Nigeria Imaginary: Colloquium

Event
Online
23–30.9.26

The Nigeria Imaginary Colloquium is a new seminar series presented as part of MOWAA's digital programming, bringing together artists from the Nigeria Imaginary: Homecoming exhibition for a set of in-depth, public conversations about practice. 

The series' title is a deliberate nod to the colloquium tradition established by FESTAC '77 and the earlier Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, gatherings where art and ideas were held in the same room. Each session picks up that thread, tracing the trajectory of a featured artist's work from ideation to realisation, and exploring the materials, archives, methodologies, and conceptual frameworks that inform what they make. 

These are not artist talks in the conventional sense. They are an invitation to sit with process itself, and to understand the labour and the ideas that sits behind the finished work. 

Events

Nigeria Imaginary Colloquium: Onyeka Igwe with Nate Agbetu

Online
23.9.26
6PM
Onyeka Igwe is a London-born artist-filmmaker whose research-based practice draws on colonial archives, oral history, dance, and voice to surface obscured narratives of body and place. At the 60th Venice Biennale, she presented No Archive Can Restore This Chorus of (Diasporic) Shame at the Nigeria Pavilion, a three-part audio-visual work exploring Nigeria's entwinement with Britain through colonial film. In conversation with Nate Agbetu, Igwe traces how the work moved from archival encounter to finished form.`




Nigeria Imaginary Colloquium: Modupeola Fadugba

Online
28.9.26
6PM
Modupeola Fadugba is a Nigerian multimedia artist whose practice moves between painting, drawing, and socially engaged installation, drawing on a background in engineering, economics, and education. Her interactive game installation The People's Algorithm invites teachers, policymakers, and students to debate how to reform Nigeria's education system, and won El Anatsui's Outstanding Production Prize. In this session, Fadugba discusses how research and material experimentation shape ideas into finished work.




Nigeria Imaginary Colloquium: Abraham Oghobase with Emmanuel Iduma

Online
30.9.26
6PM
Abraham Oghobase is a Lagos-born, Toronto-based artist whose photography-based practice interrogates land, colonial history, and knowledge production, often using his own body as subject and archive as material. As part of the Nigeria Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, he presented Rock Study, Life of Mine: Schematic II, Colonial Self-Portrait, and Variations on a Theme. In conversation with writer and critic Emmanuel Iduma, Oghobase discusses how his images move from documentary impulse toward abstraction.




Nigeria Imaginary Colloquium: Ndidi Dike

Online
2.10.26
5PM
Ndidi Dike is a British Nigerian sculptor and multimedia artist whose long-researched projects use found objects, wood, and archival material to examine slavery, extraction, and postcolonial power. As part of the Nigeria Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, she presented Blackhood: A Living Archive, a two-part work reflecting on the EndSARS uprising and its global echoes. Join us to discuss how Dike’s decades of research converge into installation.