A Coal City’s Harvest of Talents

EGHOSA HENRY OSERATIN_FRAGMENTS OF UNITY_OIL ON CANVAS

An annual art festival and competition held in Enugu concluded on a promising note, eliciting the prognoses of better future outings. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke reports

Instinctively, the viewer’s eyes scanned the oil on canvas painting for Alice and the Mad Hatter. But he was wrong: this was not about the Mad Hatter’s party in Lewis Carol’s classic, Alice in Wonderland. A bespectacled Fedora hat-sporting white dog sits at the head of a roundtable, around which cluster all kinds of animals. The animals include domestic animals, rodents as well as insects and birds. The headgears of the some of the animals evoke the major Nigerian ethnic groups. “Fragments of Unity”, the artist, Henry Osareti Eghosa, titled this work. Could he be alluding to Nigeria?

He must be. Some cryptic message obviously lurks beneath this work. The viewer only paused long enough to capture this painting with his phone’s camera and moved on to other works on display at the exhibition space in Enugu’s Nike Lake Hotel. But little did he know that this would later that day be proclaimed the winning work in the Life in My City Art Festival (called LIMCAF) competition.
The judges – comprising of Professor Chike C. Aniakor (Chairman), Nsikak Essien, Bisi Silva, Professor Sani Muazu, Professor Ohioma Pogoson, Quiterie de Roquefeuil and Dr. Ozioma Onuzulike – had deemed it the best out of the 25 outstanding works sifted from a total of 123 entries based on the theme: “Out of the Frame, Out of the Box”. It had won the overall prize worth N500, 000.
Among the winners announced during the awards ceremony that October 12 evening at the Nike Lake Hotel were those in the Best Sculpture/Installation/Ceramics (Toyeeb Ajayi), Best Photography/Multimedia (Kemi Akinnibosun) and Best Textile/Graphics (Monsuru Alase) categories. Each of these winners got cash prizes of N250, 000 each. Other prizes were the Justice Anthony Aniagolu Prize for Originality (won by Erasmus Onyishi) worth N100, ooo and the Vin Martins Iloh Prize for Best Enugu Entry (won by Izuchukwu Moneme) and Art is Everywhere Prize for Best Waste-to-Art (won by Candidus Onyishi) both worth N50, 000. Because the overall winner emerged from the Best Painting/Multimedia/Drawing category the N250, 000 prize meant was understandably not awarded. It had become superfluous.

Arriving at a shortlist of 25 works out of the many entries and selecting the eventual winners was expectedly a daunting task. The judging panel, chaired by Professor Aniakor, had fulfilled this assignment in three stages. “In the first stage, each of the seven judges had the liberty to critically study all the works on display and select up to 25 pieces based primarily on the originality of thought, creative handling of materials/media and conceptual engagement with the theme, ‘Out of the Box’.”

After comparing notes from each of its members’ shortlists, the jury identified “27 most re-occurring pieces” in the lot.  They further pruned down the list to 25 after returning to the exhibition hall and subjecting the works to a long critical discussion.

Each of the jury members would propose four of his or her best works from out of the 25 in the second stage. It is from these that 10 works would emerge as possible prize winners. In the final stage, after a heated critique session on all the 10 works, the jury settled for the winners.

On its seventh edition, this art festival and competition held annually in Enugu had made a recent foray into the Lagos art scene, where it organised an exhibition supported by the Alliance Française Network in Nigeria, Diamond Bank and Access Bank at the National Museum of Unity Onikan, Lagos. This Lagos exhibition also enjoyed the support of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments.

Similar exhibitions either simultaneously or had already taken place in cities like Ibadan, Kaduna, Abuja, Jos, Calabar Owerri, Port Harcourt, Auchi, Uyo and Enugu as the collection centres of the zones in the country. The exhibitions held at the second stage at the level of the zone of a three-stage process leading to the final stage. This final stage was the just-concluded grand finale exhibition to be held in Enugu on Saturday October 12.

The annual festival and competition had first begun as an experiment of sorts. This was in 2006, when the founder and Chief Executive of the very prominent outdoor advertising agency, Rocana Nigeia Limited, Robert Oji, sought sustainable ways to challenge and encourage the hordes of art students in the tertiary institutions in and around Enugu. These students had very few exhibition possibilities in their increasingly philistinic environ. A few lucky ones had occasional opportunities to hold exhibitions at the Alliance Française centre along Neni Street in Enugu.

With a two-man team comprising of Esona Onuoha and Onyinye Igbo (one man and one woman really), both staff members of Rocana, he had started the project. He had charged the duo to develop a proposal, which could eventually attract support from other sources for a youth art competition aimed at stimulating creativity in the visual arts.

Egged on by the initial support of Alliance Française Enugu then headed by Dr. Gerard Chouin and two enthusiastic members of the local branch of the Pan African Circle of Artists in Enugu, Ayo Adewunmi and Krydz Ikwuemesi, the idea began to grow phenomenally.
It has since grown to include an international photo contest the Photo Africa competition and exhibition for young photographers less than 35 years of age, who live and work in Africa. The winner of the competition, which first held last year, is Oluwafemi Falodun.
Meanwhile, the theme for the next year’s edition of the competition, chosen after a breakfast-time brain-storming session at the Nike Lake Hotel, is “The Future I See”.