Feature on This is Africa

This is Africa, a leading online forum for African opinion, arts and music features Charles Okereke. Read an excerpt from the interview below:

Charles Okereke – Life is about beauty

African photography is on the rise. Following decades of photographic misrepresentation by observers from outside the continent, African photographers are now showing the world what they see through their lens. This is Africa spotlights them in a series of interviews.

Paradise Utopia [2011] Ⓒ Charles Okereke

"Using photography as a platform Charles also wants to seek conscientious leadership amongst the youth, because that has been the bane of their existence for the new generation of Nigerians. Together with other arts, photography has luckily been fast accepted as a medium to value. “Yet more effort is needed in a thorough and proper education of the use of it as a veritable tool in appropriating and disseminating factual information which does not distort reality,” says Okereke.

Evil Signs [2011] Ⓒ Charles Okereke

Stimulating conversation
“With my photography I try to create awareness by elevating the mundane, the ordinary and the discarded from the common place to a valuable state which thereby incites a discourse. Shooting the usual with an unusual approach which defamiliarizes the known to an artistic level which in its duality instructs and at the same time enchants.” The future for Charles is now and now is the time to create this future. For this reason he started the Alexander Academy of Art, Design and Alternative Methods, training young, talented Nigerians and other Africans in arts-related subjects and design. “They are the future and guiding them encourages me to put more effort in realizing my own objectives as well.”

To read more, see Charles Okereke: Life is About Beauty

Now Showing: 'Earth Matters' at the Fowler Museum, UCLA

The 'Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa' exhibition opened on Earth Day, April 22, 2014 at the Fowler Museum, University of California, Los Angeles.

For further information on the exhibition and the Fowler Museum, visit: http://www.fowler.ucla.edu/

Guest Post by Charles Okereke on Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Arts 'Earth Matters' Blog

The Earth Matters blog of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Arts published an article by Charles Okereke, titled 'Earth, a Dying World?'. The article uses images from the Unseen World's 'Planeterium' sub-series to illustrate and question the state of the earth and man's role in restoring and rejuvenating the earth.

Read an excerpt below:

Guest Voices: Charles Okereke

Today’s guest post comes to us from photographer Charles Okereke. Based in Nigeria, Okereke’s work, Once in a Blue World was featured in the Earth Matters exhibition. Charles was also featured earlier on our blog... Now Okereke comes to us with his own words and meditations on his powerful and personal, world-conscious photographs. Be sure to visit Okereke’s blog for more works of art and news about this renowned photographer at charles-okereke.blogspot.com/.

Earth, a Dying World?  

by

Charles Okereke

The Earth was made as a dwelling place for all creatures, which also includes man.

Of all the creatures dwelling therein, Man is the destroyer when he was otherwise crowned with sovereignty. This arrogant attitude indicates an excess of self-worth, and has made man a plunderer rather than a nurturer.

Human beings are the only creatures that have set rules apart for themselves and refuse to conform to laws that guide creation’s movement and sustenance. Man is similarly the only creature that is out of tune with the eco-system and plagued with a one-sided narrow intellectual outlook.

What is sensed and termed as catastrophes globally today are but a retroactive consequence of a misalignment of the forces of nature – mankind so to speak, has dug its own grave, like dying Worlds.

  

Hdramhindra Blasted (2010) 

This period of recompense will be felt globally in every facet of human endeavor, not only environmentally or climatically. But it will likewise reflect in socio-political affairs, which can already be surmised in the upheavals that are perennial occurrences today.

Man has been living in an exclusively selfish mentality, devoid of the understanding of the powers which he uses daily, ignoring nature’s principles and adjusting thereby. Economic affairs are collapsing; nations are in conflict, and there is uprising everywhere.

 

Dis-integration Cameo (2010)

These are visible reverse processes, as the system has to automatically be put back into orderliness by eliminating the inferior and the destructive, be they man or animals, worlds and planets, landscapes and mountains, rivers and oceans, man against man, nations against nations, economic shifts and the rest of them – all these are manifestations of the activities of the Lords of the elements, which man sees as warfare in nature, and perceives one-sidedly as cruel in their manifestations and activities.

 
Collapse of Andromeda Emperial (2011)

Even in routine designs, we know there is a designer with a purpose who strives to make his designs adaptable and useful to the original intention for its creation; how much more for an automatic pulsating life form like the Earth with her inherent regulatory system. Mankind can only learn by compulsion and   experiences in the coming years to adapt naturally.

My concern comes from the simple understanding that we are all connected and a part of the ecosystem, and by my sense of duty to maintain a healthy and natural world...

 

To read more, visit Guest Voices: Charles Okereke 

To view more images from 'The Unseen World' Series,  click here