Ndidi Dike, Blackhood: A Living Archive, 2024. Installation view, Nigeria Imaginary at the Nigeria Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia. MARCO CAPPELLETI STUDIO / MUSEUM OF WEST AFRICAN ART (MOWAA).
THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / VISUAL ARTS DEPT.
Ndidi Dike’s Thesis on the Nigerian Condition
Ndidi Dike, Blackhood: A Living Archive, 2024. Installation view, Nigeria Imaginary at the Nigeria Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition — La Biennale di Venezia. MARCO CAPPELLETI STUDIO / MUSEUM OF WEST AFRICAN ART (MOWAA).
THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / VISUAL ARTS DEPT.
Ndidi Dike’s Thesis on the Nigerian Condition
It is safe to assume that when we think of a monumental event like the Venice Biennale, we think of varied commentary and interpretations of the lived experience. The Biennale is arguably the world’s most prestigious showcase of the arts and this year, the 60th edition of the Biennale features 13 African countries, including Nigeria—this being Nigeria’s second outing at the Biennale after an exhibition in 2017. The exhibition at the Nigeria Pavilion is titled Nigeria Imaginary, and was curated by Aindrea Emelife, the curator of modern and contemporary art at the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA). Nigeria Imaginary captures the collective cultural consciousness of Nigeria’s colonial past, the state of its present, and the liberating optimism for its future. It calls viewers to reimagine Nigeria through the works of the eight featured artists—Tunij Adeniyi-Jones, Ndidi Dike, Onyeka Igwe, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Abraham Oghobase, Precious Okoyomon, Yinka Shonibare CBE RA, and Fatimah Tuggar, who work across mediums ranging from photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, to sound, AR, and film.
Thought-provoking and luminous, starting from the neon green motifs layered in the entrance hall of the sixteenth-century Palazzo Canal where the Nigeria Pavilion is located, Nigeria Imaginary blends into the ruins of the walls and the wide interior spaces. In the rooms and halls, with doors opening contiguously into another, the works of the cross-generational group of featured artists delineate points in the country’s existence in a way that forms a visual synthesis. Central to this idea is the formation of the Mbari Club in the 1960s by pioneering Nigerian artists, writers and scholars—including Uche Okeke, Ulli Beier, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka—to serve as a meeting point of art, literature, and politics. The concept itself comes from the traditional Igbo Mbari House, which served as a confluence of deities. The principle therein, in Emelife’s words, applies to Nigeria Imaginary as an exchange of ideas, of forms, and of imagination.
Thus, we can say that the conceptualization of the phrase ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ is the literal imagination of Nigeria. One representative feature of the exhibition is in the vitrine displays that introduce the exhibition, and, according to MOWAA, represent the thoughts, and dreams and nostalgias of everyday Nigerians, especially from a post-independence context. The objects seem to be arrested in time and include a copy of Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria; a showcase of the Ikenga—a deity of the Igbo pantheon—whose double-faced physiognomy symbolically connects the past and the future by simultaneously looking backwards and forwards. Not only does this bifocal lens of nostalgia and the future engage with all the art featured, one finds that it uniquely also becomes activated in Dike’s work, which is concerned with the politics of post-independence Nigeria.
A lot has been said about Nigeria in contemporary media, especially of the social and political paradox the country presents on all fronts. But above all the clamour of opinions, the issue that is the Nigerian condition—to wit, the problem—finds agency and expression in its representation in contemporary Nigerian art through Dike’s works. At the Biennale, Dike has presented the installations, Blackhood: A Living Archive and Bearing Witness: Optimism in a Disquiet Present. Her two-part presentation reflects on the 2020 #ENDSARS protests and their intersections with other global movements against police violence. They offer a cataloguing of the pain of existence as an individual in Nigeria’s febrile political and economic environment. The inclusion of Dike’s art at the Biennale, crucially contemporary in its penetration of the Nigerian dilemma of existence, articulately demonstrates Emelife’s vision of Nigerian art as a space for mythologizing the future of the Nigerian nation. And this being part of MOWAA’s aim of deepening the connection between contemporary art and the cultural heritage of West Africa, the concurrent insight into modern Nigerian life in the Nigeria Imaginary exhibition initiates viewers into microcosms of Nigeria’s cultural imagination.
THE HISTORY OF MODERN NIGERIAN ART
The history of modern art is replete with the works of artists who adopt an intense relationship with their roots. Often, the impetus for their early work came out of their cultural and historical antecedents, and the later more exigent zeitgeist. Perhaps the most famous statement on art to this effect is Picasso’s declaration that an artist is ‘a political being, constantly alive to the heartrending, fiery, or happy events, to which he responds in every way, shaping himself in their image…No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war…’ An artist is, more or less, one with the site of their work, along with all the connections that come out of that state of being.
The palpable optimism of modern Nigerian art in its early years is evident in its projections of cultural pride and in the erections of sculptural and architectural monuments. A lot was built on the muscular hopes of the new country—confidence that persisted even beyond the dark period of the Nigerian Civil War into the buoyant age of the oil boom in the 1970s. Ladi Kwali’s renowned pottery (between the 1950s and 1970s), for instance, was an expression of a traditional skill in northern Nigeria that traces back to the ancient Nok terracotta art.
In the late 1950s, the ‘Zaria Rebels’ movement, which included the likes of Uche Okeke, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko, Simon Okeke and Yusuf Grillo, sought to project novel, if sometimes deliberately distorted, versions of Nigeria. Their works synthesized traditional forms and modern mediums of expression, a recourse to fauvist, surrealist and expressionist techniques. Their later individual works cut across different media from sculpture to architecture through a conflation of materials from iron, wood, waste, and found objects (materials that would prove integral to Dike’s art), each attempting to define the still ambiguous lines of the Nigerian identity. The spirit of the times is exemplified in the benign cultural fusion that marks the works of Uzo Egonu and Taiwo Jegede. But within them, as in Jegede’s Expectations III (1994), there are recordings of the conflicting national furores that defined twentieth-century Nigeria.
This awareness is why a piece like Ben Enwonwu’s Storm Over Biafra (Enwonwu exerts particular influence on Dike’s career as a sculptor, most overtly in her complex 1998 woodwork, Agbogho Mmụọ) reflects the despair of the Nigerian Civil War. The same awareness of what the Nigerian identity means as a whole—shown in individual vistas, images, figures, and narratives—is the overarching template that guides Nigeria’s outing at the Biennale. Many Nigerian and African artists have, over the years, become increasingly aware of Africa’s volatile political environment. From the visual meta-narratives of the pre-colonial, the colonial and the immediate postcolonial eras, African art has moved towards a graphic confrontation with contemporary concerns. Such concerns range from expressions of racial and gender identity, environment, diaspora and cultural restitution to depictions of internecine conflicts, the titillating exertions and uproars of the digital space, and global integration and development. Artistic productions from Nigeria today, as we see in Nigeria Imaginary, are mirrors of the artists’ immediate societies and, invariably, chronicle this crucial point in time.
This kind of programmatic art can be seen especially in the works of featured artists like Shonibare who, like Dike, approaches art through multimedia forms. Their unique temperament is in the documentation of Nigerian cultural identity and its modern postcolonial conundrums through the use of simple objects already bestowed with the symbols and complex associative images of the modern world, from Ankara to a vibrant collage of other disparate materials. See, for instance, the deceptively simple figuration in Shonibare’s installation, Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul. Shonibare’s installation is a powerful reimagination of how historical restitution can lead to the restoration of a people’s soul; and here in the pyramidal placements of the looted Benin figureheads and icons, we find that a bust of a British colonial officer is placed on the lowest rung. This trumping of symbols and meanings, not uncommon in the work of multi-medium artists, is a strong feature of the vast, vivid and variegated visual landscape that Dike erects in her installations, an example being Blackhood: A Living Archive (2024). Everything in Dike’s artistic vision brings us fully into the reality of images that show us where Nigeria as a country stands at present. Panoramically, Dike’s work overtly bridges the distinct imaginative canvases of different periods in Nigerian art; in her work, there is a seeking to connect what Nigeria was and what it has become, a lacerating awareness of the subtle and not-so-subtle economic decline; her work thoroughly interrogates, in very dynamic ways, all facets of the country’s painful journey towards the present.
CONNECTING MEDIUM AND EXPERIENCE
The site—the moment, the place, the history—from which Dike’s work emanates is a significant one. Her unflinching political gaze is completely trained upon almost every aspect of Nigeria’s predicament. Her use of mixed media is a reflection of her eclectic influences, a practice that captures the diverse images and symbols of modern Nigeria. That multifaceted approach to exploring her political vision reflects her art education and upbringing in the UK where she finished secondary school and her formal artistic apprenticeship at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where she specialized in Mixed Media Painting, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984. Perhaps, most crucially, it also reflects her familiarity with the dynamics of Nigerian cityscapes and her Nigerian hometown of Amaokwe Item, a place that holds some significance as an initial point along the trans-Atlantic slave route. This background—the diaspora, the torrid emanations of Nigerian urban environments, and the heavy history of the past—uniquely places her at the intersection of ideas and experiences that define the gamut of the Nigerian condition which crucially forms the Nigerian identity. Her first solo exhibition in 1986, ‘Mixed Media Expose’, showed this range of subjects through a variety of materials and mediums.
Through the years, having exhibited her work over 60 times, Dike’s prolificity has found outlet in a multiplicity of forms. Her work is usually in the form of researched-based multidisciplinary, multidimensional installations that use forms such as sculpture, paintings, photography, videos, digital art, and a collage of materials such as textiles, papers, and consciously chosen objects to comment on pertinent themes. Of this practice, she says: ‘The use of materials in my work is a conscious thing. There’s a lot of conceptualization and research that goes into selecting the materials of my work… they are not found objects, but consciously chosen because of specific metaphors that I employ particularly in my sculptural pieces…I normally employ metaphors in my work where I address issues that are not only global but may be unique to Nigeria.’
In a body of work that is evidently very political, being able to experiment with mediums allows her to accommodate the generality of her subjects. Dike has devised a form of visual rhetoric that consists in looking at the world around her through multiple lenses; we find that each of her exhibitions includes several individual art pieces that approach the same subject from different angles. Blackhood: A Living Archive (2024), for instance, shows us two sides of an event, using photography and sculpture. Another project that has that aesthetic is Dike’s 2008 Waka into Bondage: The Last ¾ Mile, which reinforces this multidimensional visual experience of singular subjects.
Being a later product of the Nsukka School, Dike is crucially influenced by Igbo uli art, a form that is traditionally the preserve of women, marked by broad, sinuous patterns in limited colours: shades of brown, black, blue, white, and amber. In the material world of her eclectic approach to art, Dike reimagines this not just in early pieces imbued with cultural meaning like the abstract paintings displayed in her 2008 exhibition, ‘Tapestry of Life: New Beginnings’, but in collages with muted colour palettes. In Bearing Witness: Optimism in a Disquiet Present, the second part of the artist’s double-take on police violence at the Nigerian Pavilion, the photographic installation is in black-and-white on vitreous surfaces, some of them layered with text and shadows as in a palimpsest. The complimentary sculptural installation, Blackhood, is architecturally brutalist in its sharp lines and functional components.
To go through Dike’s work is to go through a chastening visual experience; her moral compass incorporates mediums that project her personal experience as a permanent resident of Lagos, with its panorama of history, changing landscape, violence, achievement and hope. Lagos in particular, and Nigeria in general, provides the critical window through which her art views the world and its throbbing developments. In this sense, her work on markets, commodities and the implications of global consumerism is of specific interest. Two works come to mind: her 2021 exhibition, ‘Commodities of Consumption and Sites of Extraction in the Global South’, and her installation art from a different exhibition, Panoramic Meditations on: Trade, Capitalism and Dispossession (2021), which are both multi-media installations narratively and visually connected.
The details of these works, as in the photographs of youth anguish against state oppression in Bearing Witness, reveal Dike’s fixation with the stark reality of plebeian life. Three of the photographs facing the door directly show the back of a boy’s head with the slogan ‘ENDSARS’ carved into his hair by a barber. Another photograph shows hands lifting a placard that says, ‘No Mother Deserves to Bury a Child’. Blackhood, the first part of Dike’s exhibition, offers a potent vision of oppression. It features a large black iron grill into whose holes seven hundred and thirty six black police batons were slotted in. Hanging precariously on many of the batons are ‘cadaver tags’, inscribed with the names of deceased Africans, African Americans and Brazilians. Perhaps this is Dike’s attempt to endow hero status to those who died during the #ENDSARS protests and other such protests involving the Black Diaspora: emerging as a monument and beacon of inspiration to those who survived. The piece has a distinct optical illusion—or a visual double entendre of sorts. In close quarters, the contraption looks like a thousand large pins suspended in the air (the metaphor of police brutality is inescapable); seen from farther away, it acquires the desperate image of hundreds of prisoners reaching out for help behind the locked prison gates; from a distance the arrangement of the batons becomes an outline of the map of Lagos.
Blackhood is one of Dike’s most provocative pieces; it has all the expansive gravitas of an artist at the height of her powers. But, more crucially, with Bearing Witness in its background, it offers an eloquent visual experience of oppression in its most insidious manifestation in terms of loss of life and dissimulation of truth. Unity of purpose, resilience, high emotions, and the flushed faces of youth are some of the recurrent images that appeared during #ENDSARS. It is also evident in other global movements against police brutality, such as the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. Here, though, Dike offers a nuanced peek into Nigeria’s own unique experience of police brutality. While ours is not tainted by racism, it is similarly marked by violence and unaccountable bloodshed. Still, a sense of exuberant youthful optimism for a better Nigeria permeates the photographs in Bearing Witness. Why protest, or witness protest, if not with the spring of hope? Dike seems to ask. Emelife provides a poignant answer in her introductory essay to Nigeria Imaginary, ‘Imagination is the most fertile and powerful tool of liberation that we possess.’
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DARING THE NIGERIAN DREAM
Nigeria Imaginary in its entirety offers compelling exploration of the Nigerian condition. Dike’s work and that of other featured artists are veritable facets of it. In its manifold manifestations, the Nigerian condition presents a peculiar narrative of the struggles of the Nigerian people and the political, economic, and social trajectory of the country. The reality of life in contemporary Nigeria is how the country is confronting issues of seemingly infinite proportions on all fronts: there is, on the one hand, lurching economic instability, political infelicities from corruption to blatantly unfair elections, terrorism in certain geographical zones in the country, kidnapping, and farmer-herder clashes; on the other hand, there is poor development, widespread poverty affecting 70 per cent of the population, and what could quite possibly be the most insidious brain drain in contemporary history: the Japa phenomenon.
‘Japa’ is the consequence of a marked loss of confidence in Nigeria by its youth (see Dike’s 2016 exhibition, State of the Nation, which featured National Grid). Thus, we are confronted with this paradoxical scramble among the young to attain economic freedom away from their home country. What is most worrying about this phenomenon is the sheer scale of it. It is safe to say that the aspirational images of hope for most Nigerians are found in the aggressively expressed desire to migrate to a Western country. Essentially, the Nigerian dream, in its contemporary iteration as an unfortunate product of the country’s dysfunctions, is to leave Nigeria. The scramble for this dream is seen as a striving towards freedom.
As an artist, Dike understands, with acute insight, the dangerous paradox that this kind of hope—or the ‘Nigerian Dream’—poses for the country. The complex narrative of migration is captured in Constellations—Floating Space, Motion and Remembrance (2017). This understanding is also acknowledging that any discourse of leaving Nigeria begins from the historical point of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here is where Dike’s exhibition Waka into Bondage examines the significance of that painful history whose neo-colonial subtext in the modern Japa narrative cannot be easily ignored. There is a sense in which Blackhood: A Living Archive shows that the witch-hunting of youths by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad police unit, ‘SARS’, which resulted in ENDSARS, is a symptom of the same indignities which Nigerian youths have suffered in forced and voluntary migrations over the centuries.
Dike is, of course, only one of the Nigeria pavilion’s eight artists, each of whom offers a distinct window into the Nigerian condition. Igwe’s No Archive Can Restore This Chaos of (Diasporic) Shame (2020) is melancholic work that showcases, through the posture of seemingly random, disused, ordinary objects—‘sonic shadows’ left behind by the old colonial Nigerian Film Unit in Lagos—the postcolonial neglect and the British colonial legacy that made the Nigerian diaspora possible. Using sound, Igwe reimagines different outcomes for Nigeria’s colonial experience and future through the utopian independence address of Nnamdi Azikiwe, amongst other sonic materials on protest which the artist had collected over the years. Ojih Odutola’s drawings are a culmination of protest against colonial oppression as well as religious and material hope. In hues of blue, her drawings create an air of mysticism around the Nigerian condition. The drawing, Nwanyeruwa (Aba Women’s Rebellion), a lucid feminist image, commemorates the leader of the Aba Women’s War of 1929 against colonial taxation in eastern Nigeria. The paintings Aala (Accidental Boundary) and Congregation are highly spiritual portraits of fluid figures. The intimation here is proliferation of religion, both old and new, as a torch of hope in Nigeria. Shonibare’s monumental installation on the ancient Benin bronzes reimagines the restoration of lost things. In Nigeria’s colonial past and present politics, the predicament is how to restore what is lost. In a way, the Nigeria Pavilion’s Nigeria Imaginary exhibition is a daring call to not just imagine Nigeria as a restored entity but also to dream its future into reality.
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ART AS AN INSTRUMENT
Viewers of Nigeria Imaginary will find themselves immersed into a realm of art that is insistently Nigerian in tone, in ambience, in the synesthetic feel of a combination of colours and objects of Nigeria’s futuristic imagination. In this self-realized world, they will confront questions of the pain of history and its overtures into contemporary dilemmas. But, above all, the overwhelming sense of nostalgia and the resonant multivalent conditions of the present will position Nigerian art as a lighthouse that beams far into the luxuriant future. Okoyomon’s conflation of sound, space, technology and the terrestrial plane, Pre-Sky–Emit Light Yes Like That, combines these images and moods into a sonic-visual template for transmitting the philosophies and programmes of the mutable future. When Nigeria Imaginary finally makes its scheduled return to Nigeria after the Biennale, these responses will be even more telling.
Dike’s art, and that of her co-exhibitors, are instrumental to the extensive vision of a liberated future such as Nigeria Imaginary projects. Each one of their works bears demonstrable similitude to the contemporary concerns of Nigeria: from the decadence of history to a utopia of the future; they are at times intriguing and emotional, though ultimately inspiring. There may be moments when viewers might wonder if the relentless coda of optimism is overreached, especially where questions of functionality and practicality become urgent. We will find though that the art on display will create a bridge across time towards a place most Nigerians want the country to be.
Nigeria Imaginary is a laudatory, well-considered and original initiative in how it coalesces diverse Nigerian concerns. Not just in the metaphors that dwell in the centres and margins of Dike’s art, but notably in how all the eight artists instrumentalize mediums and materials as symbols and points in producing a coherent visual narrative which, when seen with the acute awareness they provoke, acquire a unique national and global essence. Each visual sequence is an invitation to immerse oneself in works that excavate the depths of the Nigerian identity, the pain of its history, the disaffections that define its present, and the euphoric optimism for its future⎈
