At the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art in Lagos, an exhibition of Chika Okeke-Agulu’s work turns the highlight on his profession as a studio artist, a facet of the US-based scholar higher identified for writing about different artists. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes
It is, little question, a good distance from the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties. In his curatorial observe, Iheanyi
Onwuegbucha charges that interval among the many most turbulent in Nigeria’s post-civil battle historical past. For
Chika Okeke-Agulu, whose identify has currently been extra readily related to artwork historical past than with the studio, these years had been to depart a deep imprint on each his work and his outlook. The political turmoil of the interval, together with the expertise of migration, retains bobbing to the floor in his work, drawings and sculptures. Ditto the query of what freedom means when the battle to safe it by no means fairly ends.
The query finds an echo in Chika Okeke-Agulu: Freedom Bird. Presented by YSMA and SMO Contemporary Art, the exhibition spans greater than three many years of the artist’s work. Alongside his work, drawings and sculptures are poems, diary entries, images and archival supplies. The exhibition opens to the general public at present, November 1, though its formal opening takes place at midday on November 8 on the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art (YSMA), Pan-Atlantic University, Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos. It runs till January 31, 2027. Sandra Mbanefo-Obiago, who runs the Lagos-based SMO Contemporary Art, is working with Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, the affiliate curator, on the mission.
For many years, Okeke-Agulu has interpreted the work of different artists, and in the method has turn out to be one of many main voices internationally on African modernism. Now, with Freedom Bird, aficionados can lastly expertise him as an artist as effectively. Basing his observe on the historic circumstances which can be the topic of his research, his works name out authoritarian energy, spotlight disillusionment, and the powerlessness of the person in the face of the would possibly of the state. However, it’s simplistic to learn them as paperwork of political violence. His works certainly depict the battle for freedom, and the desire to defy domination.
The portray “Tyranny and Democracy”, as an example, takes up the topic of political oppression and the folks’s proper to self-determination. Rendered in a Cubist and Expressionist idiom, it’s replete with geometric varieties that fragment arms and faces, a few of which convey tenderness.
Against a palette of ochres, blues and reds, one discerns an ecstatic flight alongside scenes of bodily battle and lamentation. The portray culminates in a panel suggesting a imaginative and prescient of ultimate sanctification. And, by the best way, isn’t there one thing Chagall-esque about its depiction of reminiscence and on a regular basis rituals?
The panels have their separate identities, however the diagonal motion throughout them attracts the attention from one to the subsequent. Together, they make a mural that invitations each shut inspection and a view of the entire.
As for “Freedom Bird”, the exhibition’s title, which can also be that of one of many works, it hardly wants explaining. A hen escaping, or being launched from captivity, is the primary picture that involves thoughts. After “Tyranny and Democracy”, the four-panel work comes as a sigh of aid. Smoke and barbed wire sweep throughout the ink-and-wash composition, gathering drive on the left earlier than thinning into the white area on the precise. A lone hen, patterned in intricate element, makes its escape. Small, jewelled dots of color punctuate the vacancy. The hen is free, however the smoke and barbed wire stay behind it.
But the phrase “freedom” carries the unknowns of what occurs after the departure, and the gap that separates folks from their properties. In works constituted of the late Eighties to the current, Okeke-Agulu explores a variety of thematic issues together with, amongst others, battle, betrayal, love, longing and nostalgia. Although located in Nigeria’s political and cultural milieu, the tenor of Okeke-Agulu’s work reverberates with the circumstances and the situations of the world past and significantly with the aftermaths and legacies of man’s inhumanity to man.
In gentle of the present scenario in Nigeria, the exhibition’s modern resonance and implications to Nigeria may be examined as referring to the nation’s persevering with battle with the legacy of navy rule and the frustrations of democratic governance. The phenomenon of ‘japa’ whereby youthful Nigerians depart the nation in search of higher alternatives has turn out to be commonplace. Beyond the statistics, there are extra personal reckonings with aspiration and loss.
These are among the points that Freedom Bird explores. For Onwuegbucha, Freedom Bird acknowledges an intriguing imbalance in Okeke-Agulu’s profession. As an artist who has organised exhibitions and scholarly publications for different members of the Nsukka School, he has primarily been ignored for his personal creative output. Onwuegbucha mentioned the exhibition gives a possibility for audiences to work together with Okeke-Agulu as an artist first, and scholar second, as he has beforehand articulated. Showcasing his work at YSMA is essential to him, Onwuegbucha famous, due to the museum’s dedication to analysis, public discourse and what he describes as an “artistic homecoming.”
Born in Nsukka in 1967, Okeke-Agulu is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies at Princeton University, the place he directs the Africa World Initiative. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and served as Slade Professor of Fine Art on the University of Oxford in 2023. Okeke-Agulu’s books embrace Postcolonial Modernism and Contemporary African Art Since 1980. He has revealed many different scholarly research on Obiora Udechukwu, Yusuf Grillo and El Anatsui, amongst others.
The exhibition will function a sequence of talks, sponsored by TEMPLARS, to stimulate discussions on the historical past of Nigeria’s politics and tradition and the position of the artist in public life. A monograph will even be revealed.
Finally, Freedom Bird returns to a query that neither independence nor democracy has settled: what does freedom appear to be in the face of ever altering threats? Through works outlined by private reminiscences and collective experiences, Okeke-Agulu engages energy and doesn’t succumb to historic pessimism. His works communicate to Nigeria’s difficult journey by means of historical past, and bear witness to the capability of the folks to recollect, interrogate, and defy their leaders.
