Writing Art History Since 2002

First Title

LEFT TO RIGHT, ROW ONE: Philip Fagbeyiro (Birds of Knowledge), Dr Clémentine Deliss (Co-Director, LagosPhoto20), Jakob Karpus (Birds of Knowledge), Joana Atemengue Owona (Birds of Knowledge). ROW TWO: Asma Ben Slama (Birds of Knowledge), Ruxin Liu (Birds of Knowledge), Alper Turan (Birds of Knowledge), Megan Dieudonné (Birds of Knowledge). ROW THREE: Asya Yaghmurian (Guest curator, LagosPhoto20), Azu Nwagbogu (Director, LagosPhoto20), Feranmi Olukosi (Assistant Curator, LagosPhoto20)

Birds of Knowledge is a research cooperative of artists and social designers whose immediate origins hail from Nigeria, Tunisia, Cameroon, China, Turkey, Finland, Norway, Sweden, New Zealand and Germany. Birds of Knowledge wishes to communicate diverse approaches to research that can help one to form alliances in digital space during the pandemic. By transgressing disciplinary boundaries, we want to represent the thematic imagination of the younger generation and promote mutual aid and solidarity. Through this process, we seek to create a counter-model of communication between artists and co-creators that works as an alternative to traditional and competitive forms of art and museum practices.

For LagosPhoto20, we have built the Home Museum. This fluid, democratic space opens up entirely new doors for accessing knowledge about the past. It invites all to feel welcome and to engage with visual materials and memories on their own terms. We recognise the importance of an inclusive and participatory process for this new online museum. Letting fly the restrictive academic thought models of the past, we wish to offer several tools and routes into the collected consciousness and kindred narratives that together constitute the Home Museum.

While wandering through this personal space, each visitor is able to form a subjective perception of the various ways the artists and co-creators have shared their personal selection of objects of virtue.

We want to evoke and promote discussions, collaborations, connections and communication. We want visitors to the Home Museum to be intrigued and feel excited about their neighbours. We want people to recognize themselves and their own journeys in those of others. We want you to discover how different human experience can be, how meanings can be shared and yet remain individual at the same time. How an object of virtue can mean home, heritage, journey, and culture. How it can stem from a sense of family, can be passed down through several hands, become a witness of time, a guiding figure, a carrier of memories, a teacher that helps you to re-imagine, or a symbol that acts as a painful reminder of past times. Ultimately the object of virtue has infinite meanings.

We Birds of Knowledge, Megan Dieudonné, Philip Fagbeyiro, Jakob Karpus, Ruxin Liu, Joana Atemengue Owona, Jakob Sitter, Asma Ben Slama, Ilo Toivio, Alper Turan and Yan Yan see the long term approach of the Home Museum as especially relevant to future transcultural dialogues.

View the Home Museum here.

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