Center for African Studies

Carter Lectures 21.3 with Qudus Onikeku, UF.

AFRICAN TIME: A New World-Thinking

Qudus Onikeku is currently the first “Maker in Residence” at The Center for Arts, Migration and Entrepreneurship of the University of Florida – 2019-2022.

Qudus Onikeku is a movement artiste made of diversity. Over the decade, he has established himself as one of the preeminent multitalented artistes, working today with different media: performance, research, installation, curating and community organizing. He is the artistic director of Nigeria’s preeminent creative organization, QDance Center Lagos, which operates as a creative incubator that applies artistic competence, human resources, innovation and creativity, as capacities for human centered content development.

Qudus’ international artistic practice intersects between his interest in visceral body movements, kinesthetic memory, disruptive practices and finding new vocabularies for performances that aren’t centralizing Eurocentric approaches, embracing an artistic vision and a futurist practice that both respects and challenges Yoruba culture and contemporary dance. He has created a substantial body of critically acclaimed work that ranges from solos to group works, as well as artiste-to-artist collaborations with visual artists or architects, musicians or writers, multimedia artistes or scientists.

Qudus Onikeku has participated in major exhibitions and festivals across 56 countries including Venice Biennale, Biennale de Lyon, Festival d’Avignon, Roma Europa, TED Global, Torino Danza, Kalamata Dance Festival, Dance Umbrella, Bates Dance Festival etc. His dance works is in the eprmanent collection of the National Gallery of Canada. He has been a visiting professor of dance at the University of California Davis and Columbia College Chicago.

Qudus is currently the first “Maker in Residence” at The Center for Arts, Migration and Entrepreneurship of the University of Florida – 2019-2022. His current research looks into the last five years of his accidental entrepreneurial work with the QDanceCenter in Lagos, along side his partner Hajarat Alli, they will be developing a business strategy that similar creatives from around the world can engage, remix and reuse as a tool kit. While his main focus will be his latest research in developing interactions with cutting edge technologies that uses artificial intelligence and augmented reality to both document, archive, identify, analyze, experiment, recompose and share dance traditions across space and time, building a bridge between technology and Afro-Diasporic dances and cultures.

Register to attend on Zoom.