Andrew Dosunmu’s First Solo African Exhibition Brings Diaspora Stories Home

Curated in collaboration with Papa Omotayo, Tega Okiti, Hailey Grenet and Fikayo Adebajo, the selection embodies Dosunmu’s interpretation of this year’s Art X Lagos theme, Promised Lands, by spotlighting scenes from African diaspora communities worldwide and combining them with pictures he’s shot on the continent — which he sees as the ultimate promised land.

Ahead of the fair’s opening, OkayAfrica spoke with Dosunmu about the curation process for his exhibition, and the importance of connecting the African diaspora and the continent.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

OkayAfrica: What was it like working with the curators on what to include in this exhibition?

Andrew Dosunmu: The show has got a few of my work, and compared to my body of work, it's quite very, very, very little. There's [also] acombination of my videos that I've made for artists, short films and feature films. And it's a three-day fair. So it's a short time to be able to show a lot of things.

So, how do we pick what's appropriate? The title for this year's fair is called Promised Lands. And for me, it's so perfect because, being an African who lives somewhere else, there's nowhere more promising [than home]. My wish for a promised land is where I come from, and Lagos is where I come from. Nigeria is where I come from, and the continent of Africa is where I come from.

You think of places like Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Panama. Those are countries where there's a huge chunk of Africans, you know, people of African descent. You can go to some villages in Ecuador, and you think you're in a village in a small town outside Kumasi [in Ghana] because there are so many Africans of African descent. And the appropriate promised land for them would be the continent.

So, it's picking pictures from a few of these places. And I think that's how we selected, like, how can we get one or two pictures from each of these places and sort of combine them with pictures I've shot on the African continent, too.

Can you expand on connecting Africans on the continent and those in the diaspora through your work?

Yeah, that's the objective of my work. How do I connect? How do I celebrate us, people of African and African descent? What's that connection? What's that celebration?

I'm very, very fascinated by the early dialogues of the pioneers of the early 19th century, people like [Liberian writer and diplomat] Edward Blyden and [Jamaican political activist] Marcus Garvey. Their objective was always to be this connection of people of African descent. Take someone like Garvey, for example, he was the man who left Jamaica and went to Panama and convinced many people from there to move to Harlem, which created the Renaissance. They all met, and then you have the whole idea of [American sociologist and activist] W.E.B Du Bois meeting people like [Nigerian independence activist and first president] Nnamdi Azikiwe and African leaders in the 1940s in England. And there's always been that conversation. And I am making that conversation through photography, through visual media. I'm trying to create that conversation again. How can we converse?

It's such a small space of time. There are very, very, very few pictures to communicate that. [Whether it’s] shooting videos in Cuba for an African American artist or [for] an African artist in Bolivia, I think it's that conversation that we should all be having.

What are platforms like ART X Lagos important for projecting visual art, music, movies and culture from Africa?

Spaces like Art X Lagos encourage young filmmakers and artists to embrace themselves and not necessarily look to the outer world for validation. But how can we be our critics, validate ourselves, and do what is best for our audience rather than trying to imitate other senses of visual art to believe that's the way to do it?

I wish that when I was starting, there were spaces like ART X that inspired [and] made any young person feel like they could do it in their way. Again, you do not necessarily have to feel that you must venture out of your borders to do it and speak to your audience. And I think that's very important. And whoever critiques you is your audience as well, someone who understands it, the texture, the language, the environment you're creating, from and can appreciate it.

What often happens is that we get appreciated by people who don't even understand the texture of what we're trying to do, which is kind of problematic. My objective as a visual artist, bottom line, is really about celebrating us. It’s really about celebrating who we are, because for the last 100 years, our image has often been projected by someone else, and it's not in a positive light.