‘Bring back what was once mine’
case, where girls are allowed to soar as high as they please on the wings of ambition, education and protection from those who seek to harm, use and exploit them. When I pointed out to Alatise the coincidental and almost prophetic timing of the girls’ release with the presentation of her installation to the world, she said: “We do not speak in vain.”
Temporarily wrecked plans and curiously timed events notwithstanding, the pavilion and the show went on. A believer in the designs of fate might suggest that Nigeria’s participation in the Venice Biennale was destined to happen now, exactly when it did, in response to and for much-needed amplification of the events that preceded it and that it addressed.
As if to drum this point home — the urgency of actions in the present — Qudus Onikeku presented a film trilogy “of contemplation, poetry and engagement” titled Right Here, Right Now, a piece he began working on in December, long before any of the aforementioned events happened.
“I’m not interested in the present; I’m interested in the now,” said Onikeku in an interview with Hyperallergic, a digital art publication. “The present is concerned with the past, but the now is so powerful that it doesn’t have time to think about the past, it’s grabbing at the future. That’s when dance becomes so interesting — it’s constantly inventing the now.”
For Onikeku, whose dance draws energy from Yoruba spirituality, “now” is the most opportune moment to trigger memory, to awaken consciousness, to free the body from the negative history and legacy it is burdened by, like that of the Nigerian girl child or descendants of 18th-century Benin artists erased from history.
The global art world has responded overwhelmingly to the alchemy of events that preceded the opening of the Nigerian Pavilion and, more so, to the works exhibited within. Onikeku, who performed at the opening of the pavilion and in an encore a few days later, is still receiving requests through the pavilion project team to perform again. The pavilion has been ranked on nearly a dozen mustsee pavilion lists by leading global arts media from ArtNet to Architectural Digest. It has been critically reviewed by the New York Times and Artsy as an excellent group showing. Rumour has it that one of the exhibiting artists’ installations may soon make a new home for itself in the collection of the Smithsonian Museum of African Art.
Ultimately, as was curator Adenrele Sonariwo’s intention — Nigeria has now without a doubt taken its place in the global narrative of contemporary art. Notably, at first and considering all that happened before the pavilion opened, she did not know what hand the country would be dealt next.
“Being the first time we were showing and constraints faced, we were not sure what to expect, how the works would be received. We just worked on putting together the best show we could,” she said. “I suppose the work resonated as it did because our pavilion was speaking in real time to events, developments relevant to NOW.”
With that and a little luck, the rest has literally been history.