The Arthouse Foundation presented a joint exhibition of Inês Valle and Kitso Lynn Lelliott,  eaturing the final projects undertaken during the artists’ three-month residences in Lagos. 

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Inês Valle is a Portuguese/Angolan artist, curator and researcher who focuses on issues of memory, colonization and architecture that spark transcultural narratives. Valle’s project in Lagos, Idile, looks at architecture in Lagos’ Brazilian Quarters, incorporating video, photography and sound. Beginning the project in 2014 in Nigeria, the project connects the notion of home and belonging with personal stories, sharing the stages, smells, and colors from these transatlantic narratives. The installation incorporates photography and video with archival materials, mixed media and found objects. 

 

Kitso Lynn Lelliott is an artist from Botswana living in South Africa who explores articulations from spaces beyond epistemic power, often times working in site-specific installations. Her work has engaged socio-cultural formations that took shape over the Atlantic during the African slave trade. In After the Boats set sail, Lelliott presents a three-channel video installation that sews together a collection of past performative vignettes taken at multiple geographic locations. The video’s narrative centers around the image of a woman who is a time traveler, both as a ghost and an ancestor. The character navigates through time, picking up fragments and traces as she contests the histories of the spaces she inhabits. Her presence transforms the sites, suggesting new imaginaries whose futures are open and malleable. By reworking past material and incorporating new locations shot in Lagos, Lelliott explores the relation between these interconnected histories, in order to shift the narratives that form our contemporary. 

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