Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos (CCA) at ISCP

About

ISCP has hosted an annual institution-in-residence since 2011. This annual residency was initiated to support cultural exchange by bringing an international perspective to a local context. This year, ISCP has invited CCA Lagos, an independent non-profit making visual art organization founded in December 2007 and based in Lagos, Nigeria to be in residence. CCA Lagos is in residence at ISCP through June 7th and will present an exhibition and series of public programs during this time.

CCA Lagos provides a platform for the development, presentation, and discussion of contemporary visual art and culture. It seeks to create new audiences and to prioritize media such as photography, film and video, performance and installation art which were traditionally under-represented in Nigeria. It supports, and presents the intellectual and critical work of art and culture practitioners through exhibitions and public programs. In addition, it encourages and promotes the professionalization of art production and curatorship in Nigeria and West Africa collaborating with artists, curators, writers, theorists and national and international organizations.

CCA Lagos at ISCP centers around the exhibition Orí méta odún méta ibìkan. Originally presented at CCA Lagos in 2016, this exhibition is re-staged at ISCP and features selections from CCA Lagos’s archives as well as works in progress by three Nigerian artists–Kelani Abass, Taiye Idahor and Abraham Oghobase. The exhibition considers the residency as an extension of the artist’s studio, a space of experimentation, of errors and counter errors, as moments of freedom and possibilities. The works by all three artists come out of their observations and experiences during their separate residencies at the Salzburg Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Austria. This is reflected in the title which translates as Three heads, three years, one place. Idahor’s collage installation is a self-portrait of her Salzburg studio—rethought for New York City—and made up of several pieces to make a mosaic on which she cuts, layers, and pastes bits and pieces that come from all three artists’ time and experience of Salzburg. Stamping and a local Nigerian Ankara cloth form the basis for Abass’s work, while Oghobase experiments with lithography as it relates to photography.