The in-depth examination of archives, inner-African networks, and scholarly research has exposed the situatedness of Nigerian modern art and its epistemological roots, which fundamentally challenge the Eurocentric idea of modernity.

In a post-northern approach this seminar introduces multiple ways of seeing, understanding and categorising Nigerian culture in the global context. It introduces the trials and rewards of researching pre-Independence Nigeria. The seminar will share how modern cosmopolitan artists defined their subjective Africanness, and how they opposed their depiction in European modernism.

Artists and the arts have always been fundamental to Nigeria’s anti-colonial ontology and they played a foundational role in shaping Nigerian nationalism.

Looking at contemporary developments and the current blockbuster exhibition Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern, how does Nigerian historical culture shape the global social ecology now?

The seminar will look at some of the recent successes and challenges of institutional representations of West African culture and thought systems in both continents.

The seminar will be recorded and shared on our YouTube channel afterwards.

Biography: Dr. Bea Gassmann de Sousa is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCL School of European Languages, Society and Culture, Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in London. She is collaborative research advisor for Tate Modern’s Nigerian Modernism exhibition October 25-May 26,  part of the advisory group for the Yinka Shonibare Foundation’s Re-assemblages programme in Lagos, Nigeria and a member of the British Academy Publishing and Conferences Committee. Her specialism is the methodical analysis of pre-Independence West African written and pictorial archives and the equitable contribution of West African scholarship to global modernity. She has just completed the draft of her first book: “On the Sharp Edge of Modernism: Art and Post-Traditionalism in early Twentieth Century Nigeria”. She is an active member of the “Black Europe” research group at UCL SELCS and regularly speaks at seminars.