This spotlight features Dr Jareh Das. Dr Jareh Das is a curator, writer, and researcher based in London and different parts of West Africa

February 2024

 

Today, we are spotlighting Dr Jareh Das, a curator, writer, and researcher based in London and different parts of West Africa, who sat down to a conversation with Adun Okupe to discuss a day in her life and the role of the creative industries in driving social change in Nigeria. 

 

Listen to the full interview on our YouTube channel here.

 

Welcome to TSC Spotlight! Let’s start with who you live with…

 

I live alone when I am in London.

 

OK, and what is a day in your life like? Do you have an alarm, what time does it go off? 

 

I am an early riser. I don’t have an alarm. I wake up at 5 a.m. every morning. I like to start my day before everybody else, and I like the stillness of the morning. I have my spiritual practise; I pray, meditate, and then I go into a short exercise session before the whole world wakes up and catches up with me. I also start my day with coffee. I also like to check my emails to clear any backlog, prioritise what is important, and crack on with my to-do list

 

I am not big on breakfast, to be honest, so it’s starting the day with coffee and getting straight into work, depending on what I’m working on. There is a lot of research time also, so sometimes I will be out in the library or I’m sort of reading while working from home. It’s usually a sort of very research-heavy day—a lot of reading, a lot of writing, meetings that come into following up if there is a curatorial project—but most of the time, predominantly, I’m writing and researching.  

 

Outside work, I speak to family, see family, and socialise, or I just pick up a book and read. I have these firm boundaries between work and outside of work. Because I spend so much time reading and thinking, at the end of the day, it’s really time for me to just switch off, the reason why I took off my social media is because it drags one into this never quite switching off.  

 

How did you get on this career path, given your background in the Corporate/Accounting world? 

 

This is a really interesting one. and especially for Nigerians, because when I left Nigeria in 1999, such a long time ago, to come to England to become an engineer and a computer scientist, my A levels were in the hard sciences—physics, math, chemistry—and so  I was in Newcastle at the time, which is a city in the North where I was born. And it was such a huge shift for me coming to the UK, and you know, I’d always been told, actually, that I was going to become an engineer, a computer scientist, by my parents, so I just followed that path. I found myself in Newcastle, having to be independent for the first time in my life as a 17-year-old and I really struggled. You know, I missed home, my parents, and my siblings so much, and it was weird because, like all of the sciences that felt so familiar, they became so unfamiliar in this context. 

 

First of all, I couldn’t even understand the accent. If you know anything about Newcastle, you know that people speak with this really strong Jodi accent, and I was like, What is this? I just found it a huge cultural shock that my grades suffered. I did get into Newcastle University to study computer science, but I think at that point, after two years of, you know, really struggling, you know, trying to get adjusted into this UK system, I just really felt like I was clinging on. I was really trying my best, but I wasn’t quite plugged into what I imagined this degree to be. And then randomly, I was working part-time in a bar restaurant, and somebody else who was there, was studying the history of art. And I said, Look, I don’t know what I’m going to tell my parents, actually, with this computer science degree, because it’s not really working out. Wwii, I don’t know if this first year is going to go and to think that my A-level grades were traumatic, and she suggested that I come to sit in on history lectures, so I did, and I thought, Wow, this is so interesting. The whole history of culture, even though at the time, I mean, I really have to say that it’s not like now, where things are decolonized and everybody is really thinking of transnational global history. It was very Western art, history-centric African art, and ethnographic lens, but I was so curious about the subject that I just kept sitting in, and I tried to take it on as an elective, but it wasn’t possible. So I went to see the head of the year, and then I spoke to her about what it would take for me to actually join this course because I can’t come on as an elective. 

 

They looked at my A-level grades and advised that if I added humanities, I could come back the year after, so I did that and I did not tell my parents. I took extra A levels in psychology and sociology, and I went back, I didn’t go to Newcastle, but I went to Leeds instead to study the history of art because they had a history of art, material culture, and architectural history.

 

Can you share some of your most memorable moments?

 

There is this project I have been working on, when I was doing my MA studies in 2009, I was at a placement at a museum in the north of England in Middlesbrough, a very small town but they had a quite substantial ceramics collection and a lot of museums in the UK have focus on ceramics graphs outside of fine art and visual arts, and I came across this object from a place at that time that I never heard about the Ladi Kwali Potter Training centre in Abuja and I mean I’d heard of Ladi Kwali but I didn’t know anything about her life that much beyond just the accolades and you know being on the twenty naira note. 

 

And so this encounter with this object, you know became this sort of on-off research that I thought right next time I’m in Nigeria, I will go and find the Ladi Kwali Potter Training Centre. This research was going on and off, and I had conversations with people about it most of the time. It was obscure, like some knew about her while some people didn’t, beyond the accolades that weren’t that much to her life story. It took a while because I would also present it to people, and they weren’t really interested or like, Who’s Ladi Kwali? She is not relevant or whatever. There was a lot of back and forth in the project, but finally last year, I curated this exhibition on Ladi Kwali, looking at this legacy of Nigerian ceramics, as well as Nigerian ceramics that then came into this colonial dialect with British studio pottery. 

 

I did the exhibition; it was in London and York museums and galleries. I’m part of an early career fellowship at the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, and I want to develop substantial rights around Lady Kwali so that there isn’t any sort of historical, substantial publication on how it works. I can’t believe I’m still doing this project, but there’s so much that has kept me going for over 10 years from research to travelling to Abuja to find out more about Ladi Kwali to staging this exhibition and creating a small publication around her catalogue.

 

Tell us something about the Nigerian condition that influences your work or keeps you up at night.

 

When I read that question, I got the impression that it keeps you up at night. Something that, you know, really kind of speaks to me because, you know, I spend like months in Nigeria each year, generally visiting family and doing research. And I’m noticing a big difference, you know, between these really significant, privately supported foundations and others. Then we move on to the governmental side, where we kind of observe things that are in decline but actually have a long and significant history. You must be aware of the action that closes the disparity between public and privately supported sectors. Additionally, as I discovered during my visits to several museums throughout Nigeria, some individuals have been employed there for decades. It’s not like there are only people coming and going who don’t care about the work, but there’s only so much you can do when you need more resources and support. Additionally, as we start having these crucial discussions about infrastructure investment in museums of the future on the continent, spaces that will preserve this culture, or spaces that will house repatriated objects. You know, what do we do with the things that are in decline? What is the way to sort of save them and salvage them? And also what is the way to sort of, I guess you really enforce a care towards objects that exist? Because again, it’s down to infrastructure and funding museum collections, that or just works that are just preserved in stores that are never on display because that’s probably the best way to preserve them. So these are the things that I sort of think about. And what is my role in sort of as a curator who’s between the UK and West Africa and spending time in Nigeria? What are the ways that I can sort of contribute to this preservation of culture in a meaningful way? This is something that I think about.

 

What does societal change mean to you? 

 

I mean, there’s so many different, you know, we just going back to you know, when I was talking about this project that was meaningful and not really know so much about that equally and, you know, knowing her name, but not knowing a lot about her life and I think this has to do with the curriculum what we’re taught at school, for people to have access to education and just the place for, I guess, art history and culture within that curriculum because actually, I’m sure you remember going to the National Museum at Onika from school and I tell you, the only thing I remember about that museum from that visit is the assassination of Murtala Mohammed and the car, I don’t remember seeing any objects, in fact I don’t really remember any sort of cultural trips that happened where you go to like National Theatre. See something I just discovered as an adult that there’s a museum at the National Theatre, I never knew there was one. I don’t know how long it’s been there but all of these things society of Nigerian artists, you know all these organisations that I didn’t have any privy to them growing up and I know things are different, that there is more visibility, more investment there more. There is more spotlight in African art and globally, and people are paying attention but you know these things have been there, you know, within our ethnic groups. You know, we have an artistic culture. I’m from Delta, there’s a cultural day that happens every year. I never went to that until I was an adult, you know and I think there’s a lot that you know. So instead of pointing fingers, this doesn’t work, the government doesn’t do that. You know there are ways that within society that we can really sort of educate ourselves about our culture. Our culture isn’t just about language and food it is also about artistic expression. Encouraging more people to come to these things like cultural days, where you can sort of engage and see art and artefacts.

 

Who in the creative industry (globally) inspires you, and why?

 

The person who has always inspired me is no longer with us. She is the late Bisi Silver. Her contribution to the artistic scene in Lagos and beyond was just phenomenal. Establishing CCA Lagos single-handedly with collaborators and relentlessly, you know, creating a critical framework for Nigeria and across the continent She continues to inspire me. Oyinda Fakeye has taken over, she is doing a wonderful job you know, sort of redeveloping and thinking about the future and longevity of CCA and all of the wonderful board of individuals who have kept this legacy going and who have contributed to really sort of securing the future of CCA Lagos and also just really sort of nurturing such important space for artistic exchange, collaboration, and development in Nigeria.

 

What does success mean to you?

 

I think success is also about the interactions you have intergenerationally. So you know, whatever you want to call it, it means being a mentor or a mentee. But I think it’s important to really have a practice or legacy as a successful individual that is about nurturing, sharing, or enabling the next generation to come because, you know, the strength in numbers.

 

If you were not a curator, writer, and researcher, what career path would you be on?

 

My Dad was an architect for many years, and that was also his only career. I would have followed that trajectory Architecture was at one point something that I was thinking of. I don’t know if I’d have made a really good architect, to be honest, but I would have tried harder.

 

I just wanted to say thank you so much for such a rich conversation. I really enjoyed the questions, and it was also really nice to just reflect and think about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how you got there. I think it’s crucial for everyone to do that, and the incredible great work that you do at The Sahara Centre.

 

If you want us to spotlight someone who is making a difference in Africa, or maybe it’s you, then let us know! Nominate or apply right here.