TESTIMONY. A solo exhibition by Adejoke Tugbiyele. At Goodman gallery Until October 10. DANNY SHORKEND reviews
ADEJOKE Tugbiyele is a highly accomplished multi-media artist. Ranging from drawing, sculpture, dance to video art, the artist exhibits a powerful protest against prevailing inequalities, ignorance and prejudice in the context of post-colonial Nigeria and Africa in general. Her works reveal sensitivity to material while simultaneously dealing with harsh realities that beset her native country of origin – Nigeria.
I found her video work especially appealing. A close attention to costume, lighting, music (sound) and dance reveals that the artist has mustered the expressive range of this medium. Through this, she is able to comment on narrow-minded institutional powers with its assumptions as to what constitutes “truth”, the “natural” and hegemonic rule. She develops an aesthetic that counters the established order, at once beautiful while ruminating on social breakdown.
One of the topics she deals with is gender issues and sexual orientation as she says: “The homosexuality debate in Nigeria, a highly diverse and complex nation, has to be understood from multiple angles: historic (colonisation); economic (oil-state); political (north versus south); religious (extremism) and geographical (North/ South/East/West). Nigeria is also a young nation, having gained independence from its colonial master – Great Britain – in 1960”.
She goes on to say that the “country’s poor educational system has exacerbated the existing levels of ignorance within the general population in critical issues pertaining to gender and sexuality”.
Tugbiyele’s performances are engaging and well from a point deep within, a cry at the existing social structures.
For example, in Pleasure/ Pain, she enacts a violent smashing of a Total oil drum. These drums are then exhibited, one of which is marked with her “performance”. In the quest for oil and riches, many suffer economically, resulting in hardships and immigration which cause there own set of harrowing circumstances.
There is a sense in her drawings encased in Perspex, of a map and of torn parchment. However, rather than a map that leads to treasure or parchment that reveals Divine truth, there is instead a lack of resources and critical awareness.
Her sculptures moreover appear to devalue a human quality being constituted or rather constructed out of material culture, rather than a sense of the living body (or somo).
Yet her dance, set within well-conceived architectural spaces, suggest a sense of humanity, that indeed communication, transformation and expressive expansiveness are indeed possible. Her work is thus a form of social activism.
While in the context of post-modern consciousness, one critiques the notion of the “centred artist”, the artist as prophet and spokesperson against the ills of society, there remains perhaps a vestige of truth in this.
The modern emancipation of the artist (perhaps initiated in the West during the Renaissance) as social critic, impervious to the materialism and belief-systems of the day, yet holds a kernel of truth. In this respect – at least to some extent – Tigbiyele’s art is a vehicle by which to assess and critique societal norms and the robust institutionality that structures such “standards”.
In the context of Africa, such consciousness is important so that critique and dissent is not silenced by prevailing orthodoxy. On the other hand, art may itself be complicit as a self-referential “game” – and thus even dissent is co-opted (as an arm of consumer Capitalism) under such terms and forces, for there is no transcendent position as such, no tabular rasa or cogita disencumbered from the social.
Somehow I associated the artists’ critical stance with the painter Ludwig Kirchner of the early 20th century, expressive paintings that seethed with a sexual and nervous energy.
The figures and their attire or nudity “dripped” in paint. Perhaps this style mirrors realities in many parts of Africa – the abuse of power/sex, as the “paint” now assumes the form of a dancing figure in her video works that laments the failings of authorative institutions, the excess and the “dripping paint” of outward success.
Instead, a delicate connection between people ought to be forged as revealed when the artist and another female performer dance amidst the authority of a cathedral, separated merely by cloth. In another video, she convulses somewhat as neon-like lights, both jarring and hyper-modern, suggest that she is a conduit for a protest that needs to occur if cultural, economic and political revolution is to take place in Nigeria and beyond.
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