Dear Friend,

We hope you and your family are keeping well during these trying times.

I write to invite you to participate in an exciting initiative that is being organized by LagosPhoto20. You don’t need to have a professional camera. You may use whatever device you have — a smartphone is fine.

The idea is to shine our eyes on our homes as if they were museums. We invite you to take part in building this new virtual Home Museum.

As we go about our busy lives, we often forget the small things worth preserving — what we are calling objects of virtue — objects that are important to each person, family and home. Some treasures we use every day, some we keep, some we hold close, some we lose, and some are simply forgotten and not preserved at all. For example, a watch passed down from a father to his child, an Ibeji doll, a piece of woven cloth from our grandmother, an old photograph or newspaper cut-out, a souvenir from the last city we visited, the first mobile phone we owned, or a medal won at a sports competition. All these evoke memories and tell stories about our culture and history in ways we don’t always recognize.

To participate all you need to do is photograph a personal selection of these objects of virtue and email these images to the address below. During LagosPhoto20, your own Home Museum will be exhibited online. With this rapid response, we hope to hold onto these valuable artefacts with you for the benefit of future generations and begin conversations about our collective histories.

We look forward to your contribution and to building the first online Home Museum together.

In Solidarity,

Azu Nwagbogu Director, LagosPhotoirst online Home Museum together.

About LagosPhoto

Launched in 2010, LagosPhoto is the first international arts festival of photography in Nigeria. In a month-long festival, events include exhibitions, workshops, artist presentations, discussions. Large-scale outdoor prints are displayed throughout the city with the aim of reclaiming public spaces and engaging the general public with multifaceted stories of Africa. LagosPhoto aims to establish a community for contemporary photography which will unite local and international artists through images that encapsulate individual experiences and identities from across all of Africa. LagosPhoto presents and educates about photography as it is embodied in the exploration of historical and contemporary issues, the sharing of cultural practices, and the promotion of social programmes.

How to enter

Follow the steps of the submission process. If you need to know more, please write to info@africanartists.org

HOME MUSEUM Procedure for Submissions

HOME MUSEUM will be an online museum in order to ensure a wide and safe circulation of content. Central to its method is inclusive participation. Through the careful processing of the entries, LAGOSPHOTO20 and the HOME MUSEUM shall create a new online curatorial model for a broader diasporic and pan-African engagement with questions of restitution and repatriation.

Curatorial Team

Azu Nwagbogu Founder and Director of LagosPhoto and African Artists’ Foundation.
Nwagbogu was the interim Director/Chief Curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art in South Africa from April 2018 to August 2019. He created Art Base Africa and is on the jury of major arts committees such as the Dutch Doc, POPCAP Photography Awards, the World press Photo, Prisma Photography Award (2015), Greenpeace Photo Award (2016), New York Times Portfolio Review (2017-18), W. Eugene Smith Award (2018), Photo Espana (2018), Lensculture and Magnum.

Dr. Clementine Deliss Curator, publisher and cultural historian
Dr. Clémentine Deliss is an Associate Curator of KW Institute of Contemporary Art Berlin, and Guest Professor in History and Theory at University of Fine Art, Hamburg. Between 2010– 2015, she directed the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt. Exhibitions she curated include “Object Atlas – Fieldwork in the Museum” (2011); “Trading Style” (2013), “Foreign Exchange (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger)” (2014), and “El Hadji Sy – Painting, Performance, Politics”.

Dr. Oluwatoyin Sogbesan Architect, Historian, Researcher.
Oluwatoyin Z.Sogbesan has an MAinArchitecture from ObafemiAwolowo University,an MA in Arts and Heritage Management from London Metropolitan University, and a PhD in Culture, Policy and Management from City University London. She specializes in cultural interpretation, representation and dissemination though various media such as the built environment, artefacts and art. Her current research is on the documentation and preservation of the tangible and intangible heritage of Oyo

Asya Yaghmurian
Artist, Guest Curator
Asya Yaghmurian holds a Masters in Journalism. Asya cofounded and curated Armenia’s first Design Pavillion. She has worked for international media and assisted on various art projects including the Dilijan Arts Observatory 2016 (Armenia), and “Portable Homelands” for the exhibition “Hello World. Revising a Collection” at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2018. More recently she was the curatorial assistant for the 33rd edition of the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts.

Maria Pia Bernadoni
International Photography Curator, Lawyer.
Maria Pia Bernardoni has been the curator of international exhibitions for the African Artists’ Foundation and LagosPhoto festival since 2015. She has co-curated the exhibition “Dey your Lane” at Bozar Museum in Bruxelles and “Tear my Bra” at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2016. She curated the exhibition “AfricAfrica” at Palazzo Litta in Milan in 2018. Maria Pia has been developing projects around migration in Europe; she collaborated on Patrick Willocq’s project “My Story is a Story of Hope”, and directed the short film “If I Left My Country”, both shown at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2018.

Philip Fagbeyiro Artist, Assistant Curator
Philip Fagbeyiro is a visual artist and science fiction writer who works and lives in Lagos Nigeria. His practice encompasses various new media formats including digital, tradigital, animation and Machinima (game cinema) art. He holds a Bachelors in Architecture from the University of Lagos. He has participated in several group exhibitions. He currently works as a curatorial assistant at African Artists’ Foundation. Prior to this he worked as a curatorial assistant for Art Summit Nigeria and a number of pop-up exhibitions.

Feranmi Olukosi Assistant Curator
Feranmi is part of the development personnel at African Artists’ Foundation, where she processes grant application and proposals. She has worked with the reputable entertainment agency Iroko TV amongst others. She has a Master of Arts in English from University of Lagos.