The African Artists’ Foundation encourages the expansion of African art on its continent and beyond – organizing exhibitions, festivals and residencies working to expand awareness of known and unknown African artists. Two new exhibitions focus on raising the voices of contemporary African Art through regenerative co-production.
Lagos-based African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), established in 2007, announces two new exhibitions opening in August 2022. The Artists’ Foundation (AAF) organizes a variety of exhibitions, both locally and internationally, festivals, and educational activities and community outreach programs to drive social change as its core ambition. Through their programming, the Artists’ Foundation (AAF) supports emerging and established artists in Africa cultivating and promoting contemporary African art production. Shout Plenty on view from August 13 – October 1, 2022, is a group exhibition featuring over 30 artists from across Africa, taking place at the Artists’ Foundation (AAF) headquarters in Lagos in collaboration with Alliance Française. Dig Where You Stand on view from September 2 – October 9, 2022, marks the first exhibition of a traveling show, taking place in several locations across Africa. The announced locations include Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA), Tamale, Ghana, The African Artists’ Foundation Artists’ Foundation (AAF) Lagos, Nigeria, White Cube, Lusanga, DR Congo, Palais de Lomé, Togo and Hangar Centre, Lisbon, Portugal
Both exhibitions underline the Artists’ Foundation (AAF) ’s mission to develop and promote contemporary African art through thought- provoking concepts of cultural rebirth.
Shout Plenty
Group Exhibition | August 13 – October 1, 2022
The group exhibition nurtures a dialogue between the individual experience and collective memory as a means of problem-solving generational distress. Seeking to build a story interwoven with distinctive voices, the curators gathered artists across different mediums to deliver a unifying message that nevertheless gives value to individual realities. Taking its name from the revolutionary and provocative Fela Kuti’s 1986 LP I Go Shout Plenty, the exhibition similarly challenges collective struggles through the experience of artmaking and interventions. Pondering the various ways freedom and voice echo through a collective experience, Shout Plenty gives agency to the interior lives of multiple artists, and by extension their communities, crafting a powerful means of protest. Alongside imagination and creative thinking, these artistic interventions produce a unique representation and understanding of socio-political shortcomings of generations. With artists such as Ayogu Kingsley, Isshaq Ismail and Audrey d’Erneville and more, the exhibition studies how art can function as a powerful and revolutionary force to challenge institutionalized systems of control.
Dig Where You Stand
Group Traveling Exhibition | September 2 – October 9, 2022
Dig Where You Stand explores the regenerative potential of art within the region and its diasporas, offering a new model of engagement with the questions of decolonization, restitution, and repatriation, both in the art world and the broader economy on the African continent. Cultivating the reformative potential of art across the region by placing an emphasis on travel, migration and (dis)placement, the exhibition is shifting the decolonial paradigm away from Western museums towards a location-specific, solution-oriented approach, leaving behind a toolkit in each location for commencing regenerative economic processes. The artists and local communities explore the economies of the colonial systems that have historically marginalized vulnerable communities and find new methodologies in the art world, which reverse its value systems and return agency to exploited communities on the African continent. Featuring the works of Ibrahim Mahama, Renzo Martens and The Cercle d'Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) among others, the exhibition curated by Azu Nwagbogu aims to promote contemporary African opus by facilitating a cultural exchange and contributing to communities with ideas rooted in liberation from the ongoing extractive processes in the economy.
