Folake Shoga
Nigeria/U.K.
Mundane (Video installation)
Folake Shoga is a Video and Installation artist. Born in Ibadan, Nigeria in 1955. Studied at Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic. Has worked as a freelance illustrator for several years and has received commissions from Women's Press and Virago. Has been presented in several solo and group exhibitions including In/sight at the Blue Coat Gallery, England, and Cross/ing at the University of South Florida Art Museum, USA. A winner of Arts Council of Great Britain Bursary for Film and Video, and a Television Award for her film "Imperfect Window". Lives in Bristol.
Oya
"Oya"
(Video installation): Within the Yoruba belief system, Oya is the
goddess of storms, tempests and of the river Niger. I have
interpreted her as a guardian of boundaries: boundaries between
weather systems, different lands, and by analogy, between
different cultures, and perhaps between two states of being, life
and death.
When two systems meet, there is a great deal of
turbulence. This figure of Oya represents the potentiality of
such a turbulence. In legend "Oya is as powerful as the
buffalo or bush cow whose hide she employs as a disguise when she
withdraws from the world." (Miguel "Willie"
Ramos). Meetings between Europe and Africa produced many changes
in both cultures. This is a ongoing process which continuously
recreates the world we live in. the presence of bronze heads from
Benin can be seen as a signifier of this process, as can the
presence of an exhibition of technology-assisted art from Africa.
Within Nigeria there are many traditions of mud-sculptures
ranging from the formal, including a type of court art, to the
intensely personal and idiosyncratic. Often they are devotional in
purpose. Somewhere within this range is the work of Austrian
artist Susanne Wenger, a founding contributor to the fusion of
African /European art I remember in the Nigeria of my childhood.
As a member of Nigeria's educated "elite" (as they used
to call us in school) I have an academic rather than a visceral
knowledge of these practices. But in the landscape of memory I
also have images of weathered, half-broken clay figures submerged
in long elephant grass, cerily powerful and silent, which evoke
for me all manner of associated memories: Sunday afternoon drives
in the bush, family visits, formal social occasions, cement
funerary sculpture, the smell of harmattan, ... No doubt it is
these factors which dictated that the first sculpture I attempted
was in the form of a shrine. I was surprised that the figures
almost seemed to make themselves. They have a strange autonomie.
Educated in the European Art School tradition, I had no idea that
the ancient, but very culturally-specific archtypes I was dealing
with would just click into place within my mind, proving a means
of picturing the world, of giving ideas a concrete form, of
mediating between something called "imagination" and
something called "real life". from the beginning, each
figure seems to have a life of its own, an internal logic and
dynamism, which is my task ro uncover. The basic material for my
figures is newspaper, which, both cheap and abundant, functions
within my context as a substitute for clay. As for the moving
image, it has been around for 100 years: long enough for us to
stop being so impressed by its magic. That is, its technological
magic. In its metaphorical, emotional and acathetic magic it is
equal and equivalent to any other material within the artist's
repertoire - and hopefully is also as versatile and as
unpredictable.
Elegba
© copyright Cross Cultural Communication