Cosmopolitan contemporary artist Emeka Ogboh takes over the fourth floor, Panorama and the Roof Terrace of the Friche la Belle de Mai from June 4 to October 24, 2021 to allow the general public to see his creative project realized throughout the late spring as part of the Africa2020 Season.
« Stirring the Pot », his first solo exhibition in a French institution, the artist unequivocally intrigued by issues of migration, movement, and the ties that ladies and men weave with their places of life, memory, or entry, presents in his work the boundaries between creative commands, mental and geological impediments, and exposes the tangible and sensory hyperlinks between territories and domains while stirring the present and the translation of history.
« Stirring the Pot », proposes the weaving of connections between the southern metropolis and the various ports of West Africa through a stirring of connections under the crystal of present time and place.
Within Panorama, Emeka Ogboh proposes a composite environment with moving images amidst history and sound establishment that react to each other. The result is a multi-tactile encounter for guests with a creation explicitly intended to solicit our olfactory memory between what is visibly shown and what is connoted. It invests the museum space and transforms it into a position of life, meeting and relaxation, while simultaneously scrutinizing the social part of the exhibition spaces by giving it conditions for exchange, discussion and reflection.
An installation inspired by the Igbo ethnic group in Nigeria, where the conventional materials come from, and a sound climate made of their sacred music.
The patio on the roof of La Friche is transformed into a foundation of possibilities and is invested in the continuity of the exhibition around an extension of artistic forms and cultural times that compose a global proposal where hospitality prevails.
Emeka Ogboh
Emeka Ogboh is an artist who stirs the order of implications and subjects.
He is interested in the repetitive subjects of relocation, identities and custom. He has participated in various exhibitions around the world including the Dakar Biennale, Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, Kassel 2017, SkulpturProjekte Münster and has exhibited at Tate Modern in London and Fiac in Paris in 2019.
Co-initiator of the video art network Video Art Network Lagos. He received the Böttcherstraße Award in Bremen and is a finalist for the Hugo Boss Fellowship for Contemporary Art and won with his work « OtobongNkanga », the Sharjah Biennale Fellowship.
