Ill, there’s a way for Alatise
Children’s Fund, the number of working children under the age of 14 in Nigeria is 15-million.
At the FNB Joburg Fair, where she has won the FNB Art Prize for 2017, Alatise is presenting an installation of O is the new + (cross). It is a startling body of work inspired by the gruesome Aluu Four mob “justice” incident that took place in Port Harcourt in 2012.
Four university students were falsely accused of theft in the Aluu community. They were stripped of their clothes, dragged through mud and beaten with stones. Concrete slabs crushed their bodies. Petrol and abandoned tyres were ringed around their necks and they were set alight. Bystanders watched while they burned. One recorded it on a mobile phone and uploaded it to the internet.
Alatise believes the tyre is the new cross — the crucifix — which is historically a symbol of execution that people wear around their necks as chains today. She questions the moral justification people use to defend meting out such inhumanity to others. “When they are not putting holes in them, they put them in holes,” she says.
Alatise could have been a furniture designer. She started brightly enough; her first job out of university — with a degree in architecture — was at a firm where she had to design furniture (and buildings).
On her very first day, she was given a book on design by pre-eminent Finnish designer Alvar Aalto. She was “blown away” by the quality of his designs.
Even after she left the company, she kept designing furniture but soon discovered her designs were more artistic than functional.
She had studied architecture at university at her father’s bidding. It was a decision that had been made years before. Her secondary school had organised a careers fair that had architects in attendance. She met one — an aspiring architect, actually, a university student — who had come along with his drawings. Eventually, she had to choose between technical drawing and art.
“It was devastating that I had to make such a choice,” Alatise says.
The career counsellor advised her to practise her art in her own time and get better at it but emphasised that she would need training for technical drawing. She heeded his advice. Years later, she would meet David Dale, a full-time artist, at his exhibition and be stunned again. Her counsellor had told her to keep working on her art but no one had ever said she could be an artist full-time.
She suddenly had a new course in life. Alatise reckons, however, that she’d always known she would be an artist. As a child, she established an early interest in working with clay and textiles — an alternative to painting and drawing — materials she still uses copiously today. She made rag dolls and collages as primary school art projects.
As she grew older, she wrote stories and she would paint her characters on paper and textiles, making portraits of them.
“I didn’t choose to be an artist. I was born this way,” she says.
She also knew her own character early on. She says she knew her reactions to things. She knew what irked her. She knew how she wanted to express her dissatisfaction. She knew what she liked and didn’t like. As a teenager, she was having arguments with her father and other adults about religion, politics and marriage. She questioned gender roles. Her younger brother, Layi, corroborates this story in a profile done on her for Al Jazeera.
Her seemingly ironclad certainty in herself, and her process and audacity in raising and challenging uncomfortable topics, reflects in the kind of work she produces. In the past few years, though, this certainty has been questioned.
When she decided to migrate from making commercially successful drawings and paintings to mixedmedia work using cloth, beads, cement, resins, fibreglass and metal, a critic said it was a failed attempt and that she should keep on making portraits.
Alatise relives her anger at that episode in a flash, as if talking to the erring critic directly. “I found it really amusing that someone wanted to dictate who I am to me,” she says. “I am an artist; I didn’t choose to be an artist, so where do you get off telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing, or who I am or I am not? I don’t make work for you. You don’t exist in my world. Fuck off.”
In another episode, another critic — this one known to me and quite prominent on the Nigerian art scene — challenged the premise of her work. She had created an installation, Sleeping Beauty, inspired by the fairy tale.
She imagines it as a sexual assault story and a reflection on the state of women today.
First, a stranger comes to a woman when she’s sleeping, and fondles and kisses her. Second, women are expected to be unconscious, not have “high pursuits”, be dormant until “kissed” by a man, perhaps crowned with a ring on their finger — and, she says, that’s supposed to be their “awakening”?
The critic posed a question to Alatise: “Some women are lesbians now. So, because they are lesbians, some women are also using and abusing women. Is this not wrong too?”
Alatise was livid: “Of all the stories and narratives in this installation, that is what you can come up with?”
The critic posed his thoughts again in his review of Alatise’s work. “And the editors agreed to print that. Those are our critics.”
Alatise’s preferred audiences are children. Flying Girls was inspired by nine-year-old children who visited her Wrapture exhibition on a school tour. “They come to the work with less prejudices. They are open to asking questions. They want to understand,” she says. “But there is a way an adult will ask a question [whereby] you will know it is coming from prejudice. I can’t have that kind of conversation with people with assumptions.”
Alatise prefers, though, that the audience members, prejudiced or otherwise, have conversations with each other.
“I get sad when I go to museums and art fairs and everybody is stuckup. This is really sad, because where is the conversation when you are snubbing one another?” she says.
“When a man shares his prejudice in front of a work and another shares an opposing view, right in front of an artwork, [it] is a good way for the other person to be understood without violence, without one declaring that [the other] is right or wrong.”
Alatise is currently in Johannesburg for the FNB Joburg Art Fair. She will be presenting her O is the new + (cross) installation and will not be entertaining assumptions.
When she returns to Lagos, there’s one certainty she needs to secure. She will be working around the clock to get her studio ready before her chosen November opening day. More hurdles likely await.
“I have been fighting things that aren’t quite there. You need the energy for production, not for fighting things.” A knock-out of sorts is certain, either way.