At the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art in Lagos, an exhibition of Chika Okeke-Agulu’s work turns the spotlight on his career as a studio artist, a side of the US-based scholar better known for writing about other artists. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes
It is, no doubt, a long way from the 1980s and 1990s. In his curatorial note, Iheanyi
Onwuegbucha rates that period among the most turbulent in Nigeria’s post-civil war history. For
Chika Okeke-Agulu, whose name has lately been more readily associated with art history than with the studio, those years were to leave a deep imprint on both his work and his outlook. The political turmoil of the period, along with the experience of migration, keeps bobbing to the surface in his paintings, drawings and sculptures. Ditto the question of what freedom means when the struggle to secure it never quite ends.
The question finds an echo in Chika Okeke-Agulu: Freedom Bird. Presented by YSMA and SMO Contemporary Art, the exhibition spans more than three decades of the artist’s work. Alongside his paintings, drawings and sculptures are poems, diary entries, photographs and archival materials. The exhibition opens to the public today, November 1, although its formal opening takes place at noon on November 8 at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art (YSMA), Pan-Atlantic University, Ibeju-Lekki, Lagos. It runs until January 31, 2027. Sandra Mbanefo-Obiago, who runs the Lagos-based SMO Contemporary Art, is working with Iheanyi Onwuegbucha, the associate curator, on the project.
For decades, Okeke-Agulu has interpreted the work of other artists, and in the process has become one of the leading voices internationally on African modernism. Now, with Freedom Bird, aficionados can finally experience him as an artist as well. Basing his practice on the historical circumstances that are the subject of his studies, his works call out authoritarian power, highlight disillusionment, and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of the might of the state. However, it is simplistic to read them as documents of political violence. His works indeed depict the struggle for freedom, and the will to defy domination.
The painting “Tyranny and Democracy”, for instance, takes up the subject of political oppression and the people’s right to self-determination. Rendered in a Cubist and Expressionist idiom, it is replete with geometric forms that fragment hands and faces, some of which convey tenderness.
Against a palette of ochres, blues and reds, one discerns an ecstatic flight alongside scenes of physical struggle and lamentation. The painting culminates in a panel suggesting a vision of final sanctification. And, by the way, isn’t there something Chagall-esque about its depiction of memory and everyday rituals?
The panels have their separate identities, but the diagonal movement across them draws the eye from one to the next. Together, they make a mural that invites both close inspection and a view of the whole.
As for “Freedom Bird”, the exhibition’s title, which is also that of one of the works, it hardly needs explaining. A bird escaping, or being released from captivity, is the first image that comes to mind. After “Tyranny and Democracy”, the four-panel work comes as a sigh of relief. Smoke and barbed wire sweep across the ink-and-wash composition, gathering force on the left before thinning into the white space on the right. A lone bird, patterned in intricate detail, makes its escape. Small, jewelled dots of colour punctuate the emptiness. The bird is free, but the smoke and barbed wire remain behind it.
But the word “freedom” carries the unknowns of what happens after the departure, and the distance that separates people from their homes. In works made from the late 1980s to the present, Okeke-Agulu explores a number of thematic concerns including, among others, struggle, betrayal, love, longing and nostalgia. Although situated in Nigeria’s political and cultural milieu, the tenor of Okeke-Agulu’s work reverberates with the circumstances and the conditions of the world beyond and particularly with the aftermaths and legacies of man’s inhumanity to man.
In light of the current situation in Nigeria, the exhibition’s contemporary resonance and implications to Nigeria can be examined as relating to the country’s continuing battle with the legacy of military rule and the frustrations of democratic governance. The phenomenon of ‘japa’ whereby younger Nigerians leave the country in search of better opportunities has become commonplace. Beyond the statistics, there are more private reckonings with aspiration and loss.
These are some of the issues that Freedom Bird explores. For Onwuegbucha, Freedom Bird acknowledges an intriguing imbalance in Okeke-Agulu’s career. As an artist who has organised exhibitions and scholarly publications for other members of the Nsukka School, he has primarily been ignored for his own artistic output. Onwuegbucha said the exhibition provides an opportunity for audiences to interact with Okeke-Agulu as an artist first, and scholar second, as he has previously articulated. Showcasing his work at YSMA is important to him, Onwuegbucha noted, because of the museum’s commitment to research, public discourse and what he describes as an “artistic homecoming.”
Born in Nsukka in 1967, Okeke-Agulu is the Robert Schirmer Professor of Art and Archaeology and African American Studies at Princeton University, where he directs the Africa World Initiative. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford in 2023. Okeke-Agulu’s books include Postcolonial Modernism and Contemporary African Art Since 1980. He has published many other scholarly studies on Obiora Udechukwu, Yusuf Grillo and El Anatsui, among others.
The exhibition will feature a series of talks, sponsored by TEMPLARS, to stimulate discussions on the history of Nigeria’s politics and culture and the role of the artist in public life. A monograph will also be published.
Finally, Freedom Bird returns to a question that neither independence nor democracy has settled: what does freedom look like in the face of ever changing threats? Through works defined by personal memories and collective experiences, Okeke-Agulu engages power and does not succumb to historical pessimism. His works speak to Nigeria’s complicated journey through history, and bear witness to the capacity of the people to remember, interrogate, and defy their leaders.