2017 Lagos Biennial - Living on the edge

Lagos Biennale, this way please

Ebutte Metta, Apapa road, Saturday afternoon, 2PM. Residents go about their business as usual. Road-side shops are waiting for their customers, mamas sell fish, tomatoes, pepper, and so on. An empty bus breaks down in front of us. Its driver attempts to push it by himself but to no avail. None of the walkers-by offer assistance, actually they have got their own business to mind and the sight of a bus breaking down is nothing extraordinary. Considering that we are standing and not about to move, my driver decides to go and help push the vehicle on the side of the road. We are now able to restart our progression and we turn into the road leading to the railway compound which is closed by a large two-way gate. Vehicles have to alternate through one of the lane for security reason.
The railway compound is a residential area abundantly provided with buildings that used to serve the railway industry back in the days. A firemen place, the headquarters of the railway company, warehouses, a shed to shelter and repair train coaches and a lot of housing for railway staff families. The compound is a large expanse, fairly green. There is an atmosphere of countryside where time would have stopped fifty years ago. Although it is next to Apapa road and the congested market of Ebute-Metta, the compound does not have any of the bustle that surrounds it.
A few wooden colonial houses still stand and one of them, called Jaekel house, is the headquarters of the Legacy association which focuses on preserving the legacy of the past centuries but also promoting tourism in Nigeria. They offer train rides once or twice a year from Lagos to Abeokuta.
Today is the day of the opening of the first Lagos Biennial of contemporary art and it is spread in several buildings of the compound. The clock is ticking. Well it is ticking for the artists and the organisers, few of which are putting the last touch to their art installations. So the biennial is not yet officially opened and visitors are kindly asked to wait for the official opening tour which should happen around 3PM, Nigeria time. The ground floor of Jaekel house is occupied by a large table at which sit the staff of the Biennial studiously busy creating labels for the exhibition and getting ready for the opening. The theme of the Biennial is "living on the edge".

the shed, main exhibition hall

We go and have a preview look at the nearby Ilukwe house, which is in advanced state of disrepair. It was probably built in the first part of the twentieth century and never restored. Walls are painted in green and it is the place hosting conceptual videos presented by artists of different nationalities. A spanish female artist, called Ro Caminal, introduces two videos around the theme of migration. One is a boat-hook attraction in which European visitors are being asked to come and hook one of the boats full of migrants that are floating on a tank full of water. Laughter and a very Felinian music does the sound background to sarcastically describe the distance between the distress of migrants stuck at sea and the inhuman statistics which are piling up in European news channels. The second one is about an African woman whose husband has abandoned her to go to Europe and started a new family there, another aspect of migration.
Another room has a tryptic video about African traders in China in the city of Guangzhou done by a Kenyan artist. About half a million Africans live in an area called Chocolate City. Nigerians, mostly Igbos, dominate the African presence and some of them have now families. The author was telling that there were 10 different Nigerian football teams and only one East-African team to give an order of magnitude of the Nigerian presence.
Upstairs the bathroom area has been re-tiled with white sheets of paper decorated with black drawings from an Angolan artist who presented a video on a ritual around the making of guarri out of cassava plants. He said his grand-mother used to do it and it had a particular meaning which he is yet to understand fully. He intends therefore to travel to Brazil to find traces of it if possible. He argued that cassava had been brought into Africa from the Americas which surprised some of the Nigerian visitors who shook their head in disbelief. Ah! It can't be possible!
On the theme "living on the edge", an Asian lady living in Lagos met several Lagosians in various areas of the city to ask them what the theme could mean for them. She presented there interview next to a picture of her with them if they accepted to be photographed.

the fight against corruption

Back to Jaekel house a little after 3PM, there was no sign of imminent opening so I decided to sneak out discreetly and follow the signboards leading to the shed where the larger part of the works are presented. It was a pleasant walk along residential buildings, where residents were going about their life as usual, hair braiding, wood-cutting, aerating mattresses... and through a bunch of banana trees planted along the railway that had to be crossed to reach the shed. It was the first time that I saw the railway. People were walking on the rails carrying load in a distance. Latter a train would actually drive past with abundant horning to warn people they should free-up the rail path.
A few meters away stood the shed where more artworks were presented along train carriages. Despite the presence of a generator, power was not yet on, which handicapped some of the works like a plant loaded with sensors to pilot the movement of its branches based on certain inputs.
It was somewhat difficult to understand all the works as none of them had yet been labelled but some where explained by the artists who stood next to them to gather feedback.
Dunja Herzog presented a selection of mirror based furniture together with a few vintage objects from the UTC, a food company, that she found in an open-air market in Ikeja.
A series of photographs from the early building of Eko Atlantic, was questioning the creation of this new city on reclaimed land which was meant to protect the coast of Bar Beach from erosion and has displaced a number of poor people who used to live there. Cities expand onto new pieces of land which become rich at the expense of those who are being asked to vacate the place.
I enjoyed the representation of anti-corruption enforcement by EFCC as a boxing ring with EFCC staff as arbiters and around which onlookers with travel bags full of cash were witnessing the fight going on. Ayo Akinwande, the artist, was commenting that most people passively look at the corruption taking place, few people would actually expose themselves and fight it.


sweet talk in a carriage: an impromptu performance by local residents

I also liked the spontaneous running of two chicken amidst a field of charred-looking wooden logs, with machetes still planted into them. The area was dotted with fire-extinguishers labelled "coolu your tempo". It was certainly related to the impact of deforestation on climate warming.
In the middle of the exhibition hall, cozily seated by the only window of a wooden carriage, two local residents, a man and a women, were engaged in a sweet chat session which looked like an spontaneous performance in itself.