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Fish Market, Lagos

ABOUT ARTIST

Steve Baker is Professor of Research for Art and Media at the University of Derby.  He is an artist-member of OUTPOST and the national Land2 research network, and an associate of the Melbourne-based AEGIS research network for arts and ecology.  Since 2010 his work has been exhibited in the UK, USA, Australia and Europe.  His solo exhibition Fieldwork (curated by Maria Lux) was held at the University of Sheffield in 2019, and in 2020-21 works from his Scapeland series will be included in As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Animals and Imagination at Limerick City Gallery of Art.

EXHIBITION WORK

Fish Market, Lagos 

 

These three images are drawn from a set of nine photographs made in Portugal in 2019 in connection with an artist residency on the theme of ‘animal remains’. The photographs show the interior of a large high-tech fish market housed in an Art Deco building. Usually it’s a crowded, bustling space, the counters piled high with the gleaming bodies of the fish, but on this particular morning it was completely empty, scrubbed of any trace of animal remains other than the equipment used to engage with those remains. It took me a while to recognize that this was an opportunity to take photographs that were more sober, perhaps more poignant, and certainly less intrusive than those I’d taken on other occasions I’d visited the building. These images are stylistically quite different from most of my work, but they are indicative of my growing interest in spaces shared by human and nonhuman animals, but where neither is necessarily present.

  • Fish Market, Lagos III
  • Fish Market, Lagos VI
  • Fish Market, Lagos VIII

Fish Market, Lagos III

Fish Market, Lagos VI

Fish Market, Lagos VIII