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In the turmoil of an ongoing global crisis with unevenly distributed impacts – coming as the catastrophic culmination of a global system that systematically skews access to human rights, health care, and freedom of movement – it becomes all the more urgent to critically assess our accepted modes of governance and to speculate on what may constitute refuge.

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The joint Third and Fourth editions of the Lagos Biennial will open a space for the critical analysis of the nation-state as locus of political action and vector of belonging, allegiance, and identity, linking this to the imperative to create an operative notion of refuge that may offer alternate paths towards constructing renewable communities and work towards climate justice in this historical moment of systemic crisis.

 

The Biennial offers an opportunity to reassess the promises, disappointments, and ongoing ramifications of the dominant nation-state model, with its panoply of modes of governance under the aegis of global capital. The critical issues of this 21st century – even though global in reach – are played out in local, national, and regional spaces. Their profound implications and effects on our lives are enabled and activated in the present by choices made at the level of the individual or community.

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The 2023 edition of the Lagos Biennial will take place in the heart of Lagos on the historic grounds of Tafawa Balewa Square, a site named in honor of the first Nigerian Prime Minister. The biennial will move the cursor away from a eurocentric history of ‘universal’ exhibitions and biennials in order to create the premises for discussing political allegiance, territory, sovereignty, regionality, notions of belonging, encounter, and alliance. Lagos Biennial 2023 will encompass experiments in non-conventional modes of exhibition making, moving from the idea of the work as an end in itself to generative models and prototypes that will continue to activate possibilities in the world.

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By situating Lagos as an international geopolitical nerve point and an international hub for artistic expression, the biennial opens a speculative space for the fabrication of alternate realities.