Joy is an emotion Ekpuk repeatedly visits in his work — his 2014 site-specific drawing for the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts was even titled Ode to Joy — and this exhibition is no different. Praise Be (2026) a digital painting featuring two dancers outfitted in ukara cloth captures this so well to the extent that the viewer can see the dynamism in the figures’ static pose. Some might see a clash between the church depicted in the painting’s background and the dancers’ cultural clothing, an indigo-dyed cotton wrapper originally worn exclusively by members of the Ekpe secret society
Art Review
The seven exhibiting artists seem to have laid their lives out on canvas and other media. The works etched into permanence –whether it is in the stains of coffee on paper, the framing of a painting, or even in the fixture of a makeshift football field–have a way of transporting and transfixing simultaneously, heightening the experience.
What holds all four images together, and what ties The Grindster back to everything Nwachukwu has made before, is his refusal to resolve the tension he’s photographing into a verdict. These are not images asking you to pity the hustle, and they do not ask you to admire it uncritically either; they insist you notice it, the way you might notice, for the first time, effort you had walked past a hundred times without seeing. “A photograph,” Nwachukwu has said, “is more than a visual record.”
A particular kind of quiet settles over a gallery’s exhibition preview in its first hour…
Walking through Afriart Gallery, you momentarily forget that you are participating in a curated art…
As you take in “What Shaped Us Does Not Disappear,” German-Nigerian artist Joke Amusan’s solo…
Speaking further the curator noted that “our mission is to provide visibility, opportunity, and creative freedom for emerging Nigerian artists and photographers by creating an inclusive exhibition space that celebrates innovation, experimentation, and authentic storytelling.”
There are many more enthralling threads and brilliant analysis of Victor Ehikhamenor’s oeuvre by all the contributing writers to the 208-page book, which, in my view, is a fitting scholarly review and documentation of Ehikhamenor’s art practice to date, and marks a notable milestone in the yet unfolding journey towards his undoubted destiny, of becoming one of the most important artists of his generation, worldwide!
In contemplating the works of these other portrait photographers one notices, almost immediately, the constant focus on the subject, especially the face or in the case of nudes, the body, as the object of the shoot but there is a sharp shift in portraits by Ike Ude which are, as earlier mentioned, usually full length and defined by a quirky dandification, an almost colouring in of the subject into his background something Ike Ude has explained as coming from his past as a painter.
나쁜 애도/Bad Lament responds to this injustice through a queer lens on mourning. The exhibition gathers artists working in performance, video, installation, and drawing. Together, they propose grief not as ritual perfection, but as protest; fragmented, messy, necessary.
Ameh Egwu’s subjects are clearly men as is discernible from their physiognomy but peer as close as you want you cannot make out their facial features. The obscured facial features heighten that sense of the taboo because unable to discern their features, the men seem to be hiding albeit in plain sight.
Adisa Olashile’s body of work reads less like a tidy career arc than like the…