Bisi Silva

This interview took place on October 11, 2018, via phone, while Bisi was in London and Temitayo was at home in Lagos. After several weeks of attempting to schedule a conversation, the two managed to speak at length and Bisi was as energetic as ever. It is believed that this was Bisi’s last interview, and unfortunately, due to the decline in her health, she was never able to see the finished text. It was also the last long conversation Temitayo had with her, and the last time Temitayo would hear the voice of her friend so full of vigor. Temitayo remembers when she met Bisi in Lagos as a young artist visiting the CCA Lagos. Over approximately eight years, Bisi became a key mentor for Temitayo, with respect to both her studio and curatorial practices. While Bisi is dearly missed by many, her impact reverberates and is captured in anecdotes that shaped the course of modern and contemporary African art. In this conversation, we discuss Bisi’s beginnings and the milestones across her career, which spanned over two decades.

Bisi Silva:

So, you want me to begin with setting the stage for how I came to found CCA Lagos [Center for Contemporary Art, Lagos; www.cclagos.org] and talk a bit about London in the 1990s?

Temitayo Ogunbiyi:

Yes, please.

BS:

How are people in institutions responding to people of color and/or contemplating African art? So that’s a big question. Sometimes I find that within these questions, there are sometimes three or four questions …

TO:

I know. I know.

BS:

So, I’m not really sure, you know, what’s the most important to answer …

TO:

Well, based on my conversations with Karen [Milbourne] I feel that the most important bit from her perspective and the perspective of the issue is how CCA Lagos came to be? So, what really set the tone for it? Because I think people—I feel like in the interviews of yours I’ve read people are always asking you, “So what’s next?” you know, and these types of things. But what about the foundation for CCA Lagos, and it as an entry point for your curatorial practice (Fig. 1) …

BS:

Okay, so yeah, I’ll just answer that. I would say that it started around 1999 when I first visited Nigeria and got a sort of first introduction to the art scene, especially in Lagos. And in Lagos, I found that the art scene was extremely commercial. Most of the galleries were, you know, selling. Selling. So there was no critical debate. There was no, what I would call, cutting edge contemporary art. There was not a diversity of media. It was mainly sculpture and painting. Even at that time, there was little photography. Photography was not really considered in the mainstream of the visual arts scene. And at that time also there were few art photographers, I would say. It was really at a nascent stage.

In visiting Nigeria, one of the first projects that I did was through a temporary structure called the Institute of Visual Art and Culture (IVAC). I felt that instead of repeating what was already happening around Lagos, I would try to take multiple approaches to promoting art. I was interested in how could we begin to develop a critical debate, critical thinking. So, that first exhibition was sort of like my millennium project because it took place in the year 2000. You know, everyone had their millennial projects then and I wanted—I didn’t want to do something that was just Lagos-centric because I had visited outside of Lagos. I had been to Nsukka. I had been to Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria [ABU]. So, I felt that let’s have a discourse so that everybody is engaging. I wanted many people to be engaging in this conversation.

So, I developed a project called the IVAC Lectures—International Lectures on Visual Arts and Culture. Through this, I would invite visitors, and these international visitors would come to Nigeria and go to Lagos, Nsukka, and Enugu, and ABU. The participants...