onome ekeh

African Jetset: Mystical Dream Edition

When excavating the roots of African diasporic trauma, one happens upon a mystical seam…The African Jetset series takes a shamanic twist, this retrospection is the future.

The Warrior Saints of Atlantis

Inserting new narratives into amnesiac gaps created by colonial forces, adept at erasing our past, new mythologies are devised. This is the core of Afrofuturism: a conversation with the past projected into the future… The Warrior Saints dips into a melting pot of West African folklore, oral traditions, and aesthetics to fabricate new modalities. It is also a riposte to the disneyficaton of ...

Art of the Gele

Art of the Gele is fixated on Nigerian glamour in the shape of the extraordinary and ultra-fabulous headgear sported by Nigerian women, known as gele. From market women  to society doyennes to clergy and First Ladies, what the origami-like folds and intricate structure of the gele represent is a formidability of gesture wielded with élan. This series is a “throway salute” to this distinct ...

African Jetset

The series African Jetset is a response to the violence and trauma that has marked the bulk of African migratory patterns, from slavery to economic or conflict driven displacement:  “I wanted to create a corrective space, an alternate timeline where there was never any interruption: no slave-trade, no colonialization, no external war or plunder. Instead the continent developed along ...

Excerpts from ‘Hotel Legba’

Preview from the first volume of my graphic novel series “Hotel Legba” in which the Yoruba gods of the diaspora converge at the crossroads.

Future Fashion Week

I am delighted to have my speculative piece Future Fashion Week as part of the inaugural ‘Wild Papers—Unpredictable as the Future’, a new online publishing series, edited by Ingo Niermann and commissioned by the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. Wild Papers constitutes a collection of concise scenarios that affect the future of art, technology, gender, and nature. Why “wild”? The ...