The Maker Lab is a platform for young, aspiring artists to showcase their portfolios to a distinguished panel of creative professionals. Participating artists benefit from valuable insights and feedback on their work, offering them opportunities for growth and development in their practices. The program places particular emphasis on various design sub-genres including furniture, product, graphic design, fashion, and architecture, as well as welcomes photographers pushing the boundaries of contemporary photography. Through Maker Lab, young artists receive ongoing mentorship, opportunities for exhibitions, and support in establishing themselves as successful creative entrepreneurs.
Maker Lab: 2017
Artists: Akinbu Akintayo | Bright Ackwerh | Dennis Uche | Kadara Enyeasi | Odion Tobi | Osaze Amadasun | Poirier Nkpa
Maker Lab: Here Is Home 2018
Two singular artists emerged from the open call as the exhibitors for the inaugural exhibition of The Maker Lab titled ‘Here is Home’. Ayeni Olajide and Anthony Obayomi, artists who investigate elements of our built environment from complementary albeit distinct perspectives. Fidelis Joseph, a recent graduate from the prestigious Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, was also selected from the pool of submissions to create a custom mural for the exterior of the exhibition space.
In Bonafide Squatters, Obayomi brings a combination of aesthetic composition and visceral force, in chronicling the dire conditions of overcrowding at university hostels in Lagos, Nigeria. A city heaving with industrial and economic enterprise, Lagos is the most populated city on the African continent with skyrocketing housing prices, a by-product of persistent migration. These rising housing costs are particularly challenging for students who find themselves at the bottom of the housing food chain. For the 57,000 students that were enrolled at the University of Lagos between 2016-2017, only 8000 bed spaces were provided, a number which has slumped and risks further degradation due to bureaucratic apathy in response to the plight of the students. There is both a luminous purity and grittiness to Obayomi’s images, which document how students have resorted to paying to squat with friends, sleeping in classrooms and abandoned buildings, to function slightly above the margins of homelessness.
Ayeni’s body of work, ‘If Demolition Could Be Colourful’, illuminates on his fascination with what is left behind in the process of development. With pictorial representations of ruined buildings that run the length of Isawo road, Ikorodu, Lagos, Ayeni seeks to challenge the visitor’s aesthetic reasoning about dilapidation and beauty. The keen eye of the photographer captures split open ramshackles of vivid hues and muted tones, in a mode reminiscent of architectural section drawings, thus encouraging us to explore the underbelly by asking, “what will be remembered when a new beauty masks our memories?” Ayeni also documents how the inhabitants of Isawo road relate with the vestiges of their environment. Several of them had erected makeshift structures with discarded materials, emblematic of their resilience and adaptation to a new lifestyle, in an environment composed of beautiful ruins
Maker Lab: ljé 2019
The Maker Lab: ljé, is a merger of new artists working with video, sound, paint, and photographs seeking to break new grounds, carve new paths and most especially introduce themselves in style.
Kamnelechukwu Susan Obasifor this edition produced a series of photographs and experimental videos exploring a variety of themes, ranging from Aging, to boyhood.
Phillip Fagbeyiro’s work is usually heavy in line detail and shows a lot of exposed machine components. This is provoked by the ‘injustice’ on all the mechanisms and details that lay hidden behind plastic and aluminum encasings as we see in our technology today. His style would best be associated with cyberpunk and retrofuturism.
Adeoluwa Oluwajoba’s broad oeuvre explores themes of identity, blackness, masculinity and human spaces. he is particularly interested in the critical engagement of art and in examining the dynamic ways in which art mirrors and engages the society
Raymond Isibor’s style is a contemporary mix of lines, colors, illustrations and symbols in an intricate doodle like abstraction. His works explore thoughts on Gender, Black Excellence, Afrofuturism, religious, and socio- political issues. Yinka Bernie would make beats on the spot and also serenade the audience with his music and tunes from his playlist.
“Masculine Fecundity” through his visual inquiry, Aadesokan attempts a reconciliation of tension between the masculine character and figure through diptychs as the man is willed forth, with repeated patterns as overlapping circles that evoke flowers as the boy blooms. He merges beautiful monochromatic with digital art to create this collection.
Maker Lab: Yanga 2019
For this edition of the Maker Lab, we are delighted to present a collective of young contemporary African Artists’ steering new narratives through diverse mediums.
Yanga
Verb. (j∧nga)
1. A colloquial Nigerian term that means to pose.
Yanga expresses a kind of sentiment within the Nigerian culture that encompasses self-presentation and performance. The term is reminiscent of the overwhelming pride with which Nigerians generally wear new attires and how as children, we couldn’t wait to show off our celebratory garbs to friends, family members and even total strangers. This self-presentation alludes to a performance that sometimes is
Artists: Amobi Abeeb | Neec Nonso | Ruby Okoro | Jumoke Adeyanju | Masha Ru
