BERLIN-LAGOS RESIDENCY PROGRAM 2021

Despite the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global cultural scene, we are relieved to have jointly found a solution to continue the Lagos-Berlin residency programme by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria together with the partners 16/16, Galerie Wedding, SAVVy Contemporary and ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics. We are honoered to welcome Jere Ikongio to Berlin for his 3 months residency. 

Jere Ikongio is an artist creating new media, interactive and immersive art projects. Based in Lagos, he deals with topics such as infrastructure, (hyper) identity and archiving. He is a Magnum Foundation Fellow, a Digital Earth Fellow as well as a World Press Photo grantee. His work has been shown at the Douglas Hyde Gallery (Dublin), Gasteig München, 5th Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA, Durban), the 11th Bienal do Mercosul (Porto Alegre), hFACTOR (Lagos), Hong-Gah Museum (Taiwan), Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt am Main) and the 2nd Lagos Biennale amongst others.

For this residency, he will continue his research on implicit bias on the protocols and politics of artificial intelligence art, exploring and investigating the role and processes of archiving and re-imagining existing archives. As global protocols are rapidly evolving and advancing, artificial intelligence, increasingly, gets to make some of the most important decisions about human’s privileges, access and opportunities and will be responsible for deciding human life soon enough. He is planning to explore the archives presented by ZK/U’s publishing and CityToolBox Platform as well as SAVVY Contemporary’s publications, documentation centre & archive as well as the Colonial Neighbours archive.

"I am hoping to activate the post-internet and contemporary manifestations of archives and produce (a living) AI archive and program that is trained to construct ‘new’ art based on modern and contemporary art from West Africa."