“As there are hyena-men and panther-men …”: Chris Abani, Pieter Hugo, and the shocking life of images

The article looks at the combined work of South African photographer Pieter Hugo and of ‘global Ibo’ author Chris Abani in the volume Nollywood (Prestel 2009). In their creative work both artists usually strive to see beyond established aesthetical and ethical paradigms and to bypass conventional modes of representation, in order to zoom in on adventurous and often shocking areas of existence in both life and art in Africa. In the Nollywood series, Hugo engages with the Nigerian video film industry in collaboration with local actors and make-up artists in order to recreate the workings and general atmosphere of Nollywood films. Their cooperation produces a series of violently surreal, hallucinating tableaux. The Prestel catalogue features an introduction by Chris Abani which aptly evokes Nollywood’s history and production, and provides a key to reading Hugo’s creative rendition of the phenomenon. Marked by an incessant effort to move beyond the limits of both literary and cultural representation, Abani’s work is a highly appropriate contribution to the artistic experimentation in the collection. The paper argues that the visual and textual work of Hugo and Abani both revisit and remove – through sometimes disquietingly violent aesthetical intervention – the borders that are kept in place by societal control on culture and the arts.