Afropunk, Lagos 1982

Afropunk Festival, Ikorodu, Lagos, Nigera 1982. The kids came dressed as cats, we don’t know why…

Sketches / Studies for ‘Dangerous at Night’

Dangerous at Night is a piece of  speculative cinema that explores  and reverse engineers a future  singularity arising from the collision of secret fraternities, social clubs, anarchy, and experimental christianity on Nigerian university campuses of the 1980s.

Orchids

William Gibson once said “The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed.” I’ve always reconfigured this idea as the future already having arrived, except we just don’t recognise it. So perhaps we don’t need new tech, just advanced perception. Don’t forget to smell the flowers.

Glittering Witness

West African history is reliant on oral traditions— something effectively wiped out by British missionaries in Nigeria. As such, my family line can only traced back two generations.The rest is fabulous tales of bird societies, sky kingdoms, and the ubiquitous (in West Africa), mama wata. What remained was for me was to take what old family photos in my possession, oral traditions, artefacts ...

THE GLITTERING FIELD

The works in the Glittering Field will be exemplified by the tech of text and textiles; rites of osmosis; rites of communion; interspecies relays; interventions of Intelligence of various modalities.  The show will be embedded in a subtly dynamic sound environment: the gallery itself transformed into a 24 hour streaming radio station for the duration of Berlin Artweek. The evening programs ...

Other City: Feline Fight Club

Continuing the foray into the “Feline Uncanny”. Tension builds as the shapeshifting dream cats gather to what end, who knows?

Other City: Dream Flaneurs

Inspired by the uncanny glitchiness of nascent AI Animation, reminiscent of the urban ghost stories I grew up with in Nigeria, I have cobbled together a “theater of the uncanny” from my AI video experiments. With an assist from Siouxsie and the Banshees’ Something Wicked This Way Comes.

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.

Afropunk, Lagos, 1982 @ HEK

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 ...

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 ...