The CCA Archives Project presented A Collective Remembering, a journey through the lifelong collection of memories, histories, and artistic legacies that shape our shared gaze. The exhibition traced the threads of Nigerian contemporary art and curatorial imagination, both at home and in the diaspora, through the enduring vision of the late, beloved arts custodian, Bisi Silva.
Spanning Silva’s early career in the 1990s, her travels, curiosities and collaborations across continents, the founding of CCA Lagos in 2007 and beyond, the CCA Archive offered a rich, layered view of the evolving narratives of Nigerian and global contemporary art. It stood as both a treasure trove and a testament to the far-reaching impact of her work.
The exhibition explored how the personal intersects with the historical, uncovering shared stories that move through the archive but often find no tangible expression.
A Collective Remembering honoured the intricate weaving of lived experiences into collective memory. It explored what becomes possible when attention shifts from shared geography to shared sensibility, from the local to the global, and back again. Through curated archival installations and artworks, the exhibition reflected Bisi Silva’s distinctive curatorial ethos in dialogue with the communities—past, present and emerging—that shaped and were shaped by her.
The exhibition invited viewers to consider how human connections, relationships and shared experiences constitute forms of history-making and archival practice in themselves, and how communities develop common, often unspoken narratives through these encounters and the art they create.
Central to the exhibition were the contributions of the inaugural Collective Remembering cohort, comprising fifteen local artists who engaged in intensive dialogue with the archive over a two-day period. Through this intimate process, they explored what it meant to situate themselves within the archive, responding across disciplines and media to create works that spoke to their individual stories while deepening shared cultural memory.
Their contributions expanded the possibilities of meaning-making within an evolving archive, reflecting fluid and regenerative approaches to artmaking in the digital age and the merging of personal histories with collective narratives.
A Collective Remembering celebrated the archive not merely as a repository of the past, but as a living space for dialogue, interpretation, artistic exploration and the continual making of history.
