The exhibition is organized by guest curator Joseph Gergel, currently based in Lagos, Nigeria. Namsa Leuba: Crossed Looks is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, and Garden & Gun magazine. This exhibition is supported in part by Belinda and Richard Gergel, Diane and Garey De Angelis, South State Bank, Kathleen and Tom Wright, Carol Perkins and David Rawle, Cindy and Shon M. Barnett, Deena and Walter McRackan, and Marissa Sams. The exhibition’s accompanying publication, Namsa Leuba: Crossed Looks, was designed by Swiss design studio Maximage and published by Damiani.
Namsa Leuba (b. 1982) is a Swiss-Guinean photographer and art director. Leuba studied photography at ECAL, University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland, and obtained a Masters in Art Direction at ECAL.
Leuba has participated in international exhibitions including Making Africa: A Continent of Contemporary Design at the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain; Africa Reframed at Øksnehallen in Copenhagen, Denmark; Daegu Photo Biennale in Daegu, Korea; the Athens Photo Festival in Athens, Greece; Photoquai in Paris, France; LagosPhoto Festival in Lagos, Nigeria; and a performance in Off Print at the Tate Modern, London. In 2018, Leuba was featured in the group exhibition African State of Mind at New Art Exchange, London and held a solo exhibition at the Hangar Art Center, Brussels.
In 2019, Leuba was featured in the special project Focus in the Eyes at Art Basel’s VIP Lounge. In that same year, her work was included in the group exhibition The New Black Vanguard at Aperture in New York.
Leuba was commissioned by Nike to create the Nigerian campaign for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, and she was commissioned by The New Yorker to create a photographic series with emerging Afrobeats musicians in Lagos in 2018. She has produced fashion campaigns for Christian Lacroix, Edun, and La Prairie. She also collaborated with Dior to create two Lady Dior art bags.
Her work has been published in numerous magazines, including The New Yorker, I-D, Numéro, KALEIDOSCOPE, Foam, Interview, Vice Magazine, New York Magazine, Libération, British Journal of Photography, and European Photography.
Leuba won First Prize at the Planches Contact Festival in Deauville, France in 2010. In 2012, she was awarded the PhotoGlobal Prize at the Photography Festival in Hyères, France. She was the winner of the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Festival in 2013. In 2018, she was nominated for the Foam Talent Call.
Namsa Leuba lives and works between Switzerland and France. Learn more about Leuba at NamsaLeuba.com
Joseph Gergel is an independent curator and art consultant with a focus on contemporary art in Africa. From the United States and currently based in Lagos, Nigeria, he serves as Director of kó, an art gallery specializing in modern and contemporary art, and Director of Arthouse Contemporary, an art auction house. He is also Director of the Arthouse Foundation’s Artist Residency Program in Lagos, and is a co-founder of ARTOJA, the online marketplace for contemporary art in Africa. He also served as Senior Editor at Moon Man, an experimental publication based in London that profiles global art and culture.
Gergel served as co-curator for three editions of the LagosPhoto Festival and as a curator at Art Twenty One and African Artist’s Foundation (AAF) in Lagos. He has organized exhibitions with contemporary African artists in Lagos, London, Paris, New York, Cape Town, Johannesburg, Miami, Dubai, Marrakesh, and Odessa.
In Lagos, he developed public projects including YECA (Youth Empowerment Through Contemporary Art), a community outreach project supported by the Ford Foundation, and Art Base Africa, an online database for contemporary African art, supported by the Prince Claus Fund. He has contributed to international publications of contemporary art including The New Yorker, Foam, Aperture, British Journal of Photography, DIS Magazine, Something We Africans Got, Omenka Magazine, Guernica, I AM, and Art Africa.
Gergel received a master’s degree in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University and a BA in Photography and the Philosophy of Images from New York University. He received a post-graduate diploma in photography from the Speos Photography Institute in Paris, France. He has participated in international curatorial training fellowships including the International Curator Course at the Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju, South Korea), Curatorial Program for Research Program in Eastern Europe (Kiev, Warsaw, Prague), and the ICI Curatorial Intensive in Accra (Ghana).
Learn more about Gergel at JosephGergel.com
This event took place on August 28, 2021.
