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Slade Lecture Series 2023: Drawing the Line: Obiora Udechukwu and Nigeria’s Smiling General 1980s-1990s

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History of Art: Slade Lecture Series
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In the 1980’s, the painter and poet Obiora Udechukwu (b. 1946), a leading figure of the Nsukka School, was at the height of his powers, with drawings and paintings celebrated for their lyrical power and trenchant social commentary.
Nigeria witnessed its first military coup in 1966, a civil war (1967-70), oil boom in the 1970s. In the 1980s, General Ibrahim Babangida, the smiling, brutal dictator, enforced Structural Adjustment, raised corruption to statecraft and impoverished the citizenry. In that same decade, the painter and poet Obiora Udechukwu (b. 1946), a leading figure of the Nsukka School, was at the height of his powers, with drawings and paintings celebrated for their lyrical power and trenchant social commentary. Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu considers the fate of art and the broader critical culture during the long decade, in the shadow of the military regimes.

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History of Art: Slade Lecture Series
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In this lecture, Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu focuses on the calligraphic figuration of Ibrahim El Salahi (b. 1930), the country’s leading modernist and onetime political prisoner.
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History of Art: Slade Lecture Series
Captioned

Slade Lecture Series 2023: Defiant Sculpture: Isek Bodys Kingelez and Mobutu Sese-Seko’s Authenticité, 1990s

Professor Chika Okeke-Agulu argues that the extravagant hypermodernity of Isek Bodys Kingelez’s architectural sculptures, as with segments of popular arts, constitute a distinctive form of imaginative resistance to official culture under Mobutu.
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Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/
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Episode Information

Series
History of Art: Slade Lecture Series
People
Chika Okeke-Agulu
Keywords
Nigeria
military
coup
Africa
art
history
Department: Department of History of Art
Date Added: 18/05/2023
Duration: 00:59:47

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