Ruskin alumni and associate professor on show at Venice Biennale
Artworks by Ruskin alumni, Nour Jaouda and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, and associate professor, Onyeka Igwe, are currently on show at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Nour Jaouda
Nour Jaouda (BFA 2018) is exhibiting her work in this year’s Venice Biennale in the International Exhibition, 'Stranieri Ovunque' ['everywhere foreigner'], curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Jaouda is a Libyan artist based between London and Cairo. Her large-scale textile pieces are created by layering hand-dyed pieces of fabric in rich, earthy tones cut into intricately detailed shapes.
Sumptuous, yet with a ghostly tattered silhouette, the tapestries evoke a sense of the artist’s nomadic childhood and her family’s history of migration. A grandmother’s garden in Libya and the grand art noveau gates found in Cairo have all left their mark in Jaouda’s work.
Jaouda says:
My intent is to explore themes of memory, place, and belonging. Each piece is a timeless object, a landscape of memory that exists in a liminal space.
Nour Jaouda’s three textile pieces have been described as one of the stand-outs in the Exhibition at the Venice Biennale and her recent success also includes a presentation by her London gallery Union Pacific at Art Basel in June.
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones and Onyeka Igwe
The group exhibition 'Nigeria Imaginary' at the Nigerian Pavilion includes work by Onyeka Igwe, newly appointed associate professor at the Ruskin, and Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, who graduated from the Ruskin's BFA programme in 2014.
Curated by Aindrea Emelife, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Museum of West African Art in Benin City, Nigeria, the Pavilion aims to inspire visions of a future Nigeria through the examination of the historical past, constructed ideas and nostalgias, mythology and memory.
Working between cinema and installation, Onyeka Igwe has responded to the theme with a three-part audio-visual series that delve into the role of British colonialism in Nigeria and the future of that legacy for the country. The focus on the intricate, intertwined relationship between the two countries builds on her research on de-colonisation, using film archives as well as textual and oral sources of narratives.
Igwe's work 'No Archive Can Restore This Chorus Of (Diasporic) Shame' traces the journey of a collection of film and sound recordings found in the Nigerian Film Unit in Lagos, Nigeria and the old British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol. The audience is transported to a time just before Nigerian independence through sound and film clips, prompting reflection on record-keeping, the histories selected for posterity, and the question of restoration if lost.
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones' dazzling large-scale painting 'Celestial Gathering', placed hanging in the ceiling of one of the grand rooms of the Palazzo, draws inspiration from Venetian ceiling painting traditions while also looking to the history of Nigerian art.
Modernist legacies are blended with influences from traditional Yoruba sculpture, shown here in life-sized figures depicted in strong, stylised forms among thick foliage and vibrant colour.
Adeniyi-Jones says:
Every memorable Greek myth or fable that we know of has an equally compelling African counterpart, but because of reductive concepts like primitivism, one rarely sees the expansive world of ancient West Africa represented outside of the continent.
By referencing Venetian artistic traditions as well as highlighting cultural parallels, one can imagine Adeniyi-Jones has placed his work in an alternative history of art, drawing attention to legacies with a contemporary approach.
Visit the Nigeria Imaginary website for more information:
