Bisi Silva 1962–2019

The Yorùbá words àkόkὸ, ìgbà, àsìkò are often used interchangeably to refer to time without any conceptual contrast. Though when conceptualized atomically, it is possible to delineate some distinctions among them. Àkόkὸ means a time around "T," where "T" denotes an event of thing. Such time, it must be noted, is not specific but an approximate. Ìgbà means a period or epoch while àsìkò simply means a specific season

(Fayemi and Fayemi 2016: 36).

Time was a consistent element in Bisi Silva's work, reverberating across the length and breadth of her curatorial practice: time in the past, sifting through archives to uncover overlooked legacies; time in the present, working with contemporary artists to document for the future—she sought an urgency in her approach to "historicize contemporary African art" (Greenberger 2019) and in the articulation of her vision, perhaps she understood that time was a transient commodity.

I first met Bisi in 2009 during the artist Kainebi Osahenye's exhibition Trashin' at the CCA Lagos. I followed her practice keenly until we reconnected in 2015, at the 56th Venice Biennale: All the World's Future, directed by the late Okwui Enwezor, where Invisible Borders, under the artistic direction of Emeka Okereke, presented The Trans-African World Space. She was a friend and supporter.

The news of her passing filtered in on February 12, 2019, as the clock struck 7:24 pm, when I received a call from the artist Ayọ̀ Akínwándé that she had died earlier in the afternoon at about 3:00 pm, after a protracted five-year battle with cancer, bringing to a close this ìgbà in the contemporary art world. Chronicles of her legacy started streaming in from far and near, sent by artists, curators, friends, colleagues, and all those who had been affected by Bisi's life and contributions to art development in the late twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, a personal and collective reflection on her time.

She was memorialized as "bold" and a "game changer" by the New York Times (Sandomir 2019); her impact, as far-reaching as her vision, contested the homogeneity ascribed to contemporary African art within the constraining Eurocentric artistic canon. Bisi encouraged specificities and a wider perspective in engaging the continent, pushing for an understanding of the specific underpinnings of artistic practice on the continent and in the diaspora.

1.

Bisi Silva at the Radius of Art conference, 2012.

Photo: Stephan Röhl

Olabisi Babafunke Silva was born in Lagos on May 29, 1962, to Chief Emmanuel Afolabi Silva and Charlotte Olamide Williams. She moved from Lagos to London in 1972 and then to France to study languages at the University of Dijon. She returned to Nigeria in 2002, disturbed by the dearth of critical discourse and engagement in the arts and the lack of strong institutional support for artistic practice. Once resettled, she founded the Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) Lagos in 2007 as a direct response to the commerce-driven, European cultural institution-led nature of the art scene in Lagos in the early 2000s. Bisi brought a new way of engagement and critical discourse into play at the CCA Lagos as a way to engage the local art scene. A vivid example is the 2009 Like a Virgin exhibition, which featured the South African photographer Zanele Muholi and Nigerian artist Lucy Azubuike; for the very first time in contemporary Nigerian art history, two female artists explored their identity, bodies, and sexuality in a way never before seen there. Muholi, whose conceptual strategies engaged the physicality of the female form challenging the portrayal and attitude towards black lesbians in the townships of South Africa through vivid photography portraits, and Azubuike, an artist focused on the way culture, tradition, and religious embodyings of patriarchal society impact negatively on women, came together to challenge the normative role of the female form. The exhibition came at a period in Nigeria when the female gender and the LGBTQ community contended with discrimination.

Bisi engaged time in the nonlinear; she was especially interested in archives, to which she dedicated two...