“A human story, serious but not overly so” or witnessing the creation of an archive

About the exhibition:

“A human story, serious but not overly so” or witnessing the creation of an archive: An exhibition of photographs, texts and memories explores issues of memory, history and archive through artistic means. Combining ‘bad’ photography (i.e. images that bear technical imperfections), pictures from the curator’s family archive as well as some of the curator’s research photographs, the exhibition shines a light on how remembering, archiving and history writing intersect. On the one hand, the exhibition resembles an act of history writing that seeks to preserve the memories and the stories surrounding a place and a person before both fade away into obscurity – the person being Chief Simeon Olaosebikan Adebo (1913-1994), former Permanent Representative of Nigeria at the UN, and the place Abimbola Lodge, Chief Adebo’s house in Abeokuta (Nigeria). On the other hand, the exhibition represents a critical analysis of the labour processes of archive making, revealing the hidden affective and material labour involved in creating an archive, labour that is usually hidden away, made invisible and erased once the (un)organised chaos of family archive has been abolished by the disciplined order of the national, institutional or organisational archive. What the photographs, texts and memories constituting this exhibition, however, primarily hope to depict is “a human story, serious but not overly so”, to quote Chief Adebo, a human story of history, of archive, of the past, a human story that can easily be lost amongst the neat order of official archives and the sanitised accounts of academic history.

About the curator:

Neo-A. H. O. Allert is a bilingual scholar of mixed German-Nigerian heritage, a historian of modern Africa as well as a creative political theorist who frequently seeks out the arts and music to express and communicate his research findings in new and innovative ways. Having completed a BA (Hons) in History and Politics at the University of York and a MPhil in African Studies at the University of Cambridge, Neo is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge. His thesis interrogates Nigeria’s performance of nationhood at the UN during the 1960s and 1970s and seeks to reclaim the UN as an aesthetic, affective and performative space in which African diplomats engaged in the performance of various global and national visions.