Nigeria Reveals Plans for 2024 Venice Biennale Pavilion
Nigeria has pulled again the veil on plans for its pavilion on the Sixtieth Venice Biennale, to happen April 20–November 24, 2024. It will mark the second time the nation has participated within the occasion, following its inclusion within the fifty-seventh version, in 2017.
The pavilion is commissioned by Governor Obaseki of Nigeria’s Edo State on behalf of Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Tradition and Info. Curated by Nigerian British curator and artwork historian Aindrea Emelife, who’s curator of up to date and trendy artwork at Benin’s yet-to-open Museum of West African Artwork (MOWAA), the exhibition is titled “Nigeria Imaginary.” The present will current works by eight Nigerian or Nigerian diasporic artists—Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Ndidi Dike, Onyeka Igwe, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Abraham Oghobase, Yinka Shonibare, Fatimah Tuggar, and Valuable Okoyomon—of differing generations and at varied levels of their careers. Following the shut of the Biennale, the exhibition will journey to MOWAA, the pavilion’s official organizer, the place it’s going to seem in an expanded type in 2025.
Emelife in a press release affirmed that the exhibition, to be held at a historic palazzo in Dorsoduro, shut by the Gallerie dell’Accademia, will “discover totally different views and constructed concepts, recollections of and nostalgia for Nigeria, with a scope that’s cross-generational and inter-geographic.” She elsewhere acknowledged the neat match of the idea throughout the Biennale’s bigger rubric.
“It’s full serendipity that Adriano Pedrosa’s theme for the Biennale is ‘Foreigners In all places,’ Emelife informed The Artwork Newspaper. “It speaks to me as a phrase about motion and evolution, discovering one’s house, and exploring one’s attachment to nationhood.”
Obaseki in a press release summed up the objective of the pavilion, noting, “This exhibition, envisioned by Ms. Emelife with a various roster of completed artists, encourages us to revisit the previous with a purpose to create a shiny future for Nigeria.”
