Domestic Violence (Photo-Graphics Report (Nigeria)

The Photo-Graphics Report project is based on the series, Hairstyles, of Nigerian photographer JD Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere. This important photographer shows us an aesthetic panorama of the different ways in which women in Nigeria express themselves through different types of hairstyle. In the case of my series this aesthetic expression has two connotations, 1) - It is the hair of women which men grab to block and demoralize their victims while brutally beating them with the other hand. 2) - The idea of resuming this aesthetic strategy but this time to represent a photographic report on Domestic Violence in Nigeria, using different types of charts, and data based on local and international reports.

The series consists of eight photographs called Photo-Graphics, making a distinction between photography and graphics, which give as a whole a panorama to date (2013-2016),and numbers throughout the country (states), on domestic violence of women. In this sense the work functions as a visual, descriptive and numerical device, as a report that can only be read in its entirety, as a document, a report on the current state of this social cultural problem in this specific country, where I also reside.

In the same way that I have been working on other projects and reports (for example Art Report), building on this series just completed in 2017, I will continue to increase and vary its presentation in the manner of an update, following the development of its original sources to follow the trajectory of the data and statistics that will appear in the next years.

Art Report, is the name of the most recent project which I have been developing. The idea is to create a kind of visual news agency which, by using the tools of art (in any of its forms or mediums), explains and illustrates to the public issues concerning our social reality. These issues fall into a number of different categories, including global economics, international investment, oil prices, spending on military defence, social issues, poverty levels.

The idea of this multi-disciplinary experience is to reference the different parts of the arts ecology, such as galleries, museums, exhibitions or events, as a geographical area which underlies the way we live. Just like a work of art, we can understand and respond to these issues as both a social report which reveals itself to the viewer and as a subject of society in itself. Art, Report also sends reports by using all of today’s available channels of communication, such as the classic fax, email, or the regular post, and in doing so systematically enacts the functions of a so-called visual news agency.