With a global art market valued at $63.8 billion and artists receiving the lowest amount of their earned income from the market...it's time to reinvent the art auction!
House of Wahala-meaning trouble in Nigerian pidgin-flips the script. Artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji steps in as auctioneer and sound artist Emeka Ogboh provides the evening's score. All works come from the primary market-that is directly from artists-to the audience. Featuring work from over twenty-five international and Texas-based artists, House of Wahala infuses the art auction with the perfect amount of spectacle, humor, and political debate. The art auction is finally fun again! ` Participating artists include Rabéa Ballin, Gabrielle Civil, Annette Lawrence, Rahima Gambo, Regina Agu, Adee Roberson, and ruby onyinyechi amanze, among others. Opening bids on many works begin at $100. Participating artworks/artists are subject to change. Wura-Natasha Ogunji's artistic practice straddles the visual and performative realms. The overall concepts in her work stretch between drawing and performance in order to explore relationships between mark making and movement. For the past several years, Ogunji has been creating multidisciplinary performance works concerning women occupying public space in Lagos, Nigeria through ordinary and epic actions. At the same time, she continues a drawing practice. Her delicate drawings on architectural tracing paper reveal images of people listening to headphones that are connected to generators underneath the earth, or plant life coming out of wires. Ogunji's brightly colored line drawings juxtapose humans and animals in environments in which agricultural life and everyday technological systems are intertwined. For Ogunji, the drawings represent a limbic world drawn from her experiences in Lagos and beyond.House of Wahala is presented in partnership with Women & Their Work and Fusebox, Austin.
House of Wahala is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Women & Their Work, DiverseWorks and NPN. The Creation Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency).For more information: npnweb.orgHouse of Wahala's presentation at DiverseWorks is supported in part by an award from Mid-America Arts Alliance, the National Endowment for the Arts, Texas Commission on the Arts, and foundations, corporations, and individuals throughout Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas. Additional support is provided by the City of Houston through the Houston Arts Alliance. DiverseWorks Season Sponsors: The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, The Houston Endowment, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Wortham Foundation In-Kind Sponsors: American Business Machines, Consequence of InnovationVideos