Nigerian entrepreneur, Tokini Peterside, is driven by a responsibility to shape and build the infrastructure that's needed in Africa to support the many passions of its people. This drive led her to so seamlessly navigate the Nigerian creative sector that creating, what has now been deemed, a nexus for artists around West Africa was a natural progression. In 2013, she founded ART X Collective to support entrepreneurs and brands like Maki Oh and ALARA across the culture, design, and luxury sectors. Later, the business would produce ART X Lagos, a platform set on not only showcasing and supporting the wide breadth of artists within the contemporary art scene on the continent and in its diaspora but allowing said artists to serve as cultural ambassadors. ART X Lagos' first fair would be held in 2016 and would start many an ongoing conversation - one particularly around the African continent as a hub for visual arts.
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Tell me about yourself and your fervour for the arts.
My interest in the arts was really nurtured by my mother when I was young. I spent a lot of my time immersed in creativity and experiences around culture, even though I was growing up around Lagos in Nigeria. My mother was also a collector, and I would go with her to various events and experiences and get to see what was happening in the Nigerian scene. I went on to study in England and immersed myself in the culture and incredible creativity that was coming out of Nigeria, in particular, at that time.
After pursuing my legal studies and opting out of becoming a professional lawyer, I came back to Nigeria and started to meet people and started to work. At first, I was just exploring the scene; I was getting to know the various fashion designers and filmmakers and working on projects with them. Eventually, that led me to Hennessy, part of LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton), and I became head of marketing there. Through that role, I was supporting the very best projects coming out of the culture and creative scene through sponsorships. All this did was fuel my passion for the arts and creativity. I was immersed in the very best art that was coming out of Nigeria. I knew that I wanted to play a role within the creative sector. I was constantly meeting and engaging with incredibly gifted individuals across the creative arts. I also had this stirring to do work that would support talent and would enable Nigeria and subsequently Africa to make the most of these phenomenal people who are based on this continent.
It was so clear to me, at the time, that creatives are phenomenal ambassadors for our culture. They tell the world the story of identity, they tell the world who we are, they tell the world the experiences that matter to us, the questions we are asking, the things we are proving, and they do it in such a remarkable way. I wanted to immerse myself in the subjects of identity and culture and see what I could contribute to helping to mould these identities for Africa through creative expression.
How did you establish ART X Collective, which would later produce ART X Lagos?
After working at LVMH, I launched my strategy consultancy, which is the company that has now become ART X Collective, the producer of ART X Lagos. In those years, I was working closely with fashion designers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries, like Reni Folawiyo, to develop what would become ALARA, a high-end concept store in Lagos, Nigeria.
I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could support the artistic talent that was coming out of Africa and Nigeria, how I could create a platform that would bridge and better connect the communities across the continent, and how we could create a moment or opportunity for the rest of the world to come into Africa or to use Lagos, Nigeria as a base. In thinking about the aforementioned, I went to the Venice Biennale in 2015 and got to see curator Okwui Enwezor's phenomenal exhibition and was so inspired by that experience, in which so many African artists were featured and by what it was doing for the perception of our culture to have the world's artistic community from patrons to art lovers to collectors to museums to institutions explore these works. I felt even more strongly that an experience that could mirror this in some way was needed at home.
I had had so many conversations with artists, through my work, about not only wanting to work together but the difficulties in Nigeria - this feeling of being cut off or shut off from what was happening internationally, this feeling that to be better integrated within the art world you had to leave Nigeria. I wanted to provide an opportunity that would enable artists who chose to remain at home to have the best of both worlds - to have the world come to them, at the right moment, to give them the freedom to go to the world when they wished to, and then also to create a space for artists that had never created to come to. The aim was to celebrate artistic expression on the continent. So this is how ART X Lagos came to be. ART X Collective started its life first as a means of supporting cultural and creative entrepreneurs. ART X Lagos sprouted out of that - it's our flagship and master brand.
What limitations have you run into, given your brand's focus on a high net worth clientele? How do you combat this?
ART X Lagos is actually very open and inclusive as a fair. I was looking at the website of Frieze Art Fair the other day and noticed it's about 60 pounds to attend the fair on the regular days. At ART X Lagos, in the first two years, we actually didn't charge anything for guests to attend the fair; all you had to do was register online because I was very clear that I wanted any and everyone who appreciated this experience to be able to access it. Yes, we had our invitation-only days for collectors and VIPs, but the minute that was done, we had two full days out of the four for the general public, in which thousands of people would come.
I remember opening weekend in November 2016 where we had a VIP night, and everyone was thrilled and proclaiming we had been successful and I recall saying, 'Actually, it's not until tomorrow, when we open to the public, that I will know how successful this has actually been.'
I stood there in the halls watching hundreds and thousands of people that I didn't know personally but who had somehow encountered the message of ART X Lagos. They were coming in massive numbers - grandparents, university students, kids, families, I mean, it was incredible. That, for me, is a very important part of our DNA.
Today, ART X Lagos is no longer free to attend because we realised we have to sort of safeguard the experience for those who really want to be there, but it's 2500 naira, which is less than $5. I remember exchanging with an excited young student at the last fair who had taken a bus from the University of Ife and had heard about us on social media. I never wanted the cost to be an impediment. We've been very clear on that.
The way art is presented can indeed be intimidating to people from certain classes of society, and it is a conversation that we've had many times prior. We ensure that the minute you walk through our doors, you feel welcome, you are welcome, and you are noticed, whether or not you are buying. You are there to be part of the experience, and because of your presence, you are important to us as a stakeholder. In certain communities, people may encounter our messaging and think that it's going to be an intimidating experience, and so they may not necessarily come because of questions like, 'Will I fit in?', 'Will I be accepted?', 'Will I be welcome?'
We've gone out of our way to reach out to various communities. We ran a partnership in which we would go to marginalised and disadvantaged communities and even bus in schoolchildren. We would bring hundreds of schoolchildren to the fair for free. We would bus in university students from various schools of the arts to give them the support to come because sometimes transportation costs can be an impediment.
Talk to me about the ART X Collective and ART X Lagos legacy.
We have opened up the Nigerian art ecosystem and market to become much more collaborative with what's happening across Africa. One only has to look at Nigerian collectors, who now are part of the second-largest art market on the continent. Many Nigerian collectors, from their experiences at ART X Lagos, are now so much more open to buying art from Ethiopia, Senegal, and Cameroun and see themselves as players in the larger pan African art ecosystem as opposed to solely fixating on Nigeria. Diverse art isn't always readily available, and it's a barrier that we have broken down. We have opened up Nigeria to the rest of the continent.
We have given the international art community a moment.
We have been a major contributor to the development of the art season because now you have ART X Lagos in close proximity to Lagos Photo Festival and in close proximity to Lagos Fashion Week. What we did in those early years was we encouraged many galleries, studios, and spaces to put on programming at that time, and what blossomed out of this was an art season. You have the Lagos Biennale that launched the year after we did in the same season and gives people the opportunity to have a rich cultural experience and engagement in Lagos and in Nigeria.
I would also say we've contributed to placing Lagos on the global art map. We are constantly receiving international visitors who are curious about what's happening in both Nigeria and on the continent because we spend a lot of time talking about it and giving increased visibility to artists from here.
For artists, we've launched the ART X Prize, which is the leading award for emerging artists in Nigeria. We're just coming up to the close of our 2021 prize, and our five finalists are being mentored by experienced artists, thinkers, and writers. We'll be announcing our winners in a few weeks. The winner gets an international residency in London. It's another of the ways we are impacting the ecosystem.
We are placing art in its rightful place back on the agenda in Nigeria. Nigeria has had tremendous artistic productions going back centuries and what happened sort of around the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s was this steady decline because of issues in governance and a lack of investment in our support of the arts. We are working to bring the arts back to the forefront of that conversion so that when the government and private sector players are talking about creative industries and music and film and fashion, the visual arts also have a seat at the table.
We are instilling pride in people. Many, whether Nigerian or otherwise, come to ART X Lagos and say how proud they feel when they walk around this experience that is Nigerian-owned, Nigerian-created, black-owned, and black-created in the heart of Africa. They are proud of what we are doing and the image that we are using to represent our continent, our country, and our city.
I am very proud of the work we have done but cognizant of the fact that we still have so much work to do.
Tell me about this year’s event.
ART X Lagos returns in its sixth edition on the 4th of November. It's going to be a hybrid fair because we are doing a physical fair from the 4th to the 7th and a virtual fair until the 21st of November. This means that members of our community and patrons, who usually fly into Lagos and who now have to think about challenges around the pandemic and global travel, can engage with an online experience that mirrors the physical experience. We are investing very heavily in depicting the energy, vibrancy, and dynamism of our physical fair in this online fair, as well.
The ART X Prize winner will soon be announced. We also have ART X Live, our live experience that fuses music and visual arts and creates a one of a kind experimental collaboration between young artists, and that is coming up, as well.
What do you hope will become of the above platforms?
We're coming up with really exciting platforms that we hope to launch that will really be catalysts and game-changers for the community of artists that we recognise on the continent. We hope to deepen our relationships with our supporters. We are expanding, but obviously, the pandemic has presented so many challenges to us like so many other businesses, and it has changed a lot of our plans. By next year, people will get to see additional expressions from the ART X label that are really working to catalyse the growth and the impact of the arts ecosystem and the arts world across Africa.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.