Day Soyinka’s art collections featured in Lagos exhibition
What is your perception of beauty? Is it about aesthetics, shape, colour, glamour, glitz, or the garnishment and the fanfare perceived or imagined?
Kennii Ekundayo, an independent art curator, provides answers to this poser in her ‘Beautiful: The Exposition’, an exhibition featuring the collections of famous artists and collectors, including the Nobel Laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka and other artists.
The exhibition of ‘Beautiful: The Exposition’ was held at the Freedom Park on Lagos Island to coincide with the Felabration ceremony to honour the Afrobeat legend, Fela Anikulapo Kuti. It was at the exhibition that Soyinka also unveiled his latest book, ‘Beyond Aesthetics’, a 160-page work described by Yale University Press as a “passionate discussion of the role of identity, tradition, and originality in making, collecting, and exhibiting African art today.”
According to the book, “Soyinka considers objects that have stirred controversy, and he decries dogmatic efforts, whether colonial or religious, to suppress Africa’s artistic traditions.”
This explains why the Nobel Laureate unveiled the book, expected to be released on November 12 2019 in honour of Miss Ekundayo.
Apart from featuring Wole Soyinka’s artistic collections, such as Epa mask of the Ekiti region titled, ‘Royal Convocation’; Nok Art titled, ‘The Philosopher 1’; the Mother Superior; Ekundayo also featured other artists, including Prof. Peju Layiwola, Chief (Mrs.) Nike Okundaye,
Muraina Akeem. Ibe Ananaba, Oliver Enwonwu, among others.
Two artists who featured in the exhibition were Chidynma Ochu and Ronke Komolafe. Ochu is described as a realist painter whose medium of expression is oil on canvas. She is mostly known for her exploitative and expressive artistic style where she experiments liberally with diverse media.
Komolafe on her part infuses hyperrealism drawing style with mixed media to express her musings, capture and relate the beauty of human emotions, drawing lifelike portraits mired in quotidian details and realized by bringing them to life on layer with charcoal and fabric.
There was also the collections of Alexander Nwuba and Ifeanyi Orakwue.
Ekundayo described the work as a complex project which took her eleven full months to actualize by aggregating the perspectives of various artists on what beauty is and not.
“So ‘Beautiful, The Exposition’ is an interrogation, an inquest into the artists’ perception of what beauty is and how they are able to relate it to their practice, how their years of practice had formed that opinion and have shaped that definition for them,” she said.
“An exposition is a thorough presentation and analysis on any given term. So I can’t say I want to do an exposition on beauty and just have an exhibition featuring two artists.
“An exposition involves the application of the media version, filming and involves 19 artists. I also drew in the collectors like Prof. Wole Soyinka.”
According to her, even though she had been “immersed in other projects”, she had nothing less than six hours to dedicate to this project every day since December, last year.
“It took me 11 full months to complete this work. There was no day off for me in terms of putting this together because it is a very complex project,” she said.
Nigeria’s Cheluchi Onyemelukwe has won the best international fiction prize at the Sharjah International Book Fair 2019 for her novel, ‘The Son of the House’.
Published by Penguin Random House South Africa and Parresia Publishers, ‘The Son of the House’ is set in Enugu in the 1970s, where young Nwabulu dreams of becoming a typist as she endures her employers’ endless chores.
Onyemelukwe, in her acceptance speech said: “I am excited, thankful, humbled and ecstatic at the love and warm reception for ‘The Son of the House’. What a truly amazing year this has been so far. Thank you to both my publishing houses, Penguin Random House South Africa and Parrésia for loving this book and nominating it. Thank you to those who have loved me through the years and who have believed in my talent, my family, friends, and teachers. In particular, I am grateful that my parents are alive to see these lovely things happen.” she said.
The Sharjah International Book Fair is one of the leading festivals in the Middle East and Africa region. At the opening ceremony, the fair typically awards the best books written over the last year by local and international writers. The international prize, worth 50,000 AED, has been won by among others David Baldacci, Sorraya Khan, and Lauri Kubuitsile.