After a tumultuous season away from its traditional venue, African Artist’ Foundation (AAF) has partnered with Alliance Francaise for a group exhibition titled, “Dig Where You Stand: From Coast to Coast.”
Scheduled for Saturday 26th October, 2024, at Alliance Française, Ikoyi, Lagos, the show is organised in collaboration with Alliance Française de Lagos/Mike Adenuga Centre.
The exhibition will run from 26th October October 26th till 23rd November 23rd, 2024. Dig Where You Stand–From Coast to Coast is a project presented as a series of exhibitions, offering a new model of engagement with questions of decolonization, restitution, and repatriation. Developed around the idea of regeneration, the exhibition becomes an experimental site for capital, ecology and resources repatriation — both tangible and symbolic, an exercise in the reclamation of the commons.
This approach shifts the decolonial paradigm away from the two pillars of Western museums/institutions/art spaces and futurists imaginaries toward a solution-oriented perspective, exploring the regenerative potential of art across the African continent and its diasporas that is meaningful and relevant in the present time. It devolves and evolves from so-called Afro-futurist discourse into a presentism that connects Africa with its various diasporas.
The project seeks to involve local communities in generative strategies of intervention, cooperation, activism, exchange, and pedagogy. It becomes a discursive platform for posing questions and initiating conversations about local realities, politics of dispossession, and displacement, as well as broader issues related to imperialism, privilege, access, and class.
The project designed as a series of travel exhibitions launched its first iteration in Ghana and has since travelled through Togo, Portugal and most recently Benin Republic, as the 2nd, 3rd and 4th iterations.
Following the recent success of the 4th iteration, we are pleased to invite you to participate in an Activation exhibition for the project in Lagos.
The activation exhibition, featuring the works of Tola Wewe, Gerald Chukwuma, Adeju Thompson, Raquel van Haver, Yusuf Aina and Caleb Prah (African Artists’ Foundation’s current Artist-in-residence), aims to create awareness and engagement with the overarching theme of Dig Where You Stand through a curated series of activities, including the exhibition itself, artist talks and a discussion between Caleb Prah and Marina Paulenka (Director of Exhibitions, Fotografiska Berlin).
This activation serves as a bridge between the exhibition and the public inviting audiences to interact with the ideas and artworks central to the theme.
