Program

ACLS Project Development Grants, 2026

Project

Experience and Memory: Artists’ Engagement with the Nigerian Civil War

Department

Fine Art and Art History

Abstract

Drawing from extensive interviews, archival research, and an interdisciplinary theoretical approach, the book examines how artists practice at the intersection of experience and memory of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970). It charts how art relates to propaganda, registers wartime violence, and exposes the reverberations of violence’s after-effects to argue that artists take up the role of witnesses and create testimonial artworks to speak to wartime atrocities, fracturing and competing nationalisms, and the lingering trauma of a conflict that remains repressed in the Nigerian public sphere.