2022 SPECIAL PROJECTS 

VICTOR EHIKHAMENOR

Ulin-nóifo,
The Lineage That Never Ends

With the emergence of intercontinental trade between Europe and Africa, Benin City became an important port for the exchange of goods. Red kernels, peppers and ivories were traded for clothes, corals and bronzes. These objects were charged with new meanings and acquired prominence in the royal court; serving as markers of sumptuary laws, value systems, as well as cultural and art practices in the Benin Kingdom.

Ehikamenor’s commission incorporates rosary beads, bronzes and sound works. They can be seen as anagrams that allow us to study the artefacts that have shaped Benin’s cultural and political histories, and to contemplate new omens for Nigeria’s present and future realities.

  ABOUT THE ARTIST   

RANTI BAM

SOWING SEEDS IN HEARTHLAND

Bam’s work with clay is an intuitive and intimate form of personal and social exploration. She sees clay in its natural unreinforced state, as an avatar of her body in the world. Through her practice she enjoys pushing this wondrous material to its limits, embracing all the possibilities it has to offer. Her works function publicly as ‘hearths’, vessels around which people gather in contemplation, meditation and discourse.

Responding to the fair’s theme Who Will Gather Under The Baobab Tree?, Bam’s performance “Sowing Seeds in Hearthland” explores the symbolic connection between her hearths and the Baobab tree - spaces that Africans have gathered around to share stories, harness wisdom and seek spiritual and material sustenance.

Her performance will act out the connection between humans and their environment, both of which are fragile yet resilient. Bam, along with a group of women will build unfired clay vessels filled with soil and seeds. From the disintegration of these forms, new crops will bloom. In the breaking down of the vessels, we are asked to consider how a relationship with nature can break down often violent mechanical and ideological structures, in order to facilitate new growth and healing.

  ABOUT THE ARTIST   

LINDA DOUNIA

once upon a garden

Once Upon A Garden is a digital garden born from a collaboration between the artist, Linda Dounia and an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model. It is a dystopian projection of a likely outcome of global warming, that depicts a world where humans now have to live with simulated images of plants and flowers, which have all disappeared from earth. Through collections of AI assisted paintings of a variety of indigenous flora, native to the Sahel region of West Africa, the installation puts forward three fundamental questions:

What has been the impact of contemplating nature, particularly flowers, in Africa? Where does the contemplation of nature fit in the broader context of industrialized societies, given the correlation between development and hedonism? Can our contemplation of art restore our collective ability to introspect on our environment and our sense of responsibility towards preserving it?

The installation attempts to answer these questions through the spectacle of flora as a distant memory, to elicit a longing for what has been lost and hopefully trigger the desire to protect what has survived.

"I first compiled a list of over 100 species of flora endemic to the Sahel region and classified as endangered by IUCN's Red List of Endangered Species. I then scoured the web for images of the plants to create the database I would later use in the first round of training. Images for many of the plants were hard to track down – only existing in scans of herbarium pages, some dating back to colonial times. In those cases, I used the commercial AI tool DALL.E to generate variations and enlarge the dataset sufficiently to begin training. I then shortlisted a subset of plants from the database that I imagine would fit well together in a garden, and this allowed me to compile a second, more refined, database specifically for this installation which I used to train a GAN. I used the GAN's initial outputs of 8,000 plant images to create animations for each individual plant and brought them together in the final composition – a digital garden of 28 flowers as seen during the day and at night from the collaboration between the mind's eye of the AI and mine. During this process, it dawned on me that a majority of the plants I used in this project were completely new to me and that, in general, I grew up seeing less than half of the plant species my grandmother grew up seeing. I also realized that while some of the extinct plant species I worked with survive in their digital embodiment on the internet, the ones that weren't recorded and digitized are entirely lost to both human and digital consciousness.” the artist explains.

  ABOUT THE ARTIST