Ara Deinde

Banu So , oil and acrylic on canvas, 84 inches by 60 inches, 2020-2021 If I were to curate an exhibition of African art at this point in time, I would explore these five themes as a matter of precedence: Sociopolitical and geopolitical commentary; Post-COVID realities; Commentary on capitalism and consumerism, and their associated culture; Gender and familial relationships and values; Didactics on specific social issues. I am interested in these topics for several reasons: each of them have expansive subject matter, and these five categories embody critical issues of engagement for Africans at home and abroad. Contemporary African artists have always been at the forefront of communicating their ideas and reflecting those of their societies in a rich and continued ritual of documentary. It is only fair enough that contemporary curators meet these artists halfway to push forward the vital narratives for education and reeducation of Africans and everyone else. Sociopolitical an

How To Save My Life , oil, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, 2023 I was watching a music video on YouTube. It was recently released by Nigerian Afrobeats music star, Asake. The title of the song is Yoga, and in it he sang about being in a meditative space, focusing on the right energies and people, and discarding draining ones. There was a particular scene in the video which arrested my attention and I felt I just needed to paint it and visually reinterpret in my own way. I took a screenshot of it. Here it is: I decided to reimagine the space around the subject as a dark one, one in which the essence of the subject had a stronger chance to be felt. We all live in a world that's tumultuous, but we need to take a stance of observation wherein we perceive all the tumult as dark and we see ourselves as the salt and light in a bland, dark world mired in confusion. The stars in my composition speak to the positive guiding influences in this bleak world. We are stars that bl

Cropped from "I think I'm alone now," oil, acrylic and wood dust on canvas, 2021. The subjects in my paintings fit into the sociopolitical context of what I refer to as Mental Migration. Emigration has been a practice that has marked the life experiences of most Africans especially in the Sub-Saharan parts. At first this migration was forced - in terms of idigenes captured using military force of both their compatriots and slave traders from Europe and transported under inhumane conditions to the "New World" to work on the plantations as slaves. This marked the beginning of seismic moves to incorporate Africa and other militarily/politically repressed parts of the world into a fledging global economy. This prioritised the needs, dreams and aspirations of certain groups of people and polities over the needs and aspirations of the incorporated slaves, and by extension - and future colonialist endeavours - those of their compatriots. Fast-forward to the 20th and 21

My most recent drawing of Mbasughun Ukpi. In 2015, I started taking a lot of sunset pictures. I'd post on Facebook and feel a sense of fulfilment each day I documented the sun's journey. I called myself a sun chaser. Then came Mbasughun Ukpi. I noticed her penchant for taking nature photographs and sharing those pictures on Facebook almost in a rigorous, ritual-like, daily routine. I also noticed the way she wrote so beautifully. A sunsetgang photograph from 2016. Phone masts used to be one of the main features of my photos from then. I saw them as effigies of human ambition in contrast to the simplicity of nature. Now, 2015 was a year when there were still a handful of young literati on Facebook, flexing their lingual muscles through poems and stories and essays. I was also caught in that Web (it isn't a bad Web at all; on the contrary the positive peer pressure on Facebook taught many of us how to write). It wasn't uncommon to see people weave something poetic or lyri

Feeling Out For Something IV, acrylic, oil pastels, ballpoint pens and charcoal on leather, 36 inches by 24 inches, 2020 In conversation with an artist friend, I had this to say:  "I think as artists we go back and forth between appreciating and visually representing the ideal and the real, and it's good like that. It gives us a wholesome view of the world. These little things we experience everyday matter. They collectively represent reality and are worth documenting. Then there are the things we experience only in our heads. Abstract thoughts and feelings. These collectively represent the ideal." The average young person is in a place of looking for ways to get heard, get visible. It's instinctive, this pressing desire to be related with, to be understood. What do we get however? A convoluted twist of feelings and biases that becloud the identity we're trying to project. We have a lot of things to communicate but it is left to the people who really care to conn

Nwantinti by Njideka Akunyili Crosby Njideka Akunyili Crosby is emblematic of the postcolonial diasporean experience as illustrated via the most advanced form of man's civilization: art. She leads a crop of young, talented and socioculturally aware Africans in the art sphere such as Wangechi Mutu, Kehinde Wiley, Toyin Odutola Ojih etc in the expression of the new, negotiated realities of the African. These new realities are within the context of the morphing face of globalisation and the emergent role of the African narrative in it.  This is apparent in her analysis of herself as being torn continually between her native sociocultural experiences and those she experiences in the country she resides in - the United States of America. She is married to a Caucasian American and this raises a world of questions which she probably never knew were there. In Africa, we see tribes and specific cultural affiliations; in the diaspora, we are forced to see colour for what it unfortunately is

A thing or two (not) to say , oil pastels and acrylic on canvas, 2020 There is an overt exploitation of curiosity and desperation in the African art market. The curiosity is on the part of the Western world who incidentally have the wherewithal to explore the whims of their curiousness (which isn't peculiar to them anyways; man in general is a being driven by a longing to know and to do. It's why we have made all the human progress we have). The desperation is largely the bane of African artists and art markets, keen to capitalize on the influx of interest from the Western world. I am misconstrued , charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 2020 It is no news that these artefacts have since found their way into pro-western museums, but what is interesting to take note of is the attendant disinterest of the average young African artist of the 21st century in the art of his fathers asides the capitalist interest, as opposed to western interest which is both capitalist and appreciative. It