The making of MOWAA: ‘It is time to see West Africa in new ways’

In 2027 the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA) is set to open in Benin City in southern Nigeria. Arising from the ruins of Edo, a pre-colonial African empire that once existed in the rainforest, the three-story honey-coloured structure will boldly set out a vision for a new kind of museum. ‘An institution made for local people, in their own way and on their own terms,’ says the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare in the video above.

MOWAA’s ambition is huge: to provide a multifaceted creative campus across 15 acres, housing a world-class art museum containing historical art and artefacts, a modern and contemporary art gallery, an institute with research and educational facilities, community hubs, artist residencies and performance spaces. ‘One craves to be at the start of things,’ says Aindrea Emelife, MOWAA’s curator of Modern and Contemporary art. ‘It is like being handed a blank sheet of paper and the opportunity to dream.’

During Frieze Week in London, Christie’s will collaborate with MOWAA on Know Who We Are, to be offered as part of the 20th and 21st Century Art auctions to raise funds for the museum’s Rainforest Gallery and the Nigeria Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024.

Among those who have generously donated artworks are Tunji Adeniyi-Jones and Shonibare in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 13 October 2023, as well as Ibrahim El-Salahi, Lakwena Maciver and others in the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 14 October.

Additional works will be offered until 17 October in First Open: Post-War and Contemporary Art Online. ‘It is incredibly meaningful to have the support of such a wide range of artists,’ says Emelife.

Know Who We Are is a microcosm of what MOWAA is trying to achieve. Emelife wants the museum to articulate Africa’s rich story of creativity and to challenge the idea of a unified African aesthetic, one historically aligned with Primitivism. ‘African art is not tribal art,’ she says. ‘To know who we are is to know we can be all manner of things.’

The sale will include works by modern masters such as Bruce Onobrakpeya and Uche Okeke, artists who forged a new kind of modern Nigerian art following the country’s independence in 1960, ushering in a brief but exuberant cultural renaissance. Emelife considers their influence integral to the overall project: ‘European Modernism conceives that art must be dissociated from politics to tread paths of reinvention,’ she says. ‘Nigerian Modernism refutes this.’

Funds raised from the auction will go towards supporting the construction of MOWAA’s Rainforest Gallery, an exhibition space for modern and contemporary art. For Emelife, the project is an opportunity to rewrite the rule book on what a gallery can be. Using low-carbon, highly insulating earth bricks which help to regulate humidity, the Dakar-based architects Worofila have envisaged a state-of-the-art space set in a replanted rainforest that brings the natural environment into the gallery.

Emelife sees the initiative as ‘fusing two missions: reimagining museology in an African context and achieving the international standards required to house and tour exhibitions.’ After all, she says, ‘we believe we have the right to tell our stories, but we also want to tell the world’s stories.’

For too long, the curator feels, Africa has been a footnote in the history of modern art. MOWAA will help to ‘include Africa more centrally in the global art conversations’, and continue the pioneering work of academics such as Chika Okeke-Agulu and the late Okwui Enwezor, who helped redefine what African art was and could be.

In 2015 Enwezor curated the 56th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale. All the World’s Futures was an exhilaratingly sprawling affair that told the global story of art from outside the mainstream art-historical canon.

That ambition will be reflected in Emelife’s curation of the Nigeria Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Featuring eight artists from the country and its diaspora (among them Shonibare and Adeniyi-Jones), Nigeria Imaginary ruminates on the country’s past, present and future.

After Venice, the show will return to Nigeria to become the first exhibition in the newly opened Rainforest Gallery. The curator describes Nigeria Imaginary as ‘looking at the many Nigerias that live in our minds’ and as a ‘restless investigation of the present and a defiant imagining of what is yet to come’.

It is an urgent topic: Nigeria’s rapidly growing population of 200 million with a median age of 18 is set to double by the middle of the century. With high levels of unemployment and economic uncertainty it is important that the country thinks creatively about how it can sustain itself in the future. MOWAAs strategy to build a flexible artist district that is responsive to a complex changing environment is visionary.

It is also a chance for the world to see how things can be done differently. ‘It is time to see West Africa in new ways,’ says Emelife, who suggests MOWAA can be a blueprint for other nations. ‘By looking back and into the imaginary, we can develop a manifesto for the future,’ she says.

Explore Christie’s 20th and 21st Century Art auctions in London and Paris, throughout October 2023