0100 BENIN


Moufouli Bello, Ishola Akpo and Romuald Hazoumè, and the show was curated by Azu Nwagbogu, alongside Yassine Lassissi, director of visual arts at the country’s Agence de Développement des Arts et de la Culture. Bello’s work explored the desires and limitations of women in Beninese society; Akpo’s was an ‘archaeological excavation of history’; Quenum reflected the ‘fragility of diaspora’, while the established figure of Hazoumè, a prize-winning artist with a history of exhibitions in the UK, France and the US, used recycled materials, ‘the refuse of consumer society’, to create his works, including black plastic jerry cans, ubiquitous in Benin for transporting black market petrol from Nigeria, cans that he uses as a potent metaphor for all forms of slavery, past and present, drawing parallels with the container’s role


Curator Azu Nwagbogu explained that it was essential the pavilion felt like ‘one big exhibition’ rather than four separate presentations


as a crucial, faceless unit within commercial systems, dangerously worked to breaking point before being discarded. In Venice he fashioned a magnificent ceremonial hut out of the old cans. Nwagbogu explained that it was essential


the pavilion felt like ‘one big exhibition’, rather than four separate presentations. Te artists talked of their works being ‘in conversation’ with another. A trailblazer engaged with issues of decolonisation, restitution and repatriation, Nwagbogu was named by National Geographic its ‘explorer at large’ for the society. Te exhibits’ theme was ‘everything precious is fragile’. In 1889, Goethe coined the phrase ‘see Venice and die’. And that in a place where climate change laps at every canal-side palazzo and vaporetto stop. Today, artists delighting in


ALL IMAGES: JACOPO LA FORGIA


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