contemporary art at various museum spaces across Nigeria. There are three main pillars of the project namely the Museum Fellowship programme, the Museum conversation series and the Youth education programme.
The Museum Fellowship Program will focus on a critical engagement with Nigerian museum, content and the creation of research results that engage contemporary topics such as democracy, African traditional leadership systems, gender, generational difference, justice and social cohesion.
The Museum Conversation Series will take place at the six museums across Nigeria. In addition to other audiences, these dialogues will target artists seeking to work with the collections and ground their work in research.
As part of the Youth Education Program, young people will be invited to make visual representations of artefacts, heritage, culturally significant symbols or entities and other parts of the communities’ histories and how these objects resonate with them. The aim will be to elicit young people’s interpretations of the objects and the objects’ significance in their cultures or their lives, rather than a presentation of the objects themselves.
The Goethe-Institut Nigeria together with the Ford Foundation and Nigerian museum partners invites artists/art researchers, archaeologists, architects, social researchers etc.