Badiu Olorunfunmi, early 1960's. Photograph by T.O. Atowo. Courtesy Jelili Atiku
Center in Lagos completes program
In the past four months, Lagos, Nigeria’s CCA hosted a dynamic, diverse overview of the notion of love, through performances, interactive performatic installations, videos, and films. The program featured a roundtable on Eastern African Performance Art with artists from Nigeria, Ghana and Ivory Coast. A transatlantic collaboration with Houston’s Menil Collection and St Louis’ Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts was also featured, and the event closed at Lagos’ Contemporary Art Center with Jelili Atiku’s Araferaku (2013) performance, from January 24 to 26.
The title Areferaku has been freely translated from Yoruba as meaning “a part of me is missing.” Atiku conceived the piece as a tribute to his father, evoking the reverential emotions of a son whose father passed away seven months before his birth. The performance was commissioned by the project and is divided into two parts: the first is a meditation lasting 44 hours, in an empty room covered from floor to ceiling with wallpaper printed with a photograph of the deceased father. Jelili invokes the memory of his father, but this is really the invocation of the memory of an absence, and he remains alone for the most part of the 44 hours that represent each year of his life, and the mother is the only one to (briefly) share this moment, in a near-transcendental trilogy. The second and last part simulates a traditional Yoruba funeral, mixing reality and fiction in an attempt at replicating the state of confinement that is burial, which is also the public representation of a universal emotion.
Learn more on the cca lagos website.
Source: E-flux