This is Lagos

Press Release

THIS IS LAGOS
Yabis Night, Music and Fela

Photograph Sculpture

July 17th – September 13th, 2003
Reception: Thursday, July 17th, 6-8pm

Skoto Gallery is pleased to present This is Lagos: Yabis Night, Music and Fela, an exhibition that examines the social , political and cultural dynamics of Lagos as the often-veiled setting of Fela’s lyrical space through the media of photography and sculpture. Artists in the show include photographers Howard Cash (USA), and Femi Bankole Osunla (Nigeria). Also included are sculptors Osaretin Ighile (Nigeria) and Sol Sax (USA).

Lagos – the boisterous city by the lagoon has always preoccupied Fela’s aesthetic imagination, and he found the city an apt metaphor for describing contemporary human conditions and contradictions in post-colonial Africa. With a highly developed working class drawn from Nigeria’s rich and diverse cultural background and a dynamic protest tradition that dates back to late 19th century and home to an earlier generation of militants such as Herbert Macaulay, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Michael Imoudu and Mokwuogo Okoye among others, the city was an inspiration for his politically-charged Afrobeat music and social activism.

The city’s original settlers were of Benin and Awori-Eko heritage, and became a Portuguese trading post by the 15th century. The British captured the islands around it in 1851 and formed Lagos Colony and from 1960-1991, it was the capital of independent Nigeria. The city has witnessed an explosive growth in its population from nearly 1 million in the 1960s to about 13 million today due to urban migration from within the country and the West African subregion, and an oil boom in the 1970s resulted in opulence and decadence in the society that led to institutionalized corruption and mismanagement of resources by successive military regimes and the elite. The resulting social disruptions have widened the gap between the VIPs – labelled Vagabonds in Power by Fela, and the masses. Despite these problems, Lagos still remains Nigeria’s commercial, industrial and cultural nerve centre. Lagosians love to laugh, dance and play music.

The prevalent concerns of Fela’s lyrics are often contesting between the rich and the marginal. In between these two extremes are to be found the diverse modes of coping, of acquiescence or, on the other hand, of resistance with a repertoire of subcultural codes. Using music as a weapon against injustice, Fela engages society in a manner that brings to the fore its subjects not as peripheral, shadowy figures but as victims of its alienation who, however, are bent on repositioning themselves to alter their states and create a language of resistance.

Femi Bankole Osunla , who for over two decades was Fela’s personal photographer and member of his musical group is among a select group of Nigerian photographers that has created a significant body of work since 1859 when the photographer George Da Costa , opened the first portrait photo studio in Lagos till date. Others in this esteemed group include Peter Obe, Matthew Faji, Ojeikere, Yusuf Oladele, Jackie Phillips, Sunmi Smart-Cole, Gani Layiwola and the relatively youthful Don Barber, Jide Adeniyi Jones and Tom Fiofori. Femi, who owns one of the largest portfolio available today on the life and times of Fela has managed to establish a huge deposit of visual treasure that will help fill significant gaps in the proper understanding of Fela’s trajectory. Some of the photographs explore the personal world of Fela as well as encounters with the police and state power.The beneficiaries of this resource however, will be visual and especially photographic theorists and art historians seeking new pathways to understanding the relationship between tradition and the individual African artist. His painstaking and intimate documentary ohotography of episodes on Fela’s controversial and effervescent life make him one of the most significant historical photographers of note today.

Howard Cash has been documenting the African diaspora for over twenty-five years, including four years in the 1980s when he lived in Lagos and worked as a freelance photographer with several Nigerian newspapers. His prolific career over these years has produced an impressive body of work that helps deconstruct and reconstruct the image of the objectified native that has historically dominated colonial and racist perception of Africa. Using symbolic and expressive imagery that communicate personal and social dignity, Howard’s photographs are documents and metaphors that allow us to examine and celebrate contemporary urban and rural life in post-colonial Africa.

The sculptors – Osaretin Ighile and Sol Sax represent a younger generation of artists who have drawn artistic inspiration from an increased awareness of their complex historical and cultural heritage and an acute fluency in the language of modernism. Both artist command perfect grasp on their medium and are keenly aware of the fact that African sculpture contains the basic tenets of universalism in modern sculptural forms and in their unique individual styles, they have manipulated these tenets of universalism towards a pan-African and diasporic cultural orientation and development to create works that are highly personal, tactile and at times purely poetic.

Osaretin was born in the ancient Nigerian city of Benin – a city with a rich bronze casting tradition. His mixed media work is an interpretation of the concept of negritude in simplicity and directness of expression. Sol Sax (USA) holds an MFA degree from Yale University School of Arta and Architecture. His work is rooted in the realm of the ancestral mind which he uses as a bridge to link the contemporary African and African American experience.

New York Times Review, August 8 2003

This is Lagos Skoto Gallery 529 West 20th Street, Chelsea Through September 13

If you crave a second fix of the charismatic Fela Anikulapo-Kuti after seeing “Black President” at the New Museum, Skoto Gallery is the place to go. Much of the gallery’s fine summer show is devoted to pictures of Fela by the Nigerian Femi Bankole Osunla, who was part of Fela’s inner circle from the early 1970’s to his death (of AIDS) in 1997.

In his pictures Mr. Osunla takes us onstage for performances at the Afrika Shrine, Fela’s personal club, and takes us inside the Kalakuta Republic, the residential compound in Lagos that the performer declared a seperate country whithin the politically corrupt Nigeria, and where he lived with an ever-shifting entourage of friends, musicians and wives.

To some observers Kalakuta was a glorified drug den and harem. Mr. Osunla calls it “an institution of higher learning.”

He ought to know, he was there. He was also on hand to photograph the aftermath of the brutal police raid on the compound in 1977. Fela’s mother, a well-known political activist in Nigeria died from injuries suffered in the attack. A picture of Fela leaning solicitously over her as she sits on a hotel bed captures the tender side of a notoriously mercurial man.

The 50 pictures here and a handful at the New Museum are from an archive of more than 5,000 Fela-related images by Mr. Osunla. They document not only a singular life but also an important span of African cultural history. Mr. Osunla’s work at Skoto is complemented by a handsome series of color images of Africa by the American photographer Howard T. Cash, who lived in Lagos in the 1980’s. In one Fela appears as a sapphire-blue haze of kinetic energy.

Also in the show are two sculptured heads by the young artist Osaretin Ighile. They draw on an idealizing aesthetic associated with the Negritude movement, a source of Fela’s pan-Africanist politics. Mr. Ighile updates this historical style with a subtle flourish: in his heads, passages of rainbow-colored glitter seem to glow from beneath the skin.

Finally, a second, smaller space at Skoto holds an installation by the young American artist Sol Sax. Its main component is an altarlike corner structure, with a cruciform figure made from bundles of raffia and a handwritten panel about the politics of AIDS. In this piece and in the sculptured heads that sit like mute witnesses on shelves across the room, Mr. Sax projects the same maverick, formal flair evident in his solo show at Daniel Silvertein earlier in the season, and that makes him seem, at Skoto, a natural citizen of Fela’s world.

Holland Cotter