Many times, when Atiku confronts the issue of politics and injustice, he seems to find a ready pivot in his religious affiliation to Yoruba spirituality, and many times the connection is with the marine deity, Yemoja. Through liturgical practices that define water veneration in the Yemoja cult, the solo drama of Atiku’s performances becomes elevated as it were into a mystical ritual; Atiku himself seems to lose his corporeal frame, as we watch him, slipping into a territorial angle of existence more spiritual than physical. On those stages, he becomes a figure under spirit possession. And when he embodies that nonhuman incarnation, his messages take on the meaning of something beyond the railings of an ordinary performer or activist (In his performance, ‘Porongodo – The Feast’ (2012), he transforms himself into the likeness of a cannibal to protest animal brutality, accompanied by a tall installation of bones upon a scaffold and a sound feature emitting the mooing of bovines). What we see is not a magical descent into fantasyland; what we see is a necessary transformation into an arbiter of justice, operating in a realm that places supreme value on liminal spaces, fluidity, and formations of the natural world. Going through many of Atiku’s performances, one sees that his routines bear similarity to those of a traditional priest; the figurines he often displays are objects of immense sacred value, they represent divinities, small and large, hierarchical or mysterious. 

On his ‘Mukoo Moro’ performance in Amsterdam in 2021, which takes the Covid-19 pandemic as its central theme, Atiku talks about performing at a T-Junction, a convergence of roads where ‘energies meet’. In Yoruba religion—and the broad spectrum of African traditional religions—road junctions are a vortex of strong cardinal energies that collates the four winds. Whatever is done at road junctions is believed to be extremely potent, for it has been witnessed by all the positive and opposing forces of the spiritual world. Here, Atiku places his fight for human rights in conversation with the practices of his Yoruba spirituality. He intones the poetry of Òrìṣà and the connective power of the Ọpọ́n Ifá into the performance as a verbal expiation of wrongs, a form of cleansing, in which the body undergoes an immolation of sorts and transmutes into a spiritual instrument. This is more readily obvious in his recent performance, ‘My Ori Is Kotuba Kotuse’, at the Cite Internationale, Universitaire De Paris, Paris, France. In the performance, featuring three babaláwo (diviners), he builds his central concerns for the crises of the contemporary world—Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan, Congo—from the philosophy of Ori (head) in Yoruba cosmology, integrating the energies of Olode (guardian of outer space), Adele (guardian of inner space), and Iyere Ifa (tonal Yoruba divination chants).

To do activism that aligns with the precepts of Yoruba spirituality is, for Atiku, a statement of identity. The artist’s first point of departure is his own cultural origins, which he excavates and uses to express his own unique power as a product of an ancient culture which holds ancient knowledge. Atiku believes that this access to ancient knowledge and mystical practices is an important part of his artistic paraphernalia; in this sense, the principle that guides Atiku’s performances is the forcefulness of recall. It is from the vantage point of his combination of a spiritual and historical identity that an artist like Atiku could begin to demystify the constructed and unformed mysteries of the modern African experience whose identity has been unmoored from its past by the extirpating effects of colonialism and corruption. 

Memory and recall is at the root of immersive sculptural performances such as ‘Giving Contours to Shadows – Alaagba’, which he made in Berlin, Germany. At its root is Ifa—the religion from which Atiku draws inspiration. Ifa-based ritual is very fully demonstrated in ‘Olomoyoyo’, a performance first done in Berlin, Germany in 2018, commenting on the plight of children all over the world. That ritualistic practice will be more realistically seen in his performance, ‘Stand, Wait, Listen for Ogiriyanda’ (2020), which heavily incorporates Odu Ifa in acts of propitiation, cleansing, and initiation. In the Yemoja cult (Olokun is the equivalent male Òrìṣà but presides over the sea), the dimensions of performance are highly stylized in a sequence that includes white garments for the purity of the worshiper, items of offering presented at the beach, intoned words of supplication to the river goddess, and sometimes even dance. These acts are supposed to offer restorative results or a sense of connection with the natural world (His ‘Alaaragbo’ performance in Marseille in 2021 is also a reference here).

In 2017, during Nigeria’s first outing at the 57^th Venice Biennale, Atiku presented a performance titled ‘Mama Say Make I De Go, She Dey My Back.’ The performance was held on the opening day and its central theme is the channelling of the potency of female energy and body ritual as a catalyst for peace and harmony in the world. The art presentation here segues from installation to performance and back to installation again. In the performance Atiku, carrying a large figurine on his head, worships a large parade of women, beautifies them with ornaments, and leads them in a procession, amongst other ritualized actions. This enactment is somewhat similar to processions sometimes enacted by the women worshippers of Osun or Yemoja.

Between the religious images he constructs and the complex choreographies of his performances, Atiku often seems to be possessed by a kind of frantic mystical ague. And it is this mystique that he repeatedly exploits in his art. In a 2016 interview at Co-Lab Copenhagen, Atiku noted that his art comes from a tradition that sees the very things he does as part of the natural way of living, not something that has to be labelled and classified in a gallery. He also acknowledges that this view of where his art comes from makes it very effective in what it does, for when he protests, it is not seen as something planned and ideated in the formal sense, but as a natural and direct response to what the eyes sees and detests and what the head and the body revolts against. Thus, it is an art which from its foundations is primed to spontaneously decry the created narratives deployed by powerful institutions and perpetrators of injustice. As he explained of his teaching duties at the Lagos State Polytechnic in the 2013 documentary, ‘Lagos in the Red’, he wants his students to understand that art represents something beyond itself. ‘They must understand what they are trying to create and they must feel the importance of it, the relevancy of it to the society and to humanity.’

Though Atiku’s art confronts external issues, it is more an art that demands inwardness, reflection, and contemplation of what we are, what we want, and what we want our world to be. This art teaches us that the duty of the average person, as he goes through the world, is to strike the studious countenance of learning: to learn from sight as well as from experience, to learn the language of the body’s posturing and the subtextual subtleties of movement, to learn that life is so vast and unmasterable that our best hook upon it is to try to affect our own little part of it in a positive way, and to develop a sense of justice and moral gumption out it all⎈