The last time we featured South African photographer Pieter Hugo, he was hanging out with the Gadawan Kura or ‘hyena handlers’, a group of minstrels who wander the towns of Nigeria, entertaining people and selling traditional medicines. It seems he has returned to Nigeria to explore yet another facet – the phenomenon that is Nollywood.
The film industry in Nigeria has become the second largest in the world, ahead of Hollywood and behind Bollywood. Shot on location all over Nigeria, a staggering 200 videos are released onto the home video market every month!
In Hugo’s latest series, he explores the Nigerian tradition of story-telling by asking a team of actors and assistants to recreate Nollywood myths and symbols as if they were on movie sets.
His vision of the film industry’s interpretation of the world results in a gallery of hallucinatory and unsettling images.
The tableaux of the series depict situations clearly surreal but that could be real on a set; furthermore, they are rooted in the local symbolic imaginary. The boundaries between documentary and fiction become very fluid, and we are left wondering whether our perceptions of the real world are indeed real.
Here’s a small gallery.
See more of Pieter Hugo’s Nollywood. [some content NSFW – exposed boobies & penises]
[via Between 1 0and 5]
4 replies on “Pieter Hugo in Nollywood”
They look like scenes from a real life version of Resident Evil 5!
quite disturbing
OMG! Powerful images, but some of them are very disturbing!
Dude, you are so behind the times. I was raving about this exhibition LASt YEAR already when I saw it at the Goodman. Or was it Stevenson? And I may not have been able to remember the photographer’s name…