Lagos Photo Festival 5th Edition ‘Staging Reality, Documenting Fiction’ October 25 - November 26,

William Shakespeare,"La Nuit des rois".

Time is not a general framework but a provisional result of the connections among entities. Modern discipline has reassembled, hooked together, systematized the cohort of contemporary elements to hold it together and thus to eliminate those that do not belong to the system. This attempt has failed; it has always failed. There are no longer - has never been - anything but elements that elude the system, objects whose date and duration are uncertain. It is not only the Bedouins and the !Kung who mix up transistors and traditional behaviours, plastic buckets and animal-skin buckets. What country could not be called ‘a land of contrasts’?

Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (1991)

Breathtaking Photos of Witch Doctors and Healers Reveal the Spiritual Diversity of Bolivia

Space and Modernism in Ghanaian Architecture

Space and Modernism in Ghanaian Architecture

Commissioned work by South African freelance photographer Alexia Webster. This particular series is spellbounding in the way that it captures public spaces in Urban Africa.  The series provokes the viewer to reinterpret architectural structures and you feel as though you are caught in between the present, past and future where the objects in the photos appear to be both geometrically ordered and…

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Le savoir est l’unique fortune qu’on peut donner entièrement sans en rien la diminuer. Amadou Hampathe Ba

Interview of Kenyan film writer/director Wanuri Kahiu, about “Africa and science fiction”, in reference to the sci-fi movie she wrote and directed: Pumzi, 2009 

This interview was part of the exhibition “Si ce monde vous déplaît” at the FRAC Lorraine, Metz (France), 2013.

Oulimata Gueye 

Shamans using sites like Facebook for black magic, says Malaysian official

A communications officer with a government ministry has reportedly warned people against posting pictures of themselves on social media, lest they be used in black magic rituals.

Wangechi Mutu and Her Post Human Kenyan Mutants by Edgar Arceneaux

Edgar Arceneaux: I did have a third category of how I see you using materials, which is synthetics, be it hair, mylar, sheets of vinyls that look like wood. These are things that have the qualities of being natural but are actually made with machines. Blurring the lines between organic and synthetic imbues your backgrounds with additional associations to concepts of science fiction. When we talked about particles, bleeds, and strains of interactions in your art materials, these are also the same fear-inducing qualities of the antagonist in much of science fiction, fantasy and horror genres films today. Dispersions of airborne viruses producing zombies or wiping out of society with an incurable disease, or on the genetic level, dealing with bio-technology, genetic manipulation, mutation, genetically altered foods and the cloning of human beings. All cause radical restructuring and conflict within both the human body, as well as the societal body. In most Hollywood films, disfigurement is treated as something to be suppressed, pushed back into the shadows, but in your work, you use it as a means to dispel illusions. In spite of that, your work is very seductive to so many people, could you talk about why you think that is?

Wangechi Mutu: I don't even know what people are actually seeing, I can only see through my eyes, or how it feels to be making it, or what if feels like to see these characters created in their environments. I do know that I have a deep fascination in what is considered to be "not-normal," what is considered to be the quintessential look where an ethnicity is considered to be normal. Who came up with and why? What is the purpose of coming up with those delineations and categories? In many ways I see it as a thread running through my work. I see it in pinups, in female insects to cyborgs, everything has this question of beauty, appearance, perception, our claim to understand a person's history and their intentions is based on appearance. That is why I play with this notion of what draws you in, what gives you a sense of comfort, gives you a set of codes that allows you to judge this person. "Oh, I know this person, they're morally in the right place," and I can therefore allow them in. As a non-American, as someone bureaucratically and officially alien, that term itself raises questions about what that means anyway. If you see any depictions of alien in Hollywood or mass media and apply it to yourself, there is inevitably going to be this disconnect or questioning. That's where some of those things come from.

Cotonou.

Dust in a Taxi

New York, by Louis Draper