“I think most women around the world rarely have the experience of walking through the street and having people move out of the way and that is something that can happen for women here performing if they're masked.” We’re talking to Wura-Natasha Ogunji about her practice, ahead of ART X Lagos 2019 this weekend. Now in its fourth iteration, this year’s edition of West Africa’s biggest art fair is introducing a Performance Pavilion, which is where Ogunji’s expert curation comes in.

Originally from St. Louis and now based in Lagos, this celebrated Guggenheim fellow works across performance, video and works on paper to engage with critical issues around masquerade, gender, the body and public space. Often in her performance works, such as Strut and Will I Still Carry Water When I am a Dead Woman?, she takes women onto the roads of Nigeria’s megacity where their interventions literally and figuratively disrupt the status quo. She’s also established The Treehouse here, an experimental studio that welcomes transient and challenging artist-led happenings.

For ART X Lagos’s inaugural performance programme, Ogunji has chosen new works from fellow Nigerian artists, Eca Eps, Taiwo Aiyedogbon and Ngozi Schommers. Entitled Small Acts, each of the vastly different pieces will delve into the connection between art and ethics. While Ogunji isn’t performing herself ("I like to make things when I’m moved to and I don't feel compelled to do so right now. Usually, when I’m developing a performance, it comes out of an urgent question that I have in the moment,” she says), the works she’s selected and developed are as provoking and transformative as her own.

The overall concept is something that has been bubbling away for a while. “Since I started doing performance in Lagos, I’ve been thinking about how you could do something simple that had a big impact on people and that transgresses daily expectations in a very poetic way,” she muses. “So, I’m very excited to be able to have people look more closely at the work that these three artists are doing because I find that the questions they’re asking are very interesting. All three have a powerful visual aesthetic.”

For Ogunji, it’s art in general, and performance specifically, that gives women agency to generate real change. “I think one thing that performance does is that it allows for interruptions in societal expectations and cultural rules, which is a really beautiful place to be,” she explains. “I'm looking at how performance opens up public space. My work and that of these artists is about exploring what's possible when we step through that opening.”

Water Works by Eca Eps sees the artist dressed in a NYSC uniform performing with water, as an exploration of access to resources and the disparity between rich and poor in a country with the highest number per capita of millionaires, yet where poverty is widespread. “Eca’s visual and performance work is based on a simple set of objects or gestures yet is full of meaning,” says Ogunji. “This piece is really about access to resources and waste and this tension between poverty and abundance. In Nigeria people's basic needs are not met and we have huge infrastructure problems. I think it’s important to be addressing excess in a place where there are so many people living without.”

Ngozi Schommers’ performance, If Not For a Child, is using the tradition of Omugwo to ask a question that would struggle to be more universal - without children, am I worth less? “Ngozi's piece is based around the Igbo tradition where when a woman has a child she gives gifts to her mother and it’s this whole celebration,” she explains. “So, the thing is, if you don't ever have a child, does that mean you are of less value to your mother because you are not able to participate in this ritual?”

Similarly, Mirror Mirror by Taiwo Aiyedogbon looks at themes of belonging and community through a uniquely Nigerian lens. “This is an endurance piece with Taiwo and another performer, Mary, who wear a conjoined costume. They're basically moving around, while remaining attached,” Ogunji reveals. “Taiwo is really interested in how we are individuals but also need other people, which in Nigeria is a lived social and economic reality. There is this tension between the connection to another person and the discomfort of that because it means if you dissent, you're really in a difficult situation.”

Oguji hopes that each of these digestible pieces will not only prompt conversations and curiosity, but also tangible self-reflections. "It’s not like any of these pieces is going to cause a huge upset but it is going to ask something of people that they're not necessarily talking about. And while I don't think artists have any bigger responsibility to create political work or do social justice work, I am examining ways that we can uniquely shift how people think about the world and each other and also inspire actions based on those changes in thinking,” she says.

“I think art is one of those things, like love, that has the potential to completely shake you. You can become more open, caring and more generous because you feel connected, excited by something or moved by beauty in front of you, and I think that is so amazing.”

ART X Lagos 2019 runs from 1-3 November at Federal Palace, Victoria Island, Lagos. Buy tickets here

Read about more about Wura-Natasha Ogunji and Strut, here. Photography of Strut courtesy of Allyn Gaestel

Visit ART X Lagos

Published on 31/10/2019