Traces of Ecstasy | Lagos Biennial Fourth Edition
Traces of Ecstasy is an ongoing project (consisting of an architectural pavilion, an art exhibition, and a symposium) that premiered at the 2024 Lagos Biennial from February 3-10, 2024.
Traces of Ecstasy was one among a series of autonomous platforms responding in diverse ways to the biennial’s overarching theme of refuge. This edition of the Lagos Biennial was be held in Tafawa Balewa Square—a site in central Lagos, named after Nigeria’s first prime minister, that hosted the country’s independence ceremonies in 1960. The curatorial project critically responds to the charged historical residues of this space, taking its constitutive role in postcolonial nation-building as a point of departure. Bridging African indigenous frontiers, queer methodologies, and decentralised digital technologies, Traces of Ecstasy aims to unsettle the colonial capitalist power structures that maintain and reproduce the ideological legitimacy of the nation-state model in post/neocolonial Africa.
Providing a space for critique, repair and freedom-dreaming, Traces of Ecstasy features artists from the African continent and its diasporas including Nolan Oswald Dennis, Evan Ifekoya, Raymond Pinto, Temitayo Shonibare, and Adeju Thompson/Lagos Space Programme. The exhibition presents all newly commissioned works spanning sculpture, video, sound, textile, performance, and digital art.
A curatorial statement providing further information about each of the works can be accessed here and a pdf version of the exhibition booklet can be downloaded here.
Gathering artists, writers, and scholars whose works informed the theoretical thrust of Traces of Ecstasy, the accompanying symposium (held on February 7, 2024) included presentations and discussions exploring a variety of relevant themes such as the fraught relationship between colonial modernity and African indigeneity; the pitfalls of postcolonial statecraft; the intersections of critical African studies and queer and feminist theory; and the affinities between African metaphysical schemes and digital technologies. The symposium’s speakers included Zoé Samudzi, Emmanuel Iduma, Roberto Strongman, Neema Githere, and Nolan Oswald Dennis, with introductory and concluding remarks by KJ Abudu.
Traces of Ecstasy is titled after an essay by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, an exiled British-Nigerian artist whose photographic works combined Yoruba ritualistic practice and transgressive homoeroticism to destabilise colonial fictions of nationality and positivist rationality. Equally oriented toward a future horizon of queer, decolonial liberation, Traces of Ecstasy brings together aesthetic and discursive interventions across space and time to illuminate alternative, anarchic forms of African collectivity for the twenty-first century.
