19/05/2015
ANCIENT RIVERS: NEW TRIBUTARIES
The title of the exhibition the Society of Nigerian Artists (SNA) is offering this year at Art15 is borrowed from Jean Kennedy’s book, New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change. Though the book offers an introduction to contemporary art at the time of its publication in 1992, its title is suggestive of the wave of creativity that has continued to evolve since then.
Leading painters like Alex Nwokolo, Duke Asidere, Diseye Tantua, Kelani Abass, and Joseph Eze, presented here, play an important role in the creative renaissance engulfing Nigeria’s contemporary art space. The choice of this traditional medium is informative and lends itself easily to the title of the exhibition—the artists drawing innovatively from ancient rivers to explore new possibilities in painting.
The works presented here, underscore the Society’s thrust and arguably mirror the social and cultural realities many artists and indeed Nigerians are faced with. These challenges owe much to intense and rapid urbanization, as well as hyper consumerism and its attendant effects.
Work by Alex Nwokolo, Joseph Eze and Abass Kelani speak of the complex and multi-layered relationship between Africa and the West. They increasingly probe the difficult relations of belonging and identity and in particular, the shared history of man and machines through a hybrid of different materials including modeling paste, collages of magazine cut outs and newsprint.
There is also Diseye Tantua whose paintings, a fusion of Pop Art and indigenous traditions, depict over loaded mass transit buses and trucks with passengers dangling precariously on the outside. The buses are painted in loud colours and inscribed with cartoon style calligraphy of advertising slogans, local proverbs and street creed.
Though the artists work across diverse media, they are united in their personal and political responses to Nigeria’s urban realities and traditional heritage. They describe the societal changes ignited by the rapid development of West Africa, notably Nigeria. In considering the process of rural to urban migration, the collusion between tradition and modernity, the blurring of spatial boundaries between the public and private, they negotiate their cultural identities, becoming part of an intimate conversation between Africa and the West, their work forming an important trajectory in the discourse of contemporary art from Nigeria.
