Your Ad Here

Billboards taken over by artists in Abuja and Lagos

Your Ad Here will bring together people living and working in Lagos and Abuja in Nigeria with British artists to create new art works that will be pasted on billboards in both cities.

Commissioned by Create and Whitespace in Nigeria and funded by the British Council artists Karo Akpokiere (Nigeria and Germany), APT artist Matt Stokes (UK) and Nick Waplington (UK and US) will develop three new works that bring art into an unequivocally public context. Each new work is the result of extensive research and conversation with people living in Nigeria.

In Nigeria giant advertising hoardings are commonplace with billboard images on a vast cinematic scale. Beneath these monolithic structures three artists will explore the relationship between advertising and daily life in the city of Lagos. What happens when advertising space is used to represent the minutiae of daily life on a grand scale, replacing the usual aspirational images of commercial marketing? When scale is shifted from the very small to the oversized, what impact does this have on our experience of reality?

For Your Ad Here artists pay tribute to the social networks and complex economies of day-to-day life in Lagos found in restaurants, music shops and exemplified by street sellers.