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.
Preview from the first volume of my graphic novel series “Hotel Legba” in which the Yoruba gods of the diaspora converge at the crossroads.
Afropunk Festival, Ikorodu, Lagos, Nigera 1982. The kids came dressed as cats, we don’t know why…
The luminous movement behind the movement, invisible lines of flight made visible, culled from the archaic ethers of Isis, dim reflections of a defiant Nefertiti…
My series ‘Afropunk, Lagos, 1982’ will be featured at HEK this November: UNSCHARFE REALITÄTEN – REGIONALE 24» Saturday, 25.11.2023, 19:30 PM About Afropunk Lagos, 1982 This series of images is a rebuttal to the social conservatism by way of formal and informal repressions that dominated my youth in Nigeria. There was a time when it was illegal for women to wear trousers, it was ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...