DEVOTION, DREAMS, AND DESTINY

Devotion, Dreams, and Destiny play upon the adventures of Okri’s protagonist, Azaro, an abiku (spirit) child who is born and reborn, sanctified by struggle and choice. His journey through worlds seen and unseen becomes a mirror for the exhibition, in which the central portrait opens the threshold into this rich world of tension and possibility where ancestral spirits emerge into the landscape as companions, tricksters, witnesses, and guides. The spirit figures imagined through painting within this landscape carry an aesthetic consciousness drawn from the corporeal, material, and metaphysical embodiment of African ancestral carved wood figurines and effigies of the Yoruba & Igbo (Nigeria), Fang (Gabon), Dogon (Mali), Songye (Congo), and Nkisi (Congo), Dan (Ivory Coast) peoples. 

VILLAGER employs varying strokes of acrylic color and texture to create stylized, conceptual representations (àròyá) of these figures, which, Dr Babatunde Lawal, a world-renowned historian and scholar of Yoruba Art, describes as “not so much concerned with physical resemblance as with realities beyond the visible”. This fusion of figurative representation with symbolic abstraction, conjured through gestural scarification, layering, subtraction, and devotional mark-making, evokes the remembrance and reverence of Indigenous Yorùbá visual & material culture, and African spiritual philosophies & technologies. This is true of these ancestral altar figures and the mixed media collage cardinals, whose creation, placement, and activation are birthed out of devotion, awakening us to the consciousness of ancestors whose presence emboldens us to possibilities of time and space beyond our imagination. 

The exhibition also features a selection of works from the artists’ 2013 and 2025 portal series. These works in this series are characterized by circular forms inspired by the Yorùbá and Bakongo cosmograms. These cyclical shapes, stylized and reinterpreted in the paintings as visual representations of African cyclical time, engage with themes of destiny, choice, beginnings, and endings—bridging the past and present into an energetic and temporal architectural experience. VILLAGER also introduces a body of over 10 new sculptural assemblage works, which gesture to a core tenet of the artists’ practice, which they describe as a ritual of making that metaphorically mirrors the fluidity, ambiguity, and contradictions of time, culture, and memory. Using found objects from travels, wanderings, as well as by-products from their transdisciplinary practice, VILLAGER draws from contemporary sculptural practices of artists such as El Anatsui,  Jack Whitten, and Ibrahim Mohama, to create works that function as a locus of experimentation, exploring the material and metaphysical interactions between these different artistic mediums.