Traces of Ecstasy: A Conversation with Curator KJ Abudu

Above: 2024 Lagos Biennial. Image courtesy Chioke I’Anson

Earlier this year, The Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU opened a compelling exhibition curated by KJ Abudu entitled Traces of Ecstasy. The exhibition was inspired by an essay from queer exiled British-Nigerian artist Rotimi Fani-Kayode and adapted from a pavilion Abudu curated for Tafawa Balewa Square at the 2024 Lagos Biennial. Tafawa Balewa Square has a charged architectural and historical significance; in 1960, it served as a space to host ceremonies celebrating the country’s independence from British colonial rule. By staging the Traces of Ecstasy Pavilion at that site in Lagos and modifying it for American audiences at the ICA in Virginia, Abudu queries the contemporary conditions of the postcolonial world with a keen critique of the ideological legitimacy of the nation-state in and beyond Africa. For Abudu, “freedom-dreaming,” as described by scholar Robin D. G. Kelley, has been modeled by artists, theorists, freedom fighters, and intellectuals for generations and continues to offer us all a range of reparative possibilities by which to contextualize and resolve the myriad crisis’s induced by late-stage capitalism. This notion guides the broad conceptual approaches of the contemporary African artists featured in the exhibition, Nolan Oswald Dennis, Evan Ifekoya, Raymond Pinto, Temitayo Shonibare, and Adeju Thompson.

After three years of critical research, Abudu selected work that he believed “looked towards the past and the future.” The resultant interventions are exploratory, cerebral, and steeped in the rigorous discourses that inform our contemporary times. Featured artists activate traditional indigo-dyeing techniques, masquerade performances, polyrhythmic drumming, and postcolonial modernist architecture as potent speculative meditations on digital sovereignty, fractal geometries, sonic healing, and queer embodiment. In addition to their formidable interventions, Abudu hosted The Traces of Ecstasy Symposium. This dynamic one-day symposium further contextualized the thematic and philosophical concerns undergirding the 2024 Lagos Biennial and ICA exhibitions. The symposium invited an international cadre of renowned artists and scholars, including Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kwame Edwin Otu, Nkiru Nzegwu, and Nkhensani Mkhari, to engage in a critical dialog about their timely research reviewing colonial modernity, African indigeneity, postcoloniality, and the intersections of African metaphysical schemes and digital technologies. Their contributions provided an expansive recalibrating vantage to assess the exhibition and elevated the urgency of contemporary African art discourses in and beyond art historical canons.

I enjoyed attending an early tour of Traces of Ecstasy led by Abudu and ICA Curator Amber Esseiva. Afterward, Abudu and I had an in-depth conversation about the exhibition. 

Angela N Carroll (AC): Why was it important for you to adapt the Lagos Biennial exhibition of Traces of Ecstasy for an American audience? 

KJ Abudu( KA):   Well, I think it was important for me because I’m very much grounded in the politics of the African continent and its intellectual traditions, political history, and historiography. However, I need to articulate that there is no world without Africa; the world as an aesthetic and ideological conceit depends on Africa’s material and metaphysical subjection. So, one cannot engage in a curatorial practice centered around Africa without articulating its entanglements with territories that exceed it. Africa is everywhere, and it’s at once nowhere. So, I feel like my practice is a reflection of that. 

 I am always thinking within a Pan-African imagination. So Africa, to me, is in the Caribbean, America, and Europe. The artists I’m working with are mobile and moving everywhere. We’re all from the continent but also outside of it, so it was very important to reflect on the geographic expansiveness of the project because the things we’re thinking about in terms of the nation-state and colonial capitalism are global phenomena. It was important not to localize it to Lagos but to trace how it moves to many different sites. I’ve done this before in my previous project, Living With Ghosts, which was first at the Wallach Art Gallery in New York and then migrated to London. From an internationalist perspective, a geographic constellation is very important to me.

AC: What was interesting about Richmond, Virginia, as a site for this exhibition? 

KA:  There are both intellectual and pragmatic reasons. For pragmatic reasons, Amber is a curator that I’ve just long admired, and I love what she’s doing at the ICA VCU. It’s been, for me, a way to center experimental Black and African diasporic practice that isn’t falling into the stereotypical traps of African art or contemporary African art.  Richmond, Virginia, is a rich site to bring this project to. In my work, I’m always trying to trace the history of colonial modernity from the 15th century to the present, to articulate the continuities between the project of the slave trade, the colonial capitalist infrastructures it birthed, and their relationships to the colonial projects on the African continent. 

Even the people we are referencing [like] Rotimi Fani-Kayode, who the exhibition takes its name after, inform the spirit of this project. So I knew from the beginning that if we’re looking at an artist like that, whose work was steeped in African Indigenous knowledge, but at the same time had these very unpredictable, unwieldy, cross-cultural energies that confused everybody, Black British people, Nigerian people, White gay people, that had to be the spirit of the project. Richmond has that historical context; it’s close to DC, where he studied; it’s close to New York, where he also studied; and it’s littered with the ghost of slavery, so it was an ideal site, I think, for this project. 

AC: As you noted, the artists featured in this exhibition operate beyond the expected tropes of African art. Can you share what excites you about these artists? 

KA: Yeah. That’s a question I thought about myself for a long time. We’ve been in conversation for three years, [beginning] in 2021 with the open call for the Biennial. Once we were selected, we developed further projects. From the beginning, I have wanted to tackle ideas of nationalism and colonial capitalism through various media. I think I knew there had to be all these, like a maelstrom of sensorial encounters, sound, performance, etc. So essentially, it was really about finding people working within particular lines of aesthetic inquiry that best fit the spirit of the project. Adeju is someone I have already written about, and I think his work drives a lot of the spirit, even though he works outside of the art world. In his work, there’s an indigenized queer element going on and the appeal to African numerology and digital technology in his practice. I mean, even the name Lagos Space Programme masquerading is rich and steeped in Yoruba intellectual traditions, but I also think about contemporary gay culture and digital technology. In a way that allowed me to realize that all these different elements, these pillars that I was talking about earlier, which in their ways destabilize the affection of the nation-state, his practice articulated that triangle for me. And so it was just a matter of finding people whose energies resonated. 

Evan Ifekoya was someone I had already been thinking about because they were involved with the Black Obsidian Sound System from the UK, and nominated for a Turner Prize. Their work concerns the relationship between sound, queerness and nightlife, vibration, tech, and spirituality. Nolan is someone that I had had my eyes on for a long time as well. He delivered this particular lecture on Black abstraction and was conversing with Darby English, Julie Mehretu, and a few other people. There was this meticulous scientific, philosophical, and linguistic way he approached Blackness from a continental perspective that I thought was so rich. He was in the NTU collective with Tabita Rezaire and Bogosi Sekhukhuni; they were similarly exploring the intersections of digital technology and African spirituality. So he was the perfect person and had a background in architecture. I knew I wanted to design a pavilion, and he just had all those things going on. 

Temitayo Shonibare is a young artist who I knew had the potential to be part of this project because they’ve always been particularly interested in performativity in the digital realm from a Black feminist angle. They kind of introduce a very, if you will, humorous, unpredictable energy because everything else is controlled. Raymond is someone that I met through a close friend of mine, Serubiri Moses, a talented curator. I met him through a panel on Rotimi Fani-Kayode, where I was invited to lecture on Fani-Kayode’s work.  Raymond is a choreographer who was part of that panel with another artist, Assotto Saint, and similarly did all this work around Afro diaspora, spirituality, and gender.  So, again, perfect. From that, I was just like, oh, I think I have everyone, and when we had the conversations, it worked. I feel everyone’s work is fluid. It’s beautiful to see what is realized in these exhibitions. 

AC: The artists you feature are also deeply invested in creating work that is critical and investigative and not just invested in aesthetic or ornamental representations of African culture. Do you think all artists, particularly those from the African diaspora, have a similar responsibility? 

KA: I think there’s a possibility for imminently critical aesthetics. I want to insist that there is a way of working, a form of politics I’m deeply invested in. I’m interested in a form of practice that embeds the criticality in the material in the aesthetic investigation. And I think all the artists here literally do that in the way they coax media to perform in a certain way. I’m more interested in contemporary African art that rigorously deals with the colonial present. But there is a lot of space in that and lots of legibility skills. So, it’s not all going to look like an archival institutional critique approach, which I love. Some of it may appear playful and, I dare say, decorative, but it might have a critical edge. So we just have to be careful about those terms because “criticality” is very loaded, and it carries a lot of Western critical theoretical baggage that I’m trying to work around. 

AC: What do you hope people who view this exhibition walk away thinking about, troubling, or being inspired by? 

KA: I would say one of the things is the idea that everyone is implicated in the imaginary of Africa. Africa is not some distant place that you have nothing to do with. Your existence in the global north depends on the subjection of the globalsouth and Africa specifically. So again, the entanglement between here and there is something I’m always trying to insist on. Secondly, the idea that I think a lot of people may have caught on to the fallacy of the capitalist mode of production, but I don’t think as many people have caught on to the fallacy of the nation-state as another kind of problematic, violent, exploitative, construction that we need to think through,  and one could say abolish or dismantle. And what would that look like? What would it mean to consider modes of being together that exist beyond the state and capital? I think that’s the driving focus of this project in particular.

Traces of Ecstasy is on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University from now through July 14th.