Stacey Ejiroghene Okparavero [Stacey Ravvero] is a multidisciplinary, multilingual artist and author from Nigeria, with an M.A. from the University of Warwick. Her work includes painting; works on paper, and canvas, metal sculpture and performance art.
The artist imagines her artistic practice to be fluid and evolving, driven by her desire for experimentation, freedom and self-mastery. She explores and merges the boundaries between visual and multi-sensory disciplines, which allows her the freedom to constantly test the possibilities of medium.
Over the years, her work and visual aesthetic have crystallized and taken the synergy of lines and text to create simple yet profound forms. These forms sometimes are informed by her rich traditional heritage, and the search for deeper understanding of self, within the context of contemporary and historical times.
Okparavero’s multifaceted practice currently investigates the human experience, while focusing on socio-political and environmental issues. She explores varied materials such as repurposed metal, acrylic, pastel and ink. She enjoys being able to express an idea in one form and translate it to another, while allowing them feed into each other, which is evident in her continuous line drawing and metal work.
Her artworks have been exhibited in Lagos, London, Chambéry, Tennessee, Dakar, Accra, Nairobi and New York. Some notable exhibitions she has featured in include; Fragility Awakening and Power, Gallery of African Art, U.K in 2017, Gallery of Small things Dakar Biennial Off, Senegal in 2018, Art Expo New York, in 2019, LineGuage at the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos, Nigeria in 2018. Her work has been studied and published in research projects at the Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands and University of Lagos, Nigeria.
Hamza Mohammed Beg is a London-born, Berlin-based artist, activist and researcher. His work functions in research cycles; the topics being investigated indicate the mediums of expression.
Over years, his work has employed performance, sound design, video collage, digital design and poetry. His current research cycle is focused on ritual and ideology, both from an individual and collective perspective. Working with notions of place, the Pedestrian and the production of the public realm he seeks to understand how disparate groups can be bound to both each other and to space by a unified sense of the civic.
Between performances in galleries and museums, bars and in cafes, his artistic work and life traverses both high cultural institutions and highly localized artist run collectives. With travelling for residency programs, he looks to learn how ideas change as they are uprooted and replanted in a new soil. This process is reflective of the joy and travail of the postcolonial body, his own with roots moved from Mauritius, India, Pakistan, Britain and now Germany.
