When the Lagos Biennial debuted in 2017 at a railway terminal, there was a sense that the event was remarkable for the way it captured the do-for-self disposition of Nigerian artists, who’d been starved for years of institutional support. Directed by the artist Folakunle Oshun, the mood of that edition was makeshift—with scant concern for charting easy paths to navigate a weed-strewn place, or for presenting artworks with any kind of pristine veneer.
Oshun’s choice of an unconventional locale as an art venue was memorable—a gesture that seemed to me as striking as playing a football match on the peak of a hill. His idea was not only to imagine the unexpected space as fitting for the showcase of art: the gesture was also meant to suggest to viewers how Lagos, as a city with both a storied colonial past and a future as a megalopolis, had an infinite number of options and concepts when it came to conceiving and showcasing its culture. Hence the second edition, as if to further the ethos of the first, was held across four floors of Independence House, a mostly dilapidated building commissioned to commemorate Nigeria’s independence from Britain.
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This year’s edition is larger in scope by every metric than the previous three: running for a week in February, it included 80 participants from more than 30 countries. Titled “Refuge,” it seems to have throttled into the clearest articulation of its curatorial ideals: a method of remaking a historic public space into an exhibition venue, while simultaneously challenging artists to rethink what they can do in a space without walls. The host venue was Tafawa Balewa Square, an exhibition ground set on nearly 50 acres of land, and named after Nigeria’s first prime minister, who was killed by mutinous soldiers in 1966. Known for short as TBS, the history of its use suggests how significant a space that large can seem in a dense city.
When I entered the square close to noon, the sun had no bite and the clouds seemed covered in a haze of dust. The harmattan season had returned, its residue of dry air a surprise for early February. There was a feeling that few places could offer artists the space to respond to as many overlapping histories. It had been used as a racecourse, for military parades and cricket matches, for the first Independence Day celebration in 1960. Now, with oversight by for-profit management, it can conceivably be used for any event that requires several acres of unencumbered ground. Regardless of the theoretical frame in which the Biennial was staged, and what significance it holds in its historicity, the artists had to make work on rented space within a period the organizers could afford—in this case, one week. This condition threaded ephemerality into the installations, sculptures, and structures on view.
Here, Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh replayed parts of the first Independence Day speech across seven speakers. The idea, Ogboh wrote, was to “recreate the auditory experience of 1960.” The prime minister’s voice was comprehensibly dwarfed by the concrete expanse. From one end of the square, the speakers seemed as slender as squiggles. Perhaps that scale-shiftwas a statement in itself, as if Balewa’s historical speech fades into greater ambiguity the longer Nigeria remains a republic. What could this signal to the listener except, as the installation is fittingly titled, The Ambivalence of 1960? Six decades later, that year holds as much meaning as the name of a distant relative for many Nigerians. Familiar but remote, evoking scant personal memory.
Ephemerality is present in many forms, some of them unlikely. Anyone who saw Victor Ehikhamenor’s installation Miracle Central might not have been thinking about how it was installed, or how it might be taken apart—which was perhaps the point. At 85 feet wide, it was an unmissable spectacle. It is “my most audacious installation to date,” he said. The interior of this roofless structure clad with thousands of white handkerchiefs nods to the setup of a church, including an altar with a billowy tapestry of rosaries sewn on lace fabric. The handkerchiefs are a signature accessory of Nigerian Pentecostalism, nodding to one of the rentable site’s current clients: prominent Pentecostal congregations. A recording on an overhead horn speaker throws back to the mid-1980s, when the late Archbishop Benson Idahosa’s “Expect a Miracle” crusade brought thousands into the Square.
Positioned alongside each other, the interventions of Ehikhamenor and Ogboh sharpened the focus of the Biennial: they offered an opportunity to consider the overlaps in discrete moments of Nigerian cultural experience, to hear the voices of a prime minister and archbishop in tandem. This was Lagos, after all: Nigeria’s first capital, an amalgam of all its peoples.
The theme for the Biennial was “refuge,” which in several works took the form of spaces of enclosure. I took note of three such structures: a pavilion that Nolan Oswald Dennis made of concrete bricks, wood, and aluminum roofing sheets that together form a breeze-block pattern, and house works by several artists collectively entitled “Traces of Ecstasy”; a gridded surface of alternating wooden cubes designed by architect Endrit Marku for videos by a collective known as the Albanian Conference; and Taşlık Kahvesi, a “resting space in the biennial itinerary” that French artist Deniz Bedir constructed from wood and a metal frame, with mats where visitors could sit and make tea or coffee.
But “refuge” took a panoptic assortment of other forms too. There was the “textile architecture” made from second-hand clothing bought in a Lagos market by an artist collective known as Outsiders; there was Native Maqari’s minimalist hark back to the windows of ’90s Nigeria, a wooden frame with overlapping glass slats. Maqari’s reference to everyday architecture found resonance in a series of doors by the octogenarian Nigerian artist and architect Demas Nwoko: rendered in deep brown, these wooden entryways were held to the ground by long slabs: a statement of congeniality, even a blessing, from a doyen who turned from fine art to architecture and furniture making in the late 1960s. The choice of doors for Nwoko is telling. Since, unlinked to a wall, they are structures that have no need to prove their use, the point might be less function than intimation—a consideration many of the artists took to heart: as though to imagine a refuge for a megalopolis that had no need for walls, as circumambient as a surge of people in all directions.
The Biennial’s notion of wall-lessness is made clear in a surprising display by Ibrahim Mahama. Acclaimed for enveloping towering buildings in fabric, here he chose to deliver a conjoined expansive spread of jute sacks across the ground. It seemed both untethered and quotidian. When I chanced on it several hours before the fair opened, I first thought that it was laid out for installation elsewhere. I also wondered if the choice of location was made given the improbability of renting a building with sufficient scale. Yet Mahama’s work, even when removed from its usual framing, is not diminished in effect. Chinenye Emelogu’s adjacent Human Hive 3—a neat, even sprawl of plastic rings, intending to reference a beehive—is of similar, extensive scale. Her network of circular configurations was soothing, instructive. It was easy to note how the rings could, in her words, “provide significant insight to the resolution of the Nigerian situation,” a country whose multiethnic pluralism epitomizes the ideal of a hive.
“Lagos is the place to think about what’s happening in the world,” said Kathryn Weir, Biennial co-artistic director, during the opening event. Her statement could mean that Lagos is a nucleic representation of the world’s debacles, including conflicts, migration, overpopulation, climate change, the limits of democracy, and so forth—a salad of themes to be found in any biennial right now—lacking its own particular overflow of ideas. But this is not how I wish to think of it. I am reminded of a quote John Berger attributed to Édouard Glissant in a 2005 essay: “The way to resist globalization is not to deny globality, but to imagine what is the finite sum of all possible particularities and to get used to the idea that, as long as a single particularity is missing, globality will not be what it should be for us.”
By the end of this century, Lagos is expected to become the world’s largest city. Exhibitions in the megalopolis, going by Glissant’s framing, ought to master the particularities of the city. The makeshift nature of the Biennial suggests that, despite the phenomenal scale of urbanization, questions of who has access to shelter in Lagos—at what cost, and on which terms—will be the central quandary of the next decade. The exhibition lets artists and architects claim and inhabit an open, historic space, crafting, in their own makeshift ways, a kind of future for the city. Their assessments are timely.