Gallery B57 is set to open the doors of her new space for its inaugural art exhibition titled, Ghosts of Bar Beach. The exhibition will open on October 28 and end on November 11, 2018.
The inaugural exhibition, a solo show by Ade Adekola, provides a post-documentary perspective to the history of the popular Bar Beach in Lagos, which examines how contemporary artists deal with the concept of nostalgia and memory.
The organisers of the event, in a statement made available to our correspondent, said, “Our inaugural exhibition explores nostalgia and memory in Colour, the Colourful and the Spectacular.
“Also, Ghosts of Bar Beach conjures up several aspects of nostalgia from the 1500s, with the naming of its environs as ‘Lago du Curamo’, to the 1800s when the British bombarded Lagos and the 1970s when it city and rest of the southern coast of Nigeria was a place of spectacle of death.
“The re-mastered images in this exhibition are presented with their electrifying colours to provide access to moments of nostalgia and memories of Bar Beach moods lost for good.”
Stressing that Ade Adekola’s body of works was defined as ‘post-documentary’ due to the long interval between shooting the images and creating the re-mastered works, the statement added, “The images do not document specific events but memories of a colourful past. Each image comes alive and creates a spark of resonance, sometimes in a slow meditative and contemplative pace.
Ade’s symbolic gesture of layering his images, creating ghosting and the use of vibrant colours fit with the idea of time, nostalgia and loss that are consistent with the history of the Bar Beach.”
Adekola is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning architect turned conceptual artist, who primarily explores the possibilities offered by digital image making. As an image maker, his photography is more or less his medium of artistic expression and his career is aimed at conceiving, orchestrating and delivering images so charged that one may experience them as objects. Typical in his work is the use of vibrant and electrifying colours.
Adekola’s photography has been described as performative, creating vibrant memories of a time and questioning the boundaries between individual and collective experiences. His images are considered to elevate the visual plateau of Nigerian photography.