Q&A with Azu Nwagbogu

Azu Nwagbogu - Voices curator


As part of the new Voices sector, Azu Nwagbogu answers questions to Paris Photo team and presents his curated project Liberated Bodies on view at Paris Photo on the ground floor of the Grand Palais from November 7-10, 2024.

Joana Choumali, My Home is in My Head, 2024 - Courtesy of the artist & Loft Art

Through your concept 'Liberated Bodies', you invite us to challenge the subjectivity of the archive. How do the artists you selected use archival material to liberate photography from its conventional role?


Cai Dongdong's work is based on found photographic archives that circumscribe the history of modern China. The half-century from 1949 to 1989, in China had some of the most consequential events that influenced the world with its failed utopias and monomaniacal errant of human intervention in which had a devastating impact on ecology and human lives. Today we speak of the Anthropocene but the decay, I would argue, started with the wars of conquest and colonialism that defined the previous century. Yet so little is known of these monumental events. Dongdong's work is not photography as evidence or with comments on jurisprudence, it rather is a powerful impulse of an artist towards a reflection of that period in humanities history.

The Great Leap Forward, The Cultural Revolution, and the Sino-Soviet relations of the last Century, which today takes on an inverted form in our century. These are all very interesting from a visual history perspective. 

Joana Choumali’s work is also based on the archives but in her case, a personal familial archive, that pays homage to her journey as an empath in a vicious violent world. One often hears of work being cathartic, in Joana Choumali’s it is vitally true. Choumali stitches and weaves memories and histories through her “radioactive” stitching intervention on the photographic prints.

Lebohang Kganye, is the latest winner of the prestigious Deutsche Börse photographic prize. Her work is based on a retelling of South Africa’s troubled past through various sculptural photographic interventions. 

I do not want to give too much away but I am very excited to see this edition of Paris Photo Fair.

Is there a historical link that ties these works together, and why did you choose to connect them?


In a formal sense, these works are all connected by their archival roots and secondly by their sculptural dimensions and elements. The historical weight of the works are also self-evident. That is to say, there is a commentary on conquest, forms of hegemony and the arrogance of human intervention in trying to subdue nature, geography and people.


In your current research, how does photography bring a deeper understanding of society and culture, and what is its impact?


Photography is light and light banishes darkness. It illuminates and informs and with the proposition with 'Liberated Bodies’, I hope it frees the imagination and brings us closer to seeing and feeling a sense of our common humanity.

Cai Dongdong, Miss the Target, 2020 - Courtesy M97 © Cai Dongdong, Courtesy of M97 Shanghai

Exhibited galleries


La Patinoire Royale Bach, Bruxelles – Solo Show -  Lebohang Kganye

Loft Art, Casablanca – Solo Show - Joana Choumali

M97, Shanghai - Solo Show - Cai Dongdong 

Portrait d' Azu Nwagbogu - Crédits: Anastasia Ermolenko


Biography


Azu Nwagbogu - Founder and Director of LagosPhoto Festival, Independent Curator

“The selection for Voices - ‘Liberated Bodies’ - focuses on artists who reactivate the archive by transforming either existing archive or their own personal archive to tell stories, and if not a story, just an idea of a life lived. In a sense, their practice accepts the active as a living breathing being that is liberated by artistic intervention.”

Azu Nwagbogu is an independent curator, interested in evolving new models of engagement with questions of decolonization, restitution, and repatriation. In his practice, the exhibition becomes an experimental site for reflection, civic engagement, ecology and repatriation – both tangible and symbolic. Azu Nwagbogu is the Founder and Director of African Artists’ Foundation (AAF), and serves as Founder and Director of LagosPhoto Festival.     He is the publisher of Art Base Africa. In 2021, Azu was awarded ’Curator of Year 2021’ by the Royal Photographic Society, UK, and also listed amongst the hundred most influential people in the art world by ArtReview. In 2021, Azu launched the project ’Dig Where You Stand (DWYS) - From Coast to Coast’ which offers a new model for institutional building and engagement, with questions of decolonization, restitution and repatriation, the exhibition took place in Ibrahim’s Mahama’s culture hub SCCA in Tamale, Ghana.

Voices sector


Paris Photo is launching the Voices sector this year, inviting three curators to develop a proposal around contemporary themes to (re)emerge an artistic scene or medium practice.This first edition of Voices is presented by the curators Sonia Voss, Azu Nwagbogu, and Elena Navarro.