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 has 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 vital narratives for the education and re-education of Africans and everyone else. Sociopolitical and geopoli...

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; 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 tumultuous world, 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 blaze i n light, and light recognizes light in the midst of darkness and chaos.  ...

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...