With a view toward a broader Art & Country 2026 programme, Art & Country 2025 is conceived as a multimedia artistic production marking the fifth anniversary of the #EndSARS movement and the events of 20 October 2020 in Nigeria.

Five years on, the project asks a pressing question: how is this moment remembered today—and what traces of it remain in our collective consciousness?

Through a series of three-day public engagements—including panel discussions, performances, film screenings, and collaborative production sessions—Art & Country 2025 explores the intersection of state-controlled violence and contemporary artistic practice. The programme centres on themes of memory, trauma, erasure, and civic consciousness, reflecting on how societies process and live with unresolved histories.

In contexts where state violence risks being obscured by denial or political narratives, art becomes a critical site for remembering, questioning, and reframing lived experience. This project therefore examines how Nigerian society—its citizens, artists, and cultural practitioners—has engaged, consciously or unconsciously, with the trauma that disrupted its democratic trajectory.

What has been forgotten?
What persists?
And how do these fragments continue to shape socio-political life today?