AFiRIperFOMA was founded in 2011 in Lagos by Jelili Atiku — the Nigerian sculptor, video and performance artist who is widely regarded as the originating figure of contemporary Nigerian performance art — as the first biennial in Africa dedicated specifically to performance and live art. The inaugural biennial opened in Harare in November 2013 under the title Mnemonic; the second was staged across Lagos in October–November 2015. The wider project is an artists-and-curators-led non-profit collective with administrative headquarters in Ejigbo, Lagos, and a continuing programme of symposia, workshops and rotating editions across African cities.
AFiRIperFOMA — an artists-and-curators-led non-profit organisation and collective of performance and live artists working across the African continent — was founded in 2011 by Jelili Atiku, the Nigerian sculptor, video and performance artist born 27 September 1968 in Ejigbo, a town in Lagos State. The platform was conceived as a networking and discursive space for the expansion of contemporary performance practice on the African continent and as the operating body for what would become the first biennial in Africa dedicated specifically to performance and live art. From the founding statement, AFiRIperFOMA committed to organising a rotating biennial performance festival in different African countries; to developing educational and public programmes around performance practice; to providing current information about performance projects and resources across the continent; and to building international networks with institutions outside Africa working in the same field.
The first AFiRIperFOMA Biennial opened on 8 November 2013 in Harare, Zimbabwe, and ran for two weeks to 22 November, staged under the general title Mnemonic. The Harare edition's curatorial argument — articulated in the AFiRIperFOMA programme statement and in the institutional record collected by the Biennial Foundation and by African Performance Review — was that the mnemonic, the device of memory, is the proper figure for a contemporary African performance practice that does not begin with European avant-garde history but with the long performance cultures of the African continent that long predate colonial interruption. The participating artists — including the Egyptian-German media artist Sameh Al Tawil, the American performance artist Gabrielle Civil, the Beninese painter and performance artist Rafiy Okefolahan and the Dominican-American artist Charo Oquet, alongside Atiku and a wider roster of continental practitioners — worked across public urban space and gallery settings in Harare on questions of identity, the power of objects, and spiritual and cultural transmigration. The Mnemonic edition was the institutional declaration that performance had a continuing biennial home on the African continent.
The Lagos second edition and the Marcio Carvalho curatorship
The second AFiRIperFOMA Biennial returned to Lagos and ran from 2 October to 27 November 2015 — an extended eight-week programme of live performance in the public urban space of the Nigerian commercial capital, with the performance section under the curatorial direction of Márcio Carvalho, the Portuguese visual artist and independent curator (born 1981) long resident in Berlin and the co-founder of the CO-LAB performance programme. The Lagos edition's working argument was that performance art's institutional home in the African continent was not Senegal — where Dak'Art, founded 1992, had become the principal pan-African biennial of contemporary art — but Lagos, where the absence of a comparable continental institution and the city's continuing position as the largest urban concentration on the continent together made the case for a Lagos-anchored continental network. The 2015 programme was complemented by the AFiRIperFOMA symposium Performance Art: Time Immemorial, which had run at the Nkem Gallery in Lagos in December 2013 as a closing intellectual frame for the inaugural Harare biennial and which made the project's continuing case for performance as the African contemporary art form with the longest continuous history.
The two confirmed biennial editions — Harare 2013 and Lagos 2015 — together constitute the verified institutional record. Subsequent edition planning has been recorded in the AFiRIperFOMA communications and in the Atiku archive, but a continuous biennial sequence has not been independently confirmed in the secondary literature; the project's continuing activity has expressed itself instead through Atiku's own performance practice — including his 2015 Prince Claus Award (one of ten laureates honoured by HRH Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands on 2 December 2015 in Amsterdam) and his performance Mama Say Make I Dey Go, She Dey My Back at the preview of the 57th Venice Biennale (Christine Macel's Viva Arte Viva) at the Arsenale on 12 May 2017 — and through the continuing institutional presence of AFiRIperFOMA as a network rather than as a regular biennial calendar.
The structural significance of the project is independent of the question of edition continuity. AFiRIperFOMA is the institutional argument — first such argument in the African biennial system — that contemporary performance is not a marginal subset of the contemporary visual arts but an independent practice with its own institutional needs, its own rotating geography and its own curatorial protocols, and that the African continent is the proper site for the first dedicated continental institution committed to those needs.
