Emeka Ogboh (Nigeria) wins artwork competition for the Peace and Security building of the African Union / Addis Ababa
About:
Emeka Ogboh is a Nigerian artist, whose works contemplates broad notions of listening and hearing as its main focus. He works primarily with sound and video to explore ways of understanding cities as cosmopolitan spaces with their unique characters. His sound recordings also consider the history and aural infrastructure of cities, Lagos, Nigeria in particular, where he currently resides. These Lagos recordings have produced a corpus of work entitled “Lagos Soundscapes,” which he has variously installed in different foreign locales.
A graduate of the Fine and Applied Arts Department, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Ogboh has exhibited in several venues in Nigeria and Internationally, at venues including, the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos; Menil Collection, Houston; Whitworth and Manchester city galleries; MassMoca Massachusetts; Museum of Contemporary Arts Kiasma, Helsinki and Rauternstrauch-Joset-Museum, Cologne.
Ogboh is a DAAD 2014 grant recipient, and the co-founder of the Video Art Network Lagos.
Quote Ogboh:
“If you have ever been to Lagos you will understand why sound is my preferred medium. One of the first impressions of the city is the intensity of its soundscapes. For a first-timer in Lagos, especially if you are from the Global North, it can be a shocking experience to have the city’s soundscapes invading your eardrums. But my forage into sound art actually began after I attended the media class on the audible spectrum taught by the Austrian multimedia artist Harald Scherz at the Winter Academy in Fayoum, Egypt in 2008. Upon returning to Lagos, I began experimenting with sound. I remember receiving a phone call from a friend around that time. This friend, who lives in Abuja, Nigeria’s political capital, was visiting Lagos. After fifteen seconds into our conversation, I asked him if he was in Lagos because I could pick up the distinctive Lagos soundscapes in the background. He was startled that I knew that he was in Lagos. He had wanted to pay me a surprise visit. In a sense that phone call opened my ears to the uniqueness of the sounds of my city. So I started to listen, record, and experiment with these sounds. The more I recorded and listened, the more I appreciated their power to immerse and transport the listener. I find sound more engaging than any other medium.”
C2073, 2013.
Size: Variable room size
Medium: Mixed media sound installation
Date: 2013
The title C2073 is from the combination code that unlocked the door to Room 202, my place of residence
during my stay in Yokohama, Japan. The installation is a re-enactment of this space and time,
and focuses on memories, whole and fragmented. Reconstructing room 202 from memory, and as a starting point of the installation, the space is recreated with its furnishings. The walls and every piece of furniture in the room were then covered entirely with the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, spanning from 30th September – 7th November 2011.
A headphone and speakers installation combines soundscapes and conversations recorded over the period of
39 days to build an acoustic archive of the time spent in Japan.
Ala, 2014.
Size: Variable room size
Medium: 2 channel video projection + stereo sound
Date: 2014
Àlà brings the sights and sounds of the megacity Lagos together in an installation that explores Lagos’
continued capacity to capture the imagination of people near and far, who arrive daily with
aspirations of carving out a living and eventually finding their “golden fleece.” In a dizzying display of
manipulated images and intricate sound mixing, Lagos is painted as a space of intense hope and
desire, laying bare the “dream” (àlà) that keeps it churning, yet which for many is a fleeting illusion.
Lagos State of Mind, 2012.
Size: Variable room size
Medium: sound, speakers, earphones, bus
Date: 2012
The Danfo bus is the most recognizable visual iconography that anchors Lagos in popular
imagination. The typical Danfo is a VW transporter bus, painted in cadmium yellow with two black
stripes. The Danfo bus, in my aesthetic universe, is stabilized as a visual sign around and within which
the myriad acoustic references mined from around Lagos can be assembled to effectively transform
the Danfo bus into a dynamic, sonic sculpture.
This piece combines Lagos soundscapes recordings installed outside the bus (spot speakers), and
recordings of late night radio love shows installed inside the bus (earphones), in exploring an intimate side of Lagos.
Trancemission, 2014.
Size: Variable
Medium: sound, speakers, water, well.
Date: 2014
Trancemission focuses primarily on my sound experience of two port cities: Lagos and Yokohama. The
work consists of excerpts of sound recordings that are reflections of my aural experience of these spaces.
I compose a sound narrative that evokes nostalgia because I am engaged with aspects of my past in the
present. It is also an active process of relieving and recreating this sound-based past in a new context
that inadvertently becomes part of my peripatetic, in-transit, cache of memory of spaces and places.
Trancemission is realized as an electro-acoustic composition that derives from experiential soundscapes
of these port cities, and installed in a well in Cartagena, another port city.
The water well becomes a deposit of life experience, creating an opportunity for listeners to sit on its
edge, peer into it, and find their reflections in a composition of my memory, as the sound emerges from
its depth.