MORE THAN A STRIP SHOW
If you go to art exhibitions to feed your eyes and minds, you may want to add ears to that. Brushing aside the growing number of feet at the exhibition hall inside Rele Gallery, Onikan, the scintillating soprano from the surround audio system was unmistakable. It was Alicia Keys. Actually, the lyrics of her track, “A Woman’s Worth”, has some remote bearing on the dominant subject of the joint exhibition by Kelechi Amadi-Obi, Reze Bonna, Toyosi Faridah Kekere-Ekun, Ibe Ananaba, Logor, Ayoola Gbolahan and Isaac Emokpae.
Curated by Wana Udobang and Ayodeji Rotinwa, the formal opening of the show titled, “Strip” brought fresh thinking into the human form. The curators know how conservative Nigerian audience can be, albeit ironic, given the entertainment forms we crave. They prayed for the viewers’ indulgence saying, “We strongly encourage you to approach these works stripped of the caution of modesty but clothed with the courage of an open mind.”
They also observed that for eons, the human body has been “a source of fantasy, obsession, liberation, struggle, oppression, voyeurism, politics, shame, commoditisation and of course a reference point to reality. Artists have long preoccupied themselves with documenting this endless source of expression, a reflection of an enduring time where we as a people are equally obsessed. On the intimate, familiar terrain of the body, we have made discoveries, ascertained self-worth but these are usually regarded as personal journeys, to be spoken of in hushed tones.”
Predominantly, the artists presented and explored the female form to provoke existential themes of survival with the right dose of emotions. Through the works of these various artists, one begins to see the female form with a different pair of lenses. That form speaks volumes about human nature. As a senior culture journalist, Nseobong Okon-Ekong puts it, ‘’the body of a woman is poetic.” One might also add that the woman’s body is poetry in motion. For example, Logor found a resonance in the poetic lines that accompanied his Georgia series. Reze Bonna’s “Interdependence of a Spine” is a piece that brings the male and female forms together to show how they complement each other and how that human-to-human relationship is crucial to survival. That could be a strong artistic statement against this new threat to humanity called robots. There’s no gainsaying that man can build robots but cannot create emotions in them.
For deep thinkers, all humans look almost the same when they strip. Nudity brings objectivity to the way man is perceived. Nudity discountenances material possessions, social status and other masks we wear on a daily basis. But Kelechi AmadiObi’s body of works also served as a larger picture on social reality. Shot at a riverside in Ibadan, AmadiObi conjured the subject matter of solitude and serenity and something else surfaced as revealed in the piece titled, “Encounter”.
“It took three days to do the shoot,” he said, shortly after posing with some guests against the wall where his works were lined up. “The truth is that sometimes you set out to do something and another thing
Broken (2) by Isaac Emokpae happens. Life itself is a combination of design. Here, I was on location shooting and then came two fishermen. Others at the location said, ‘let’s wait for them to pass but I said, ‘No, I like the tension’. I was going to say solitude, serenity but it was interrupted and I just let it happen. That was the encounter and it changed the narrative. There I was engineering what I wanted to do but then something else happened.”
Those who know Amadi-Obi’s work would agree that his preoccupation has been with the human form in the nude state. And before you write that off as pornographic, you should know what intrigues him about the subject.
“I have been exploring the human form,” he continued. “When I came to Lagos, I got fascinated with it. I realised that human poses say a lot. You can communicate just by your pose. Whether you cross your legs or you walk abruptly, you say something. There is a whole repertoire of body language. The beautiful thing about the nude is that it transcends culture and time. It is man in a natural state.”
Ayoola, whose works spoke for him at the exhibition, had earlier expressed his statement on the ‘strip show’.
“I don’t paint porn. I paint women without clothes. I don’t paint nudity. I pay confidence in her own skin,” he stated. Perhaps, he could have answered a few questions on why the female subject in scarlet-colored shoes gives a rather ‘’too comfortable’’ pose in one of his paintings. Logor’s images of female with taut nipples in the Georgia series, like Kekere-Ekun’s images, could have passed for sex sirens but for the conscious attempt to align the viewer’s mind with theme through the poetic captions. The images reflect human needs towards emotional awakening. Isaac Emokpae’s intervention with the piece, “Broken,” using the male form to express human weakness, is perhaps the best counter-balance to what feminists and social conservatives would call an atmosphere of female objectification at the show.
For Ibe Ananaba, his choice of technique is water colour and if you think that’s difficult, so is his itinerary as a visual artist-cum group head at an advertising company, Insight Communications. But he certainly knows how to execute both demanding careers with the ease of an expert juggler.
“When you have passion for something, you can’t run away from it. That is the situation I have found myself. It has been a struggle trying to keep up because both of them are demanding. I have four pieces in the exhibition. It is difficult for me to tell you how long it took to work on each. I work as long as the idea comes. To have women as subjects of the works was unplanned. I like to capture mood in my work. I am in love with the human form. And I had done most of these works before I was called for this exhibition,” he said.
Other issues of humanity dangled in the exhibition space like the red bra that drooped over one of the flats bearing the signature image for the show which runs till June 7.