By Prisca Sam-Duru

The Goethe-institut Nigeria is set to launch ‘Connecting the Dots’ with six museums in Nigeria.

The “Connecting the Dots” project (2023-2025) aims at facilitating community engagement with public museums in Nigeria through the establishment of a young scholars museum fellowship program, a museum conversation series and a youth education program.

The project is implemented by the Goethe-Institut Nigeria and supported by The Ford Foundation.

The six Nigerian Museums billed to participate in the program include: Slave History Museum, Calabar; National Museum, Kaduna; Benin City National Museum; CRIMMD Photo History Museum, Lagos; Colonial History Museum, Aba and the Natural History Museum, OAU, Ile-Ife.

The project is a way forward in facilitating engagement, education and enjoyment of historical and contemporary art at various museum spaces across Nigeria.

There are three main pillars of the project; the Museum Fellowship Program which will focus on a critical engagement with Nigerian museum content and the creation of research results that engage contemporary topics such as democracy, African traditional leadership systems, gender, generational difference, justice and social cohesion.

The Museum Conversation Series will take place at the six museums across Nigeria. In addition to other audiences, these dialogues will target artists seeking to work with the collections and ground their work in research.

As part of the Youth Education Program, young people will be invited to make visual representations of artefacts, heritage, culturally significant symbols or entities and other parts of the communities’ histories and how these objects resonate with them. The aim will be to elicit young people’s interpretations of the objects and the objects’ significance in their cultures or their lives, rather than a presentation of the objects themselves.

In line with the project, the Goethe-Institut Nigeria together with the Ford Foundation and Nigerian museum partners are inviting artists/art researchers, archaeologists, architects, social researchers, writers, journalists, historians, cultural producers to apply for its museum fellowship program.

The fellowship program aims to bring six young scholars/researchers from within Nigeria and abroad to study at selected museums and produce knowledge that addresses critical aspects of the museum’s content.

In addition to a broad focus on the curatorial process and historical relevance of displays, the program seeks to address contemporary challenges facing Nigeria and contribute to advancing the role of museums in addressing key national development challenges.