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Ude Ugo Anna

@ugothegood

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storytelling, research & academics.
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Join us for an afternoon of conversation with the artists of Ka ọ dị mgbe anyị g’afu ọzọ (Until We Meet Again) as they reflect on the works, ideas, and experiences shaping the exhibition.

📅 Saturday, 19 September 2026
⏰ 2:00 PM
📍 Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, 9 McEwen Street, Sabo, Yaba

Moderated by Ude Ugo Anna.

Come listen, ask questions, and engage with the artists as they unpack the many ways grief, memory, vulnerability, and healing take shape through their work.

#CCALagos #UntilWeMeetAgain #ArtistTalk #ContemporaryArt #LagosArt by @ugothegood

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a month ago

#JournoRequest — Temporary Post

For a workshop I’m participating in, I’m writing an essay on return migrations & the Nigerian art ecosystem.

I’m looking to speak with Nigerian artists who moved back to their hometown/state/former homes after a brief flirtation with life in Lagos.

In my essay, I ponder over (1) the reason for their move (2) what returning home means for them, their art and the cultural hubs growing in their current cities.

If you are/or know an artist who has moved back home from Lagos (for any reason at all), I’d love to speak with you. Best if you moved back up North, down South or to the East. Happy to take your story regardless of where you returned to.

If you work in Archives or Museums and can speak with me about first-generation Nigerian artists or art clubs that were first stationed in Lagos before moving to another part of the country, I’ll appreciate your insight.

Looking out for recommendations until Friday.

Thank you. 🫶🏾

Know someone? Please, tag them or share this with them. by @ugothegood

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2 months ago

In May, my new year began. My feet touched the ground.

1.
I journeyed home to say my see-you-laters to my loved ones who loved heaven so much they thought it wise to watch the rest of my life from its colosseum. My trips home—not minding how infrequent they’re becoming— are my prescription for clarity and rest. Now, I reckon, they’ll become necessary acts of remembrance. A time to call to mind again faces (in other faces), voices, smells and rebuke that fade slowly from my memory. Slowly. Surely.

2.
I learned to honour my love for writing (again) through practice. My opinion essay, “Is CCA’s Archive Alive?” got published in Kurating. I practiced writing without abstractions in Chinonso Nzeh’s workshop, The Grammar of Feelings. I also had the gift of showing my zine, Moderns and the Visionary Modernist in an exhibition at CCA Lagos.

3.
I made many of my favourite meals: chicken peppersoup, ogbonno cooked with mangala and roast chicken, and stew garnished with curry leaves. Yam and oil. Palm-oil rice. I shared meals with my friends. I loved that they liked what I had craved and made.

4.
In May, I tidied up old work and started new ones. May was my 11th month leading projects at @aroleagarawufoundation. I saw the prize past its submission window. What a moment that was for the core team.

I received proof copies of The Shuttle Journal nearly one year after beginning the publishing process. Publishing a student-led journal is no mean feat. I paused and gave thanks for how the many parts of the publishing process came together.

5.
In May, I celebrated three months in a new role in an art management/consulting company. I’m testing my systems and art management arm even as I continue to map out the plans for my own projects and research. Love love my time so far.

6.
I turned 24. I loved and loved some more.

7.
May earned its due. by @ugothegood

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4 months ago

Before yesterday, my writing had only appeared in art exhibitions as curatorial notes, opening speeches, interview scripts for panels, and on museum cards. Managing communications for art audiences is work that I deeply adore seeing as it bridges the gap between artistic expression and the audience’s understanding. Nonetheless, watching my writing take space—front & centre— in an exhibition has reminded me how blessed a medium text is.

Last night, I had the privilege of exhibiting my work, ‘Moderns and the Visionary Modernist’, at ‘Medium as Time: Encounters with the CCA Lagos Archive’, an exhibition by @ccalagos.

‘Moderns and the Visionary Modernist’ is an art zine that captures the Centre for Contemporary Art Lagos and its people as Bisi Silva’s vivid visions. The zine is a response to materials (Bisi Silva’s emails, invitations and newspaper articles) contained within CCA Lagos’s newly launched digital art archives. I treat them as “inter-texts”, all prophesying what Bisi Silva is to become to contemporary Nigerian art and the centre to its immediate community.

On one page of the zine, I utilize the erasure technique of poetry (which I learned in a workshop led by @ofem.ubi), redacting paragraphs of an interview Bisi Silva granted Next Magazine in 2009 to produce what I’ve named the “CCA Manifesto.” And then on the centre spread, I experiment with typography, presenting rapid questions about CCA’s current posture towards art education in the form of the old CCA building.

My art zine emerged from two days of workshopping with seven other artists at the CCA Lagos x @ifranigeria’s workshop, ‘Archives in Practice’. Writing, designing & testing formats took four days of thinking and tinkering.

I have only gratitude for @theosaretinmwen (who granted me the opportunity to join the workshop), @amandamadumere (our brilliant workshop facilitator and guide), @ofem.ubi (who made the photos of the opening) and everyone who took time to come see my work.

Thank you!
Alua. Nua.

The zine is still up in CCCA. Go see it if you have a minute! ❤️ by @ugothegood

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4 months ago

“The Lagos Digitization Project is expected to be completed by the end of May 2026. Having broached the difficult work of broadening access to its collections, there remains other parameters for CCA to set in place. In the future, this writer and other researchers may ask: “How searchable is CCA Lagos’s Archives to audiences without knowledge of cataloguing or Collection Management Systems?” “How open is CCA to digital dialogue around its selection process and collection?” “What inter-archive collaborations have there been since the launch of the archival project?””

On Friday 24th April 2026, CCA Lagos hosted archivists, journalists and art practitioners to the launch of the CCA Lagos Archives Digitization Project and a talk themed ‘Institutional Memory and the Dynamics of Agency in Contemporary Art Archives’. The open conversation touched on perspectives relating to the power dynamics of memory, ownership, and neutrality in collection development.

For her “final beat” at Kurating, Ugo Anna Ude (@ugothegood) submits an assessment of CCA Lagos’s archive and the measures put in place to sustain accessibility to and dialogue around its collection.

In “Is CCA’s Archive Alive?” she contextualizes CCA Lagos’s digitization of its collection within a broader context of what she dubs “an enlivening of African art libraries” across the continent. She suggests that CCA Lagos is forging a new definition of archives as being beyond a repository of text. The final polish remains.

Read the entire article at kurating.com by @ugothegood

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5 months ago

powered through nothing in the past year.
instead sat through everything.
learned again the frailty of my ‘lowly’ state,
this human nature & what it is to be held by god,
by love.

to a new year of being made perfect?

photo credit: always @ofem.ubi. by @ugothegood

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5 months ago

Looking back at Damilola Bankole’s workshop “Land Versus Ground” (so-called here) and our role as producer.

The workshop which was held on February 11th 2025, was programmed within The Other Order (@the.otherorder), a multi-sensory exhibition which responds to the realities of displacement and land seizure experienced by communities in Lagos and elsewhere across the world.

The ongoing exhibition is curated by Obiajulu Ozegbe (@obiajuluozegbe) and commissioned by @apexartnyc.

In producing @dharmhie’s workshop, @artistcaddy spoke with him (the artist) to determine and refine the workshop theme and runtime; we defined the workshop time blocks and created a four-hour schedule featuring a quick tour of the exhibition, a presentation by the artist, and a collaborative artwork session.

We scheduled a quick tour of the entire exhibition as a build-up to Damilola’s presentation on land ownership and power, inviting participants to recollect again their experiences with land and ground, reframing state-sanctioned dispossession as violence that is disruptive, dehumanizing, and emotionally distressing first before anything else.

Finally, participants at the workshop made individual and then collaborative collages with photographs and salvaged materials that represent land, land ownership, home, memories of home and belonging.

Damilola Bankole’s proximity to theme (as a resident of Oworonshoki) shone through in his careful delivery of both presentation and workshop.

We’re honoured to have worked with him.

Photo credits: Ofem Ubi (@ofem.ubi) by @ugothegood

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8 months ago

I’d say I gave nothing in my life as much attention as I did schooling. Nothing. And so when in the first semester of Year 4, I realized I had dropped from a First Class grade (having remained on a First Class since the first year), my heart broke a little. On the 17th of December, 2025 when I received my final result, I cried so much. I was inconsolable. Somewhere in my heart, it rang that I gave UNILAG more than it gave me. Or perhaps, less than I had expected I’d get.

I grieved the scholarships I had been cut off from. I grieved the grand celebration I had planned in my head. I grieved the loss of my aunt and guardian whom I had hoped to travel home to show my certificate. It did not matter that I was graduating top of my class. I felt like I had lost the reward for my delayed gratification.

Now, after my convocation, I’m better. I’m a lot more joyful. I took from UNILAG all that I could gather: love, learning, scholarship, an educated worldview and a robust portfolio.

My head is raised. I displayed excellence, resilience and sharpened the skills that I need for my future as an academic, curator and researcher. And nothing diminishes the hardwork that I put in.

I am blessed to have been supported by family, friends, teachers, lecturers and librarians who saw the best in me.
The Lord God, through them, has brought me here, and I am thankful.

I have no regrets.

Meet me:

Ugo Anna Ude, BA (Hons) English, Second-Class Honours (Upper Division), University of Lagos (2019-2025)

4.45 CGPA
5 distinctions in 8 semesters.

The Best Graduating Student of the Department of English, University of Lagos (2024/2025)

•
Ofem Ubi (@ofem.ubi) photographed me in @thefineryikoyi’s garden space. by @ugothegood

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9 months ago

Interrupting your usual programming to reintroduce to you Ugo Anna Ude, BA (Hons) English, University of Lagos (2019-2025)

• The best all-round performance at the first degree level in the Department of English.

• The Best Graduating Student of the Department of English, University of Lagos (2024/2025) by @ugothegood

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9 months ago

A broad aspect of my work as co-curator of @omoregieosakpolor’s ‘We Speak Their Names in Hushed Tones’ this year was managing communications. For the pre-exhibition campaign, we were to see Omoregie Osakpolor return to Benin City—nine years after he first picked up a camera—-to touch on a social issue that’s expanded from just a familial affair to a more public one with real impact on population structure, money flow & remittances, faith practices, cultural exchange, social cohesion and public perception.

From working as a production assistant on WSTNIHT two years before, I knew that the migratory theme of the exhibition emanated from experiences within the artist’s extended family. But on a global level, attention to the plight and perception of not just irregular migrants but their home countries and families was growing. And so the brief was set: full-length interviews (in videos & text) touching on Omoregie’s growth as a documentarian but also rehashing art’s social commitment for the pre-exhibition campaigns; candid and bare highlights capturing the raw emotions in the hall and the engagement with the VR piece for the exhibition, and an all-encompassing report covering WSTNIHT’s impact across the globe post-exhibition.

Offered creative direction to @eriyaid.3rd who designed all the exhibition materials you saw/used. Man’s my gee & I appreciate every opportunity I get to work with him.

Omoregie Osakpolor’s work is always soul-heavy + people-heavy. Challenged by it all. Can’t lie. Still, I’m honoured that he’s continued to ask me to work with him these years. by @ugothegood

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9 months ago

So thankful to have had the opportunity to join Radboud University’s (@radboud_uni) Urban Cultures in the AfroDiaspora Working Group between November 2024 and January 2025.

During the collaborative learning program, I was grouped with students from Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín (Colombia), Lehman College in New York (USA) and the University of Nigeria (Nsukka) who wasted no time bonding and exchanging knowledge on the cultural interactions that takes place in cities across the Atlantic in Africa, the Americas and Europe, as it relates particularly to music.

I also got to study Afropeanism in the Dutch Context (also from Johny Pitss’s text) even as I learned about cultural diffusion in Edo music and the restitution of the Benin bronzes; Contemporary Migration between Africa and the Americas, Mamiwata, Mermaids, and the Circulation of Ideas; Igba-boi apprenticeship systems in urban Nigeria, and Migration and Japa in sketches by Nigerian comedians.

At the end of the three-month programme, I contributed five sections to a group presentation/photo essay on champeta’s mix with music from the African continent. I also had the honour of presenting the photo essay to the audience at the hybrid AfroDiasporic Circulations Conference which held at Radboud University on January 15th and 16th.

I’m grateful to my professors, @pejulayiwola and @olokopatrick for the opportunity. by @ugothegood

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9 months ago

Four days ago, I swore that this post and the series that’ll come after it would not exist. Losing two loved ones within four months of each other was way off my predictions for 2025, and something about not getting a chance to say goodbye to my people made me want to disappear.

Slowly, my heart’s taking it & God’s guiding me through this rough patch. Although I have three weeks until I can be with my family, my people are holding my hands through it.

So, to celebrate joy “in spite of”, I’m sharing a series of meaningful moments (of work, school & friendships) that made 2025 something.

And thank you for reading always.
Happy 2026. ❤️

My photo’s by @thekamzynuel. by @ugothegood

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9 months ago