Kojo Abudu

Steve McQueen’s seven-minute, ironically titled Static (2009) is the first of fourteen works I encounter in his exhibition at the Tate Modern. On the screen hovering before me, in the Museum’s unlit gallery, I observe shaky close-ups of a certain world-renowned copper statue. I often see this statue framed within postcard-like images on Facebook, or counterposed to a moody sunset in the entry credits of a sexy sitcom; or set as the unbelievable object of destruction in a Marvel Universe storyline.

Vanessa Peterson Now in its second iteration at Pace Gallery in London, your ongoing curatorial project ‘Living with Ghosts’ was first staged in March this year at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery in New York.

As I made my way to the first floor of the Independence House, where the second edition of the Lagos Biennial is located, I could hear jubilant Pentecostal praises emanating from a dark room, adjacent to a dusty stairwell, that had been turned into a church. Only there, on a Sunday in Nigeria’s cultural capital, could such seemingly disparate spaces coexist.