Exhibition Opening
Commodities of Consumption and Sites of Extraction in the Global South

Sat, 16.01.2021
4:00 PM Alliance Francaise de Lagos

An installation on consumer products connected with the transatlantic slave trade by the Nigerian artist Ndidi Dike.

 “Commodities of Consumption and Sites of Extraction in the Global South” is the title of a multi-faceted and ongoing artistic research project by the Nigerian artist Ndidi Dike. For some time, she has been intensely engaging historical archives, and working across a range of artistic media such as for instance collage, installation, painting and sculpture, which have guided her investigations—across time and with a global reach—that dive into pre- and post-colonial histories of slavery, forced migration, displacement, decolonization, identity, gender inequality, and patriarchy.

Ndidi Dike also deals with the political dimensions of commodites—their consumption, circulation, manufacture, as well as geo-political policies that underwrite the control and extractive industries that govern natural resources and appropriation in Africa. The artist does not just focus on one specific country or region or one specific aspect: "Part of my interest in these histories, despite the perception held by many that they’ve been exhausted, is
the truth that the effects of the past survive in the present. Or, as Maya Angelou puts it, “History despite its wretched pain cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage need not be lived again.” (Ndidi Dike)

This installation takes up consumer products connected with the transatlantic slave trade (along with current day global commodity markets), and highlights their materiality as potent metaphors.
 
The exhibition is open between January 16 to 24, 2021 and can be visited at the gallery space of the Alliance Francaise/ Mike Adenuga Centre.
                                            

Based in Lagos, contemporary sculptor and mixed-media artist Ndidi Dike who was born in London, spent her early years in England, is a major contemporary Nigerian artist and undoubtedly one of the leading artists of her generation with numerous solo and group exhibitions held both locally and internationally She has long mined the historical associations prompted by material forms. She has employed wood and metal to fashion object-oriented installations that call up histories of transit and oppression related to the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. While also engaging the geo political era of the natural resource extraction industries that investigates the global entanglements of material(dis) possession , postcolonial exploitation in the Global South, focusing on the DRC.
Other topics include forced migration, race, post-colonialism, cross-border/country migration, market aesthetics, consumerism, globalization, living patriarchy, gender equity, multiculturism, decolonization, identity and contemporary politics.