Designing Africa: Appropriating Culture, Mediums, and Meanings

African Artists' Foundation, Lagos, Nigeria

March 8 - April 5, 2013

 

 

As curator for Designing Africa: Appropriating Culture, Mediums, and Meanings, I organized the first annual exhibition of the ongoing project "Designing Africa," organized by the African Artists' Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria. 

 

Designing Africa: Appropriating Culture, Mediums, and Meanings presents a survey of the vital yet often under-appreciated emerging tendencies in contemporary design on the African continent. With a particular focus on Nigeria, Designing Africa examines the work of a diverse group of artists in the country who explore avenues of the vast design field, including product design, furniture design, graphic design, typography, and constructed surfaces. While their practices span wide spectrums of art and design, their work shares a commonality in a particular design sensibility, one that can be traced back to a shared interest in process, experimentation, and presentation. Designing Africa investigates the blurred boundaries between the definition of artist and designer in contemporary art and the ways in which design is articulated through both a regional (African) paradigm and a more inclusive global conversation.



Participating Artists:

Native Almaqri (Nigeria), Chinenye Emelogu (Nigeria), Ifeanyi Oganwu (Nigeria), Alafuro Sikoki-Coleman (Nigeria), THANKSTHANKSAFRICA. 

 

Native Almaqri uses graphic arts to combine elements of graffiti, street art, illustration, and cartoons in a varied mixed media practice. A native of Lagos, Native immigrated to Brooklyn as a child and has also lived in Egypt and Israel. He currently lives and works between Paris and Lagos. Almaqri’s series in this exhibition includes works on paper, with simple splashes of paint that suggest an exercise in typographical design. In spelling out “RED” (albeit in black ink), Almaqri’s series is one of progression, where the “R” begins to form in successive sketches, gradually spelling out the rest of the word. As one of the most fundamental aspects of design, typography is generally understood as the technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. In Almaqri’s case, his work seems to suggest the processes of experimentation, arrangement, and potential execution rather than a finished product. In the manner that his work intersects between the domains of calligraphy and graffiti, two very different modes of typography that allude to different kinds of cultural heritage, Almaqri’s practice could be seen as using design as a form of social intervention.



Chinenye Emelogu is an emerging artist who delves into varying disciplines such as ceramics, painting, poetry, photography, video art, textile, sculpture, and installation. Emelogu trained at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, were she obtained a B.A and is currently completing her MFA. During her MFA course work, she has untiringly explored diverse materials such clay, fiber, ropes, and strip bales, among others. Emelogu won First Place at the National Art Competition in 2012 for her installation Human Hives.

 

Ifeanyi Oganwu studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago; the Architectural Association, London; and Columbia University, New York. He has worked for the offices of John Ronan Architects, Chicago; Zaha Hadid Architects, London; and has collaborated with the fashion design studio of Hussein Chalayan. In 2003 he joined the London-based structural engineering practice of Adams Kara Taylor where he worked within their Parametric Applied Research Team to develop an integrated approach to explore and represent complex architectural scenarios. Throughout both his academic and professional pursuits, Ifeanyi has explored his fascination for art, architecture, culture, and technology. In 2008, Ifeanyi founded Expand Design Ltd, a London-based studio engaging in architecture and furniture design by investigating the correlation between history, base materials and opportunities presented by state-of-the-art fabrication techniques.



Alafuro Sikoki-Coleman is an artist and industrial designer whose work explores the dynamics between the object, user, and the environment. Sikoki-Coleman graduated from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia, in 2006 with a Master’s Degree in Industrial Design. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Authoring and Design from Coventry University, UK (2003). Sikoki-Coleman won Second Prize at the National Art Competition for her project entitled Cog, which explores television consumption and media saturation in Nigeria today.  Sikoki-Coleman lives and works in Bayelsa and Lagos states.



THANKSTHANKSAFRICA is a fictional artistic collective that exists primarily on Facebook, created in 2010 as an entity intended to support artistic, political, and social inquiry. While the project began with a specific focus on the relationship between the continent of Africa and China, it has since expanded to include the the global relationship between Africa and the “outside”. THANKSTHANKSAFRICA produces work that is disseminated through the Internet and social media, most often posters that are a combination of appropriated mass media images and arbitrary text. Their project calls into question larger issues of cultural plurality and the the formation of the other, and they use the medium of the Internet to broadcast their message on a global scale.