THE INTERNATIONAL PHOTO FESTIVAL – LAGOSPHOTO ANNOUNCES ITS FIRST GEOGRAPHICAL EXPANSION ACROSS BENIN AND LAGOS, IGNITING HOPEFUL VISIONS OF CHANGE
Cotonou | Ouidah | Port-Novo | Lagos
THEME: ‘GROUND STATE – FELLOWSHIP WITHIN THE UNCANNY’
October 27th – December 31st 2023
Curated by AAF’s founder and director Azu Nwagbogu, and East Wing Artistic Director (Dubai, UAE) Peggy Sue Amison, the 14th edition of the international photography festival will foster a fellowship of dynamic spiritual change and rebirthing of the unimaginable through the theme ‘Ground State – Fellowship Within the Uncanny.’ The festival will present a special solo presentation by artist Omar Viktor Diop curated by Maria Pia Bernardoni.
LagosPhoto Festival returns with its 14th edition in the fall of 2023 with the theme, Ground State – fellowship within the uncanny.
This year’s theme; Ground State – fellowship within the uncanny seeks to explore the present moment and envision ways to restore, repair and restitute the mysteries of histories that are crucial for our survival.
Photography has always held the power of mystery to it; the malaise, reordering, syncopation and entropy of the twenty-first century presents all sorts of possibilities and anxieties. The past two decades progressed the era of post-truth that encouraged increasingly sectarian and tribal societies with photography playing a significant role. We have evolved from the dystopian post covid reality into the era of conflict, war, of the limitless and improbable. The environment is now measured in growing levels of devastation. Centuries of an extractive history has left indelible consequences: temperatures rise, long forewarned water wars are a reality. The “Doomsday Clock” inches forward in seconds to an apocalyptic midnight. Recalcitrant colonial mindsets continue to judge worth through an impossible hierarchy. Efforts to imagine futures, decolonise, activate and recycle have ended up with reformulated hierarchies with the same output but with different players. We are racing to a breaking point; a Ground State, where everything humanity understands and identifies as “common sense” is neither. How do we restore, repair, and restitute mysteries of oral histories and aspects that are necessary for our survival.
Populations will turn to artists to make sense of what has been referred to as a “catastrophic era”. Lagos Photo Festival seeks projects that explore the present moment and envision how repair, syncopation, putrefaction, restitution, and restoration will take place; challenging our own complicity in a culture of desire, founded on consumption and how to foster a fellowship of dynamic spiritual change, a rebirthing of the unimaginable.
This year’s edition marks the first time in its history that the event will be held beyond Lagos, extending to Cotonou, Ouidah, and Port-Novo in Benin. This geographical expansion offers a wider audience the opportunity to engage with the powerful works of talented photographers, challenging our own complicity in a culture of desire founded on consumption.
The festival just announced an open call for emerging and established artists around the world working with lens-based media to submit their projects with a submission deadline of June 7, 2023. Additionally, the festival will announce a separate Portfolio Review open call with a submission deadline of June 30, 2023, where selected photographers will have the opportunity to participate in sessions during the festival with esteemed judges and panellists, including leading gallerists, publishers, educators, and experts from LagosPhoto Festival partner National Geographic. For its 2023 edition LagosPhoto Festival invites artists to showcase new perspectives of humanity’s revival and equilibrium through hopeful visions of social, political, environmental and spiritual change.
Initiated in 2010, LagosPhoto has since created a community of local and international artists united through contemporary photography encapsulating individual experiences and identities from the African continent. Through an extensive program of exhibitions, workshops, screenings and large- scale outdoor installations, the festival promotes education and reclaiming public spaces, engaging local and global audiences with the continent’s historical and contemporary stories narrated through photography.
As in this year’s edition taking place in Benin and Nigeria, the festival’s recurring topics of restitution and cultural heritage have set the tone for ground breaking programs. In 2020’s ‘Rapid Response Restitution – The Home Museum’, audiences were invited to produce a fast shutter retrieval of their personal and family’s cultural heritage to be presented in an inclusive digital exhibition, sparking an interest and conversation on cultural heritage and a visual intellect amongst citizens. ‘Searching for Prince Adewale Oyenuga’ in 2021 presented a project about a missing suitcase with a historic archive of photos and paintings left in Barcelona and repatriated to Nigeria, highlighting the theme of restitution. In 2022 ‘Remember Me—Liberated Bodies; Charged Objects’ interrogated the photographer’s influence in shaping, archiving, and ordering the stories of communities and individual identities, determining the way the present and future are constructed.
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