Event: Young Artist's Open Critique

On 26th September Okiki Akinfe and G.A.S. Foundation invited young artists and arts students to participate in a group critique or ‘crit’, following an open call. The crit was facilitated by Okiki Akinfe, with guest moderators, artist Chidinma Nnoli, and Tracian Meikle, Director of 1952 Africa, and coordinator of the Africa Accelerator, an artist Incubator program whose young artists were also in attendance. The aim of the intimate session was to create a supported environment for networking and peer review, to offer an opportunity to exercise evaluation and critical review skills, and to use the presented work as a point of departure for in-depth discussions about practice.

 

Applications were open to young artists and arts students working in all visual art mediums including fine art, sculpture, performance, and moving image, and the selection proved quite diverse, including ceramicists, movement artists, photographers, and visual artists with various mediums, techniques, and practices. The shortlist brought 15 finalists to the fore, whose works the organizing artist, Okiki, thought to be confident, diverse, had room to grow, and ripe for conversation and feedback: 

Adeniyi Adewole | Azeez Afeez | Babatunde Tribe | Blossom Oyeyipo | Damilare Adeyemi | Faith Omole | Foluso Oguntoye | Gbotemi Clay | Jola Adeboye | Rete Poki | Sam Udoh | Somto Ajoku | Seyi Akinwumi | Temiloluwa Johnson | Timilehin Oludare

 

 

Artist Timilehin Oludare presenting work during the crit.

 

Artwork presented by Azeez Afeez.
 

Guest Moderators, Chidinma Nnoli, and Tracian Meikle.

 

Photography presented by Rete Poki

 

 

 

 

 

Artwork presented by Foluso Oguntoye

 

 

 

Work presented by Adeniyi Adewole.

 

 

 

EVENT DETAILS

Event Date: 26th September 2023

Event time: 3:00pm - 8:00pm

Facilitators: Okiki Akinfe, Chidinma Nnoli, Tracian Meikle 

Location: G.A.S. Lagos, 9B, Hakeem Dickson Dr, off T.F. Kuboye Rd, Oniru, Lagos

 

THE FACILITATORS

Chidinma Nnoli

Chidinma Nnoli (b. 1998 Enugu, Nigeria) is an artist working primarily with painting. Her practice contemplates the importance of a single subject’s embodied experience(s), overlaying the past unto the present while insisting on the emotional link between body and space often in conflict with self and a background mostly saturated with religion and gendered obligations.

Nnoli earned her BFA from the University of Benin and has gone on to participate in solo and group exhibitions internationally. Her works are a part of several notable collections and have been featured in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, Colossal, and Vogue.

She currently lives and works in Lagos.

 

Tracian Miekle
Tracian Meikle is a Jamaican curator based between Lagos and Amsterdam. Her work focuses on diasporic blackness, belonging and community-building. She has worked in the field of art and culture as a researcher, moderator and educator in a number of institutions including the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Most recently, Tracian was a curator-in-residence at the experimental artspace at The Treehouse. She also leads the work of 1952 Africa, an arts institution dedicated to the support and development of  African artists and facilitates their current Arts Accelerator Programme.

 

 

Okiki Akinfe
Okikioluwa Akinfe, (born 1999) is London based painter. Her practice centres on creating an alternative to the conventional archive, encompassing 'The Black Lens', a subversive tool towards avoiding stereotypes by demonstrating their absurdity. Authenticity that involves the othered experience, refocusing the position of the White Gaze to a Black Gaze. The figures within the paintings are visible and un-visible, investigating placing and un-placing ghostly Black figures in landscapes, within their own realities, on their own terms. A space in world building for these figures to exist in a non-social geographical space, paused in their own time agency, resting, in perseverance of time.