Dig Where You Stand, which was part of The African Artists’ Foundation’s fall program and on display from September 2 to October 9, 2022, is the inaugural exhibition of a touring exhibition that will visit numerous cities in Africa. Over the coming months, the exhibition will be visiting six different regions in the continent of Africa including Lomé (Togo), Lagos (Nigeria), Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire), Durban and Cape Town (South Africa). The first showcase took place in Lagos at Alliance Francais and closed on October 9, 2022.
The exhibition features works by Zanele Muholi, Renzo Martens, and The Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) among others.
Image: Courtesy of African Artists’ Foundation
Dig Where You Stand is a series of cross-country traveling exhibitions that offers a paradigm shift by bringing a new approach to interacting with capital in both the art world and the larger African economy.
African Artists’ Foundation, the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA Tamale), the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), and Mondriaan Fonds are working together to offer the exhibition Dig Where You Stand, which is curated by Azu Nwagbogu. The show imagines liberation tactics from the ongoing economic extraction processes both inside and beyond the art industry. The show brings together a variety of examples of regenerative artistic practices but also acts as a regenerative agent in itself –in each location leaving behind a toolkit for jumpstarting regenerative economic processes.
Image: Courtesy of African Artists’ Foundation
In order to address the issues of decolonization, restitution, and repatriation in the art world as well as the larger African economy, Dig Where You Stand examines the healing possibilities of art in the area and its diasporas. The exhibition is shifting the decolonial paradigm away from Western museums toward a location-specific, solution-oriented approach, cultivating the reformative potential of art throughout the region by emphasizing travel, migration, and (dis)placement. This approach leaves behind a toolkit in each location for starting regenerative economic processes. In order to reorient the art world’s value systems and give exploited people agency once again, artists and local communities investigate the colonial economies that have oppressed vulnerable communities.
Image: Courtesy of African Artists’ Foundation
Through the traveling exhibition format, AAF explores how contextualising and community is essential to maintain healthy and relevant dialogue between art and viewer.
About African Artists’ Foundation
African Artists’ Foundation is an institution committed to the promotion and development of contemporary African art. AAF contributes to Africa’s cultural landscape by driving social change in communities through festivals, exhibitions, residencies, competitions and workshops.
By providing assistance to professional and emerging artists in Africa and support to international exhibitions and community outreach programmes, African Artists’ Foundation views the contribution to a strong cultural landscape in Africa as a transformative element in driving social change. In addition to a rigorous programme of exhibitions and workshops at its gallery in Lagos, African Artists’ Foundation organises its flagship project, the LagosPhoto Festival, annually.
