Goethe-Institut at the 1st Lagos Biennial
Opening Party: Friday, October 13 (Rooftop Goethe-Institut)
Dates: October 14 to November 22, 2017 (Nigerian Railway Compound)
The popularity of art festivals and biennials in major cities across the world has set a pattern through which contemporary art is imagined, perceived and structured. With different objectives usually directed towards the advancement of art, philosophical ideologies and promotion of artists, these periodic events have become a calendar of art activities globally, emphasizing the growing number of art festivals in Africa such as Dak'Art Biennale, Cairo Biennale, Marrakech Biennale, Rencontres Bamako or Kampala Biennale.
In recent years, Lagos has blossomed in the arts with notable personalities taking on the international art scene in various capacities as artists, curators, art historians etc.
For Lagos, it has now become necessary to open up an artistic dialogue with the rest of the world in the form of large-scale projects and exhibitions of contemporary art. LAGOS BIENNIAL (October 14 to November 22, 2017) is an artist-run event, which will hold once every two years at various locations in the city of Lagos with the primary aim of opening up cultural, artistic and political conversations from Lagos to the rest of the world. In line with the spirit of Lagos, which is all welcoming, LAGOS BIENNIAL embraces the ideology of a unified world with the participation of more than forty international artists.
The Goethe-Institut Nigeria supports the first LAGOS BIENNIAL as a very important event to present the both unique and heterogeneous Nigerian cultural scene in all its facets and its international connections.
The Goethe-Institut has invited two remarkable female artists to participate at the event: The German tattoo artist Olivia Jasinski, and the Egyptian-born artist Lamis Haggag, who was on an artist residency program in Berlin this year.
The opening party of LAGOS BIENNIAL will take place at the Goethe-Institut Rooftop on Friday, October 13 starting at 06:30 pm.
© Goethe-Institut
Lamis Haggag is a Cairo/Toronto-based visual artist. She received her MFA from the University of Calgary, Canada in 2013. She obtained a BFA from the faculty of Fine Arts, Helwan University, Egypt in 2008. Her practice involves a variety of investigations of the psychological effect of habitual confinement on a human being. Her work is a critique of social restraints and institutionalization. She presents her ideas through painting, drawing, installation, interactive installation, performance, and public intervention as a process of de-territorialization and re-territorialization. Haggag addresses the notion of territorialization by means of the body and the frame demarcating a certain space, thus, de-mobilizing the movement between the outer public and the inner psychological. She deploys absurd metaphors, such as escaping the frame and achieving a transparent body to achieve ideological freedom. Since 2006 Haggag has participated in a number of national and international group and solo exhibitions, she exhibited and performed in Cairo, Calgary, Beijing, Berlin and Dakar.
The artist
Olivia Jasinski with Polish roots was born and raised nearby Cologne, Germany and later found her home and base of life and creation in Berlin. In 2010, she began studying Fine Arts at the UDK Berlin with Professor Valerie Favre based on painting until 2016. Right before the last year of graduation, she applied for an exchange program to New York City and studied for one semester at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
After her return to Berlin, out of an impulse she started with the art of tattooing made by hand without any machine and so she developed her own unique style of tattooing people. It was the discovery of a new passion. It was like a lesson to understand trust and connection between human beings and to bring joy and beauty directly to a person and his or her inner soul. Together with her fellow artist and friend Kirikoo Des, they invented a unique tattoo performance based on Olivia Jasinski's special tattooing rhythm and his technological skills as an electronic music producer. They performed in Berlin and Paris showing abstract electronic sound connected to the needle and creating a unique sound of a connecting circulation of their work. Olivia Jasinski already performed her art in The United States, France and Germany.
https://www.lagos-biennial.org/
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