Artsdiscourse

        Mathew Oyedele Shortly after the Nigerian independence celebration in October 2020, Nigerian youth took to the streets in different cities across the country to protest against police brutality under the slogan, 'EndSARS'. SARS (Special Anti Robbery Squad) is a unit of the Nigerian police that is widely known for unlawful arrests, extortion, profiling, kidnapping, torture and killing of Nigerians. I could not join the protest physically as I was still evaluating the effect of the COVID-19 lockdown on my practice as well as plan for the year when it all began but I joined online by tweeting aggressively. I saw videos and images of louts and thugs attacking the peaceful protesters; of police attacking them with teargas and   water cannons, of police harassing and arresting the protesters, of a politician who came out of his vehicle with a gun and shot in the air with two persons reportedly dead on the spot and many others. I was actively participating on...

Oba of  Benin, Innocent Akhigbe 2019 Mathew B. Oyedele Innocent Akhigbe’s delineation of African personalities is dramatic and mimetic. It recalls the importance of every moment of laughter, victory, action, purpose and bravery. It also highlights how time gets frozen by the hands of the artist. One recalls the photographic collection of Ike Ude , a Nigerian born New York photographer, entitled, “ Nollywood Portraits: A Radical Beauty” where he graciously created a dramatic atmosphere of light and colour. Contrarywise, Innocent’s portraits are mostly rendered in black and white, but his generous use of chiaroscuro is the main element that spices up his renditions. The process begins by planning and visualizing the subject on the loom before interlacing his weft back and forth to highlight the disposition of his subject. Nelson Mandela, Innocent Akhigbe 2018 He confides that the artistic ambience in the city of Benin has offered him a great deal of philosophical k...

Oghagbon Moses, "Collective effort 2", oil on canvas, 2018.  Mathew B. Oyedele In December 2018, Weave and Co. gallery held an art exhibition of paintings by Oghagbon Moses, a Nigerian painter and photographer whose passion for Nigerian cultural landscape remains evergreen. The show was themed "Colours of Uhola". Uhola is an annual cultural festival of the people of Zuru, Kebbi state, Nigeria, meant to appreciate God for abundant harvest. And, Oghagbon, with dexterity and meticulousness, captures the colours, actions, movements and gestures of the festival. Within the context of the exhibition, Oghagbon delineates culture as the chord that connects the people of Zuru. He therefore depicts the people as embodiments and custodians of culture. Paintings like "collective effort","experience" and "the way we are" attests to this fact. Oghagbon Moses, "The way we are 2", oil on canvas, 2018. The struggles, growth an...

Ato Arinze, "Debacle; Aso Rock Mask; The IBB Years" 1994. Mathew B. Oyedele The cliche that art is the mirror of the society remains true in the work of Ato Arinze entitled, “Debacle; Aso Rock Mask; The IBB Years. Just like Picasso's commentary on the bombing of Guernica, a Basque Country town in northern Spain by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy at the request of the Spanish Nationalists, Ato's "Debacle" is a social commentary on the struggle for democracy in his home country Nigeria. The work is a fibre glass piece whose composition is arranged to emphasize an entrapped man in a web at the upper part of the piece. A huge carrot with a snake at its tail - a metaphor for temptation and treachery - occupies the axis of the work and divide it into halves. The lower part of the piece has the image of a lion in between a buttock, a connotation of astrological sign and the preference for women while batons which connotes military brutality and oppress...

Tobenna Okwuosa. Mathew B. Oyedele Three books by Nigerian writers - The Man Died by Wole Soyinka, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra by Chinua Achebe and Labyrinths by Christopher Okigbo inspired the recent works of Tobenna Okwuosa that were exhibited at the African Culture and Design Festival, in November 2017. These books offer a profound archive for the artist to delve into the past and create an oeuvre that confronts the viewer with guilt-ridden contents. 2017 was the 50th anniversary of the declaration of Biafra, and 50 years after the death of Christopher Okigbo on war front, fighting for Biafra. Okwuosa’s exhibits show the   historical facts of the Biafran War and the poetic truths of Christopher Okigbo. The Biafran War is a vital and sensitive aspect of Nigerian history that should be known to all Nigerians so that we may, to borrow an expression, transform yesterday’s action into tomorrow’s wisdom. The provocation of conversations in the coll...

By Chinezim Moghalu   Chibuike Uzoma , " Untitled", from the series, "No Victor, No Vanquished, 2018.    “No Victor, No Vanquished”, part of the ongoing 9 th edition of Lagos Photo Festival exhibition, is a body of work by Chibuike Uzoma, which forms part of his ongoing project titled “Museum of Burnt Things”. It is an ambitious and laborious project that reconciles photography with painting in a close-up intertwined sequence. This is the second part of a three part project, which is showing at the yearly festival in Lagos, presently. The work takes a departure from the term “no victor, no vanquished” , an assertion by Major Yakubu Gowon, who was the head of state during the devastating and violent Nigerian-Biafra civil war that began after seven years of Nigeria’s independence from the British and lasted for three years (1967-1970). This was a statement he made at the end of the war which indicated that there was no victor nor vanquished during such w...

Ake, the film adaptation of Wole Soyinka’s classic childhood memoir Ake, The Years of Childhood is now available on Amazon and other global platforms. Set during World War II years, the story combines a beautiful child-view narrative with resonances from the war as heard and imagined in Soyinka’s hometown in Ake, Abeokuta. It climaxes with the Egba women’s riot of 1945, led by Mrs Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, mother of the deceased musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. Taiwo Ajayi Lycett (OON) as Madam Amelia Shot at various locations in Abeokuta, Ibadan, Lagos and East Grinstead, UK, the film has been screened in Lagos and at film festivals in Cannes, France and the United States. The French subtitles were contributed by Alliance Francaise in Nigeria.   Directed by Dapo Adeniyi and produced by Back Page Productions, the cast of nearly 1000 feature s some of Nigeria’s foremost professionals in the film and theatre industries including Taiwo Ajayi-Lycett (OON), Yinka Davies, Y...