LagosPhoto Biennial: the inaugural edition

There’s a ghostly black and white photo of a cloaked figure standing in a forest, dwarfed by soaring trees. The image, by Ethiopian artist Geremew Tigabu, is a hauntingly beautiful representation of the confinement and shelter that forests can offer, and one of several photographs now showing at the inaugural African Artists’ Foundation (AAF)’s LagosPhoto Biennial. Held across four venues in Lagos and Ibadan, the festival is the brainchild of head curator Azu Nwagbogu, who founded the AAF in Lagos in 2009 to support contemporary African art. After launching the annual LagosPhoto Festival, Nigeria’s first international photography festival, in 2009, Nwagbogu has opted for a biennial for a more slow-burning, deeper dive into singular themes.

Geremew Tigabu

Sharbendu De

This year’s theme, ‘Incarceration’, can be explored from a broad range of angles, Azu Nwagbogu believes, from the obvious physical confinement of prisons to the more subtle intellectual and psychological ways humans can be confined. “It can be imposed by external forces,” he says, “or self-inflicted through our own mental models and societal structures. Through this theme, we aim to challenge artists to uncover and liberate narratives that resonate with our times.” Those narratives run the gamut from ecology and religion to identity, migration and architecture.

Geremew Tigabu

The programme includes solo works, collaborations, screenings and talks, and the biennial’s open-call selection includes a mix of internationally renowned veterans like Yagazie Emezi and emerging talents like Ayobami Ogungbe. The latter’s arresting images of people have a tactile-looking, woven texture that cleverly symbolises the migrant’s marginal place in society. Meanwhile, ecology is explored in Sharbendu De’s images of the Lisu people from his 2016 Imagined Homeland series. The Indian artist’s cinematic mise en scène in the tribe’s ancestral forest in northeast India is a contemplation of their fragility in our current climate crisis, and what it means to belong.