LagosPhoto Festival Transitions to Biennale with its 2025 edition Themed ‘Incarceration’

LagosPhoto Festival transitions to a biennale with the theme 'Incarceration.' The 2025 edition will feature commissioned works from artists and diverse curations of incarceration perspectives, in collaboration with upcoming curators under Nwagbogu's guidance. 

There are many types of incarceration. There is being locked up in a prison cell, facing a ‘sentence’ that can range from a few weeks to a ‘life’ term with no prospect of release. There is the intellectual incarceration of being hubristically trapped in false mental models and lacking the humility to escape this self-imposed captivity by revisiting old assumptions and re-evaluating old conclusions. There is the incarceration of corruption. The prison bars, gilded cages, of eminent residents held captive and for whom abuse of the power, and self-interest go hand-in-hand. The authority vested in them by their high office are not made of metal — or even tangible — but are rather mental and psychological structures constituted of pride, lassitude and rendered in symptoms akin to acrophobia. There is the incarceration of being dehumanized by physical, mental or psychological conditions. Physical: being forced to live, under forms of segregation with water, power, and all other basic amenities controlled — and withheld at whim — by an occupying power. There is also the incarceration with architecture, the manner of building to keep others out and keep some caged in. Mental and psychological: having one’s freedom of thought or expression curtailed. This may be the artistic or literary freedom of a writer or visual artist — the oppression we usually have in mind when we consider the numen “censorship”. Or it may be the prison of skin tone that others try to impose or which one imposes as delimiting a wholesome existence. There is the incarceration of the narratives that we tell ourselves about ourselves that are not necessarily true. Perhaps the more shocking incarceration of the ordinary citizen to speak freely about his or her experiences without fear of being persecuted or incarcerated by the authorities. There is the incarceration by national borders shaped and incentivised by European rapacity. A gathering organised by Otto von Bismarck, the first Chancellor of Germany 140 years ago and to this day, that ungodly gathering in Berlin, confounds the continent of Africa. With all professed truths, there is always an underlying paradox. For example, the world’s great democracy, the land of the brave and free has by far the most incarnated peoples on the planet. The 2.2 million currently incarcerated prisoners accounting for a quarter of the world’s total number of prisoners.

To be free is to be willing to suffer for the truth. All great art is a questing for this truth and nothing can be more insipid than the performativity of virtue over embracing virtue itself.

Materiality plays a vital role in closing the liminal space between an artist’s vision and viewers’ perceptions. The main imprisonment danger in any creative endeavour is to begin. The second aspect of incarceration is that both the artistic ‘giver’ and the audience, viewer or other ‘receiver’ are trapped — held captive — in their own reference systems, limited by bars established by a sort of essentialist predetermination. However the lens captures and liberates time. Photographers, film and image makers understand the urgency of creating and capturing artefacts of our time.

Join us as we begin the countdown to Lagos Photo Festival Biennale 2025 “Incanceration”.