Ẹ̀gbá
Ẹ̀gbá was part of REMIXING THE FUTURE, an exhibition of new works commissioned by The World culture Museum in Sweden and exhibited at Etnografiska Museet,Stockholm Sweden with Andreas Nur & Theresa Traore Dahlberg. The exhibition runs from 9th October 2021 - 9th January 2022
Ẹ̀gbá Artist text
Presented are sixteen still life photographs of objects from Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria in the collection of the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, Sweden. The region to which these objects belong is Ẹ̀gbá with its capital Abeokuta – the name used in the museum catalogue. The photographs present a new categorisation of these objects by their presumed functions and duties. Often the objects overlap and re-emerge several times exposing the flaws of the one-dimensional categorisation system which plagues the museum archive.
The photographs in the exhibition are gold toned c-prints housed in IKEA frames—an icon of Swedish lifestyle. The Museum of Ethnography is also iconically painted in the Swedish traditional colour Falu red. The photographed objects are thus twice confined by icons of the Swedish system, first by the museum and then by the IKEA frame.
Accompanying the prints is a publication serving as a magazine supplement to a high culture lifestyle magazine. It functions as a guide to assist those who aspire to better themselves and obtain a certain level of distinction. The supplement suggests that through purchasing the required vogue items, it is possible to increase one's cultural capital.
I am focused on examining the use of photographic printed materials as a tool for consumption, which fostered the craving for such artefacts, and set the precedence for such a collection to exist. With this I am interrogating museum aesthetics and the commodification of other cultures by western society.
Ẹ̀gbá is part of REMIXING THE FUTURE, an exhibition of new works commissioned by The World culture Museum in Sweden and exhibited at Etnografiska Museet,Stockholm Sweden with Andreas Nur & Theresa Traore Dahlberg. The exhibition runs from 9th October 2021 - 9th January 2022
Text by Michael Barrett - Curator of African Exhibit, World Museum, Sweden
Ẹ̀gbá by Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole consists of sixteen still life photographs of objects from Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, all in the museum’s collection, as well as a select number of the actual artefacts. To create the still lifes, the artist painstakingly combined into thematic sets and photographed more than 130 artefacts in the form of sculptures, textiles, tools, hats and accessories, domestic containers, ritual paraphernalia, medicinal plants, food, and beauty products. At first glance, it appears the artist wants the resulting prints to evoke our desire, a sentiment strengthened by the glossy, printed magazine found in the exhibition.
Yet, at the same time, the artist mocks this desire for the exotic as the magazine appropriates and mimics the gaze and mindset of 1930s bourgeois Europeans. Discerning members of the European upper classes had by then begun to find African art and craft fashionable. Paradoxically so, as most Europeans barely acknowledged the full humanity of African artists, and certainly not the sovereignty of African societies colonized in their name.
In Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole’s installation, tension is maintained between objects assembled according to local functions and meanings—mostly unimaginable by museum and collector alike— in the photographs, on the one hand. And on the other hand, the advertisement “copy” that attempts to convert the sculptures, everyday- and ritual artefacts into objects of desire and consumption.
Installation shot Etnografiska//Tony Sandin