Afropunk Festival, Ikorodu, Lagos, Nigera 1982. The kids came dressed as cats, we don’t know why…
Dangerous at Night is a piece of speculative cinema that explores and reverse engineers a future singularity arising from the collision of secret fraternities, social clubs, anarchy, and experimental christianity on Nigerian university campuses of the 1980s.
William Gibson once said “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.” I’ve always reconfigured this idea as the future already having arrived, except we just don’t recognise it. So perhaps we don’t need new tech, just advanced perception. Don’t forget to smell the flowers.
West African history is reliant on oral traditions— something effectively wiped out by British missionaries in Nigeria. As such, my family line can only traced back two generations.The rest is fabulous tales of bird societies, sky kingdoms, and the ubiquitous (in West Africa), mama wata. What remained was for me was to take what old family photos in my possession, oral traditions, artefacts ...
The works in the Glittering Field will be exemplified by the tech of text and textiles; rites of osmosis; rites of communion; interspecies relays; interventions of Intelligence of various modalities. The show will be embedded in a subtly dynamic sound environment: the gallery itself transformed into a 24 hour streaming radio station for the duration of Berlin Artweek. The evening programs ...
Continuing the foray into the “Feline Uncanny”. Tension builds as the shapeshifting dream cats gather to what end, who knows?
Inspired by the uncanny glitchiness of nascent AI Animation, reminiscent of the urban ghost stories I grew up with in Nigeria, I have cobbled together a “theater of the uncanny” from my AI video experiments. With an assist from Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Something Wicked This Way Comes.
The Curiously Dressed Gentleman, a Post-Nigerian Cross-Modal Fable featured at Basel Social Club during Art Basel.
The luminous movement behind the movement, invisible lines of flight made visible, culled from the archaic ethers of Isis, dim reflections of a defiant Nefertiti…
When excavating the roots of African diasporic trauma, one happens upon a mystical seam…The African Jetset series takes a shamanic twist, this retrospection is the future.
My series ‘Afropunk, Lagos, 1982’ will be featured at HEK this November: UNSCHARFE REALITÄTEN – REGIONALE 24» Saturday, 25.11.2023, 19:30 PM About Afropunk Lagos, 1982 This series of images is a rebuttal to the social conservatism by way of formal and informal repressions that dominated my youth in Nigeria. There was a time when it was illegal for women to wear trousers, it was ...
Inserting new narratives into amnesiac gaps created by colonial forces, adept at erasing our past, new mythologies are devised. This is the core of Afrofuturism: a conversation with the past projected into the future… The Warrior Saints dips into a melting pot of West African folklore, oral traditions, and aesthetics to fabricate new modalities. It is also a riposte to the disneyficaton of ...