A History of a City In a Box, Ndidi Dike (2019) (EMPIRE LINES x Tate Modern)

Curators Osei Bonsu, Jess Baxter, and Genevieve Barton cross the diverse landscapes, borders, and generations of contemporary African photography, exposing how the past, present, and future can co-exist on camera. Plus, contemporary artist Ndidi Dike revisits the ‘living archive’ of colonialism in Nigeria, from Independence House in Lagos, to London.

Since the invention of photography in the 19th century, Africa’s cultures and traditions have often been seen through Western lenses. By 1914, European powers had colonised 90% of the African continent, often using the media to construct Africa and Black diasporas, in opposition to whiteness. But photography - and photographic traditions of preservation - has long been used by artists on the continent, whether in the pioneering work of studio photographers like James Barnor in pre-independence Ghana, as a means of anti-colonial resistance and political protest in the 1950s, or powerful shots of modern Nigerian Monarchs.

Tate Modern’s A World in Common platforms how artists are reclaim Africa’s histories and reimagining its contemporary place in the world. Curator Osei Bonsu connects show how masks, removed from their ritual context for display in European museums, can also address contemporary questions of restitution, highlighting Edson Chagas’ passport-style photographs connecting Portugal and Angola. Jess Baxter and Genevieve Barton look at how globalisation, inequality, migration, and urbanisation, are differently experienced across the continent, and how their ‘hopeful’ exhibition focusses as much on climate activism as climate change. Moving beyond Afrofuturism and pan-Africanism towards ideas around ecology and global solidarity, we see how artists exercise agency in ever changing cities, and through boundary-pushing practices of ‘expanded photography’. Plus, moving from the diaspora London to practice in Lagos, multimedia artist Ndidi Dike explains what discarded files and archive documents from Nigeria can reveal about the post-colonial government.

A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography runs at Tate Modern in London until 14 January 2024.

For more about the artist Ndidi Dike, listen to this episode of EMPIRE LINES on Lagos, Peckham, Repeat at the South London Gallery: https://pod.link/1533637675/episode/dd32afc011dc8f1eaf39d5f12f100e5d

Part of EMPIRE LINES Photography Season, exposing different perspectives on the past. Listen to the other episodes on Carrie Mae Weems, Nil Yalter’s Exile is a Hard Job, plus Gregor Sailer’s series, The Polar Silk Road.

WITH: Osei Bonsu, British-Ghanaian curator and writer, and a curator of International Art at Tate Modern. He is the curator of A World in Common, with co-curators Jess Baxter and Genevieve Barton. Ndidi Dike, Nigeria-based visual artist working in sculpture and mixed-media painting.

ART: ‘A History of a City In a Box, Ndidi Dike (2019) (EMPIRE LINES x Tate Modern)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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