“A human story, serious but not overly so” or witnessing the creation of an archive: An exhibition of photographs, texts and memories explores issues of memory, history and archive through artistic means. Combining ‘bad’ photography (i.e. images that bear technical imperfections), pictures from the curator’s family archive as well as some of the curator’s research photographs, the exhibition shines a light on how remembering, archiving and history writing intersect. On the one hand, the exhibition resembles an act of history writing that seeks to preserve the memories and the stories surrounding a place and a person before both fade away into obscurity – the person being Chief Simeon Olaosebikan Adebo (1913-1994), former Permanent Representative of Nigeria at the UN, and the place Abimbola Lodge, Chief Adebo’s house in Abeokuta (Nigeria). On the other hand, the exhibition represents a critical analysis of the labour processes of archive making, revealing the hidden affective and material labour involved in creating an archive, labour that is usually hidden away, made invisible and erased once the (un)organised chaos of family archive has been abolished by the disciplined order of the national, institutional or organisational archive. What the photographs, texts and memories constituting this exhibition, however, primarily hope to depict is “a human story, serious but not overly so”, to quote Chief Adebo, a human story of history, of archive, of the past, a human story that can easily be lost amongst the neat order of official archives and the sanitised accounts of academic history.

Wednesday, 18th of March, at 5pm at the Centre of African Studies (3rd floor of the Alison Richard Building, West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP)