A CONVERSATION WITH VICTOR EHIKHAMENOR

By Desola Kazeem

At the start of 2018, I had the privilege of visiting the studio of one of Nigeria's leading visual artist-writer-photographer multihyphenates, our 2017 Venice Biennale conqueror, Victor Ehikhamenor. Upon first impression, he stood out from many other members of the Nigerian art scene I have interacted with, in his warmth and reception. Willing and skilled at switching conversation from the most casual of topics like the meal he was having, to the deepest of geopolitical discourse on identity, religion and economic crises, it is very easy to converse with Victor Ehikhamenor.

Illustration by Desola Kazeem (@subqulture)

Ehikhamenor had a very interesting, and very public 2017. Between his exhibitions and published writings, he represented Nigeria (and almost didn’t) at our first showcase at the Venice Biennale. Notably, he received international attention for his sarcastic but heartfelt social media critique of Damien Hirst’s piece “Golden Heads (Female)”, which is a gilded recreation of one of Nigeria’s famous Ife heads. His issue with the piece lay in the fact that there was no adequate accreditation of the work to the Ife Yoruba people, beyond the accompanying text which told a tongue-in-cheek fictional history of the creation of the piece (as was part of that particular exhibition). Ehikhamenor’s knee-jerk reaction to seeing the head- which is one many of us West African international art enthusiasts know well- was proliferated in the world through major media- from the New York Times and CNN to Gal-dem.

Left: Ife brass cast head. Right: Damien Hirst's sculpture. 

Upon reflection on the year, he summarizes the saga as his observations being taken out of context. If you follow him on Instagram, he says, he is known for his sarcastic, satirical and on-the-spot commentary on everything he experiences in his travels. Colonialism, he says, is the sensitive issue here. “Golden Heads (Female)” was part of the exhibition, “Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable”- which included the Sphinx and other famous art imagery. Ehikhamenor didn’t- and still doesn’t- care if Hirst had wishes to take pieces and inspiration from all cultures of the world. He continues to stress, that our specific colonial history- especially with regards to the ownership of our ancient artwork- is one which others could never truly understand, and to which special care must be taken when referencing.

Colonialism quickly became a long thread of conversation with him. Going back and forth with him- even if you are a stranger- is very much like talking to an intelligent friend or family member, and cannot easily be condensed into a simple essay. Conversation ranges from the messy politics of city life to petty observations of art personalities in Lagos and the chaos that is corruption in Nigerian politics (as is the natural home base of every conversation amongst Nigerians). The conversation takes an interesting turn when I mention the ease with which he opens his art world to outsiders. In our short conversation, multiple guests, family friends, and curious art enthusiasts of all ages stride in and out of his art space- including where he actually creates his work. He says that there are two types of people and two types of artists: those that want to talk and those who may want to talk but cannot intellectualize themselves. While we must respect different types of personalities, he seems hopeful that more of our artists- of which contemporary Nigeria is teeming with-will come out of their shell. Embracing the general public better, in his opinion, better helps this blooming industry flourish.

His experience on the first Nigerian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale was a complicated one. It was fraught with several near-disasters, but in true Nigerian fashion, the chaos ended with a beautiful showcase and a career-defining moment for one of our most important modern West African creators. The importance of our visibility at the Biennale, he explains to me, is in making history. It is bittersweet when he expands on this by saying that our general public might not fully understand it yet. It is for the future, he says, it’s not exactly for now. 

Victor Ehikhamenor, A Biography of the Forgotten. 2017. Venice Biennale.

Our conversation journeyed between these topics and many more: apprenticeship, art education and the financial legitimacy of art careers. But again, a simple essay does not do it justice. Victor Ehikhamenor is one of the warmer and more youth-welcoming members of the elusive Nigerian art scene- and any opportunity to speak to him yourself should be taken. The main take away from my conversation with him is that change begins with the mind. I have a lot of personal emotional investment in the growth of the Nigerian media and cultural scene- as I genuinely believe this will significantly affect how I view the conceit of living back in my messy, chaotic Lagos. His educative, social and opinionated approach to the art world is a valuable perspective that we could all stand to gain from. With the strengthening of the Nigerian art and tourism world, comes the strengthening of public consciousness and the rehabilitation of a broken nation.

In 2018, Mr. Ehikhamenor has exciting projects underway- including a new art centre below his studio, a fantastic Nigerian art-deco Airbnb, and a special new project with a major media conglomerate.

“IT IS TRUE”. SEEING ENUGU WITH IMMACULATA ABBA.

By Stephanie Amata.

Since we first met photographer and writer, Immaculata Abba at Project A where she kindly helped us immortalise the event with her images, she has come a long way. After spending part of a summer at London College of Communication doing a photography course, she decided it was time to document her "mystified" hometown, Enugu. With this, she created Seeing Enugu a vast body of reportage work which she exhibited at PhotoScratch, a work in progress exhibition in January. After seeing the work, I was keen on hearing the process behind it. So on a snowy Sunday in London, we sat in a noisy but warm Costa café close to her accommodation on Holloway Road.

Tell us a bit about yourself. 

I am writer and photographer studying History and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London. My studies and my art are both motivated by my interest in outsiders and what it means to be an “other” in any context and also how we reconstruct the world based on our beliefs and how we see things and people. Essentially how our physical environment can tell us stuff about ourselves and our history. That’s something I’m really interested in both in my photography and in my studies. So most of my work is around that.

Between writing and photography, which one came first for you?

I don't think anyone started first, every time I try to think about where either of them started, I get to a dead end because it goes too far back beyond what I can remember. I remember being 5 and asking my mum for a camera and I’ve been writing forever. The roots have gone too far in my memory that I can’t identify them I just know I’ve been with them for as long as I can remember. But I guess, actually, writing has been favoured more because I’ve had the instruments. With photography, in order to have practised more, I needed a camera and I’ve not always had a camera, not even a phone camera so in that way writing has had the upper hand. But I can’t say I love writing more than I love photography.

Tell us about how your latest body of work, Seeing Enugu, exhibited at PhotoScratch came about.

My family moved to Enugu when I was 11 when I moved to boarding school. So you can imagine that I spent most of my time in boarding school and my holidays in Enugu so I didn’t get the opportunity to enter into the Enugu community. It’s been 10 or 11 years since I’ve lived in Enugu and I still don’t feel like I belong there or I know my way around there. So that mystifies Enugu for me cause I’m always trying to in a way claim it for myself too no matter how big or small the claim may be. Whenever such a mystery presents itself, it’s only natural that I try to explore it through writing and photography so I’ve written about Enugu previously. I have tried to take pictures of Enugu but like I said, I’m away for school and then back only for 3 weeks of the holiday. So the first time I really tried to embark on a project where I tried to see Enugu for myself, to explore Enugu or my lack of ‘Enugu-ness’ with photography was two or three years ago and I think the summer after that I was going to go back home with my camera but I lost my camera a week before I went back home. Then last summer was the first time I really had the opportunity and the presence of mind and the time because I was there for a month and I really went in. When I went in, obviously for a lot of projects, I’m not exactly sure what it is that is going to come out of it. But I knew I wanted a picture for myself, I wanted to see Enugu for myself. Exhibiting at photo scratch, it’s a work in progress type of exhibition, it really helped me greatly to see more about what my work is and I think now I can say very confidently that the project was a portrait of Enugu from my perspective, so it’s not the true story of Enugu, It’s not even a story. It’s me trying to capture the impression that Enugu leaves on me.

So you went in with no preconceived idea?

I mean there was an idea which was to see because I never see Enugu in the media I consume. So it was almost like I was just going to do whatever, I had the colours that I really wanted to capture, things that I wanted to tell myself that ‘It’s true’ that this is what I see. For example, the redness of Enugu, I remember once I was talking to one of my teachers in my IB [International Baccalaureate] school here in the UK, I think it was a geography lesson and I was saying that we have red soil back in Enugu and he said no that’s not true, that there’s no red soil in the whole wide world. So little things like that that I wanted to confirm for myself that ‘it is true’. Another one of those things was how much of an old city Enugu was. I really wanted to see Enugu for myself. I don’t know who I was trying to prove it to, maybe myself but I just wanted to prove that the way I felt about Enugu existed and I wanted something that when I went to my mind and when I try to imagine Enugu, I could readily call on these images as memory. That’s not the most precise thing but it was still a motive.

They were particular themes that came through like religion and the influence of Fulani people in Enugu.

That was very interesting but I didn’t bring it up earlier because it wasn’t anything new to me. I’ve been there for 12 years so I’ve seen the gradual changing of Enugu. Those two things were things that I was seeing better not newly. So with the Christianity, Enugu is such a Christian place, Igbo people are very Christian. I’m not saying it’s a bad or good thing at all but this is just who they are and it’s very integral to their identity and to what they make of the world around them. So it’s one of those things where I was looking at our built environment to tell me about how Christian Enugu is, and it really did, all the signboards, the houses. There was that picture of a fence that had the Holy Family painted on it and such a thing is not uncommon or like you’d see people’s gates in Enugu that had like religious inscriptions or “God protect this house”. It’s a nice way to see how people craft their worlds according to their beliefs and own for themselves. The Fulani-Enugu theme, when I moved in 2008, it wasn’t like that at all and it has been really interesting to see the development and the progression and the increasing Fulani-Muslim presence in Enugu due to their nomadic nature and I sense that a lot of it obviously has to do with what’s going on in the North and some people finding refuge in the East. It has not been rosy, it hasn’t been completely easy and nice for these communities because there have been clashes.  A number of them, like clashes between Fulani communities and indigenous communities, were killings. Some of them were far away from me but some were actually really close. I would know people who died, someone who went to my church and it was so interesting to see how Islamophobic Igbo people are like a lot of the people I know and talk to and just to see how, change, in this particular context has been complicated. I try to highlight those, I could do it better I feel but for now that’s what it is.

There is a complicated grey area when capturing more rural and less documented areas, the glamorisation of those places in certain media and the discussion around it. How do you handle that in your work, especially since Enugu isn't widely represented? 

It’s an argument almost as old as time. It’s a discussion that comes up all the time, a western or outsider or privileged people coming into a rural area and imposing their own view and selling that as the story of the place. I know it can happen outside racial lines so you could have Lagos people who live in Banana Island going to Makoko to do what white people would do. I’m aware of that and I’ve thought about it in the context of my own work and one of the things I got from family members was that perhaps I should have soon the more affluent side of Enugu, which haunted me for a while because I see how very valid a feeling, a sentiment it is in my work but, when I was making the work, I wasn’t thinking of proving any economic status or cultural superiority or lack of inferiority to anybody. I was doing it to see what it was I seeing and seeing what it was I was seeing from my own perspective as an inside-outsider of Enugu. My experience of Enugu is not affluent, okay that’s a lie it’s not completely affluent, my dad has money, we live in an expensive estate but I don't have friends at this place because I hardly spend time in Enugu. This summer, every time I went out of my house, I walked around my estate a lot of times, and I never saw people who actually owned the houses, I just always saw gatemen and some of the mallam’s children from the shack. Those were the people I made friends with eventually, those are the people I ended up interacting with. Every time my friend, Frank took me around Enugu, it never occurred to me that Enugu was impoverished or affluent. It existed to me in this vast middle ground between affluent and impoverished to the point that even thinking of Enugu is terms of a poor place or even a rural place did not really occur to me. I wouldn’t call Enugu rural, it calls itself a city even though I don’t think its a city I think it’s town but I won't say it’s rural. Enugu is not affluent is what I’m trying to say.

There's a huge sense of stasis that comes through in the work as if everything has been paused. 

I feel much more of that than what the actual Enugu is which is where I’d like to hammer in on the subjectivity of the project because as much as Enugu is fairly static, compared to any other place it's not the most bubbling place. I’ve lived in Aba as well it’s not a bubbling place at all but myself, even more, I am more an outsider. I don’t know if you remember the picture where there was the guy outside watching a football match and there was the red cross on the fence, I look to that picture as a self-portrait of me in Enugu. This is again another thing the feedback from photo scratch helped me recognise, I wasn’t trying to tell a story about Enugu, I was trying to, you could say, write a poem about my experience of Enugu so it wasn’t a documentary because that would be a bit dishonest because the research didn’t go that much into actual Enugu things. So calling it more of a subject poem and owning the subjectivity of that really releases me from the pressure to tell a true story, to be liable to all these different people and all the different ways you can see Enugu. I think that’s valid enough because you don’t have anything else from Enugu. It's not like I see anything else to start with. When you read a poem you don’t ask the poem to tell you the story or history or narrative of a place you ask it to put you in a place, you ask it to transport you to a mood and to get a sense. That is the closest to what my work is or trying to do.

You can visit Immaculata's website here or follow her on Instagram, here. Thank you for reading.

SEYE ISIKALU: REPRESENTATION MATTERS.

By Stephanie Amata.

Seye Isikalu's Ocean (2016) at Lagos Photo Festival. 

I had the pleasure of interviewing photographer and filmmaker, Seye Isikalu on a sunny day in London. A rarity because London has been doomed to greyness and Isikalu isn't quick to hand out interviews.  I was eager to pick his brain and bring to light the motivations behind some of his projects especially his ongoing Skinny Jeans Film, a long-term project consisting of smaller ones discussing the black male experience from refreshingly unique angles.

Tell us a bit about yourself.

My name is Seye Isikalu and I’m a London Based fashion & beauty photographer and filmmaker, and I’ve worked in the industry for about 9 years.

How did you get into the industry?

I started off taking pictures of my friends for fun. We’d set up shoots on location & I’d edit the pictures afterwards and the positive responses I received each time had me considering it as something I could pursue professionally. But at the time I had very little knowledge on where I could take photography, so curating my Myspace page with sliding galleries of my work was like my own little virtual exhibition. My work was noticed by an agent who was able to get me professional work & I got my first taste of working within the industry.

You use a range of mediums to tell stories; film, photography and poetry. How do you decide which medium to use to tell what story?

They all intertwine. The poetry often reads as a script or treatment for a visual. I didn’t study film so I wasn’t particularly savvy with the traditional process of creating a film; the treatment, storyboard, synopsis, script etc. So my process was to marry together all my skills to create a hybrid.

Where did that come from? Did it come from wanting to write or wanting to go into film?

It just came from a place of having stories to tell & was a way to portray my experiences through a medium that people are able to engage with easily. It’s also a therapeutic process for me. I’m able to let go of a lot through my art.

Do you ever do photography projects for yourself as opposed to the more commercial side of it?

Yes, my personal projects are mostly letters to myself in a way. Or better put, like journals that everyone has access to, and if they’re able to relate & take something from it, then that’s the magic of it.

It rings true of your work, especially your filmography the voiceovers do sound like spoken-word, like letters.

Certain projects I’ve done like ‘Don’t Police My Masculinity’; that was a letter to myself. It was the first piece of work that I’ve felt reluctant to put out because it was so personal. So the response to it being overwhelmingly positive felt really good. It was healing for me & people have expressed to me that same sentiment from it.

Don't Police My Masculinity, 2015.

What is that like for you?

Crazy, because it was unexpected. But at the same time vindicating. As an artist, you can only hope that your work is met with understanding. And that’s not to say that that’s the sole purpose of creating, but it felt really good to know that people understood.

Your work deals with masculinity a lot. It's the defining theme of "Skinny Jeans", which consists of smaller bodies of work like "Flourish". Flourish is one of the most unique takes on black masculinity I've seen, so where did that come from?

Flourish is about just being free. I’ve always been around & admired men who weren’t afraid to express themselves through dance & that’s where the concept came from. It’s an ode to those men & the montage exposes the spectrum of black masculinities. You’ve got men twerking, dabbing, tribal dancing and generally just in their element on a dance-floor and the placement of all these different styles is important & deliberate because you don’t really see that type of juxtaposition.


flourish. [interlude] from Seye Isikalu on Vimeo.

You've talked about freedom and in contrast, masculinity being policed, is that something you faced?

Yes definitely even up until now. But the difference between now and before is that I can recognise the behaviour that’s being projected onto me and possess the language to combat it. Now I can say, “I know what you’re doing, this isn’t about me, it’s about your own insecurities. Stop that.”

Did making these projects help in the unlearning in any kind of way?

Yes of course. Don’t police my masculinity, initially, was me saying “don’t project your insecurities onto me”. That took me on a journey of discovering that I’ve internalised that behaviour so much that I subconsciously do it to myself, & then it became ‘don’t police your own masculinity Seye’. That’s where it took me and I guess that’s why I’m making Skinny Jeans, it documents my journey of unlearning in a way & I get to share it.

Going back to your beginnings in photography, was there anyone you looked to, to create a style?

I took cue from a lot of women photographers. I found their work to be a lot more beautiful & honest. I still do. Black photographers like Itaysha Jordan & Tarrice Love were pivotal in my desire to shoot more subjects that looked like myself, in the same vein as the models featured in glossy fashion magazines, who were mostly white. Their work was testament to it being possible at a time I was being told that I couldn’t shoot too many black models for my portfolio because clients would be turned off by it or think I only know how to shoot black models. Which is ridiculous, but it seemed to be the way the industry worked at the time. I feel like seeing their work stopped me from internalising the toxicity.

Arlenis Sosa by Itaysha Jordan.

Angel Perez by Tarrice Love. 

One thing I admire is an artist's ability to be truthful, to shed any kind of bravado and showcase the vulnerability in their work, this is where I believe Isikalu succeeds. As he clearly put, he is documenting his learning and unlearning and because he takes us with him on this journey quite candidly, as he fills the gaps in representation that media has left for himself, we are able to deeply identify with him in our own way. Asides from this, the honesty with which he approaches his work allows him to pull from his experiences in the most peculiar way, translating everyday thoughts into profound and poetic bodies of work.

Isikalu has also just released a new film; yellow in blue, which you can watch here. It is an expressive story of two roommates navigating love and friendship, definitely worth a watch or 10.

TAIYE IDAHOR: FEMININE POWER.

By Stephanie Amata

Taiye Idahor at the private view of her exhibition. 

Lagos-born Benin artist, Taiye Idahor has been on a steady rise in her career. Her latest bloom is her current solo exhibition, Òkhùo, which takes place in London's African Diaspora-centric Tyburn gallery following Victor Ehikhamenor's (also a Benin artist) In The Kingdom of This World. The exhibition features 3 sets of work. Firstly, Òkhùo - which consists of collaged outlines of women using images of Benin coral beads on photo paper. Secondly, Ivie - also featuring collaged images of coral beads, but on tracing paper. Lastly, one part of The Embryo Series - a set separate from the two on display - consisting of braided newspaper collaged against a light blue backdrop and the other part, not featured in the gallery, steel wool sculptures. Bunmi Agusto, our trusted friend here at A'naala and I caught up with Idahor to ask her a few questions after attending the private view of the exhibition on the 8th of February, focusing, in particular, on the theme of feminine power.

In Òkhùo you discuss the absence of women in power but what kind of power is it?

I am referring to an innate power, not something that is acquired, but something that exists already. For me, I see women as having that power. It just comes with being a woman already. But the absence I’m talking about is that women may not be aware that they have that kind of power. Hence, the absence that I create in the work. For example, I reference Queen Idia from the beads and royalty and everything, but it's not looking at that - it’s just a reference. But it’s speaking more to an innate power that comes with the feminine being.

Taiye Idahor. Oghogho, 2017.

Where did this come from? Anything that may have prompted you to start this conversation?

I can't say there is anything specific, to be honest. I think just my daily life. Living in Lagos is a huge influence because daily I’m thinking about my existence in that kind of society and culture. How do I live? How do I respond to things around me? It’s just a conversation that I usually have with myself. 

The beginning of this [Òkhùo] project - where it all started from - was based on an exhibition I took part in in 2014. [The exhibition] was 100 years of Benin City. It was happening in Benin and I really wanted to be a part of [it] and connect with home in some way. I’ve lived in Lagos all my life so I have this disconnect from home. For me, that exhibition was just an opportunity to spend some time in Benin and just do some work. Prior to that, I had been exploring the subject of women already so I wanted to remain on that. But at the time, the Oba of Benin had just passed away and they were preparing the son to ascend the throne and of course as they prepared the son, they prepared the mother to ascend her throne for her title as Iyoba. At that time, there were stories going on about whether she was going to be allowed to take up the title or not. That’s why I started to look at the absence that was already being created by this woman. It was important because chiefs are usually men. You have the king who is a man and all the chiefs that work under him are men as well. You have this one title that a woman could occupy -and there's all this controversy that regards whether she could take up the title or not. That was why I really started to think about the vacant spaces that women leave and the consequences that regard such situations. Before then actually, the main reason I was also interested in that, was that I had just done an exhibition prior to 100 years based on the absence of my grandmother in my family and looking at the consequences of her absence. Now, I'm moving forward to look at this absence again, created by another woman. So it just kind of happened. Now I’m looking at women generally, their absence from who they really are, their identity and the spaces they should occupy - not necessarily seats of power, but just accepting the strength that they have as women.

Taiye Idahor. Hairvolution.

Is that something you want people to see specifically or is it open, because there is a duality in the work, in the use of beads where Ivie means beauty and beads? 

Well, the thing about art in general is, I don’t think you can always think for people. I make the work and there’s a place from where I make it. However, I will not always be present with every piece and it's not every time there will be information available to every piece. So there is always that room for people to interpret the work as they please and for me, it's fine. But then I think it's quite obvious and even without meeting the artist or having any information, just a little research on beads and their origin already points you to Benin City. For me, that’s what's really important - that when you see the work it connects to Benin. Whichever way you want to interpret it, there’s that connection to my hometown.

On the topic of Benin, how has growing up in Lagos affected how you perceive Benin?

How I perceive Benin? I mean Benin is Benin. I think maybe the question is how do I connect with home now. I have a better connection with home now through my work. I think my work is now becoming my way to connect with home. That's what it is. It is my way of consoling myself that I’ve missed so much, that I wish I could speak my language better and all those things. It’s my only consolation I guess.

You have the smaller set of work here, "Embryo Series", can you tell us what that is about?

First of all, the Embryo series is separate from this [Òkhùo] work. It’s a very simple series. When I started it, I was looking at life and death. People think it’s quite morbid, but that’s part of life. Life is about birth and death. It’s inevitable. Although people never want to talk about it, it was a subject I really wanted to confront with that series. Where there’s birth, there’s already death ahead - whether you want to accept it or not. That was what the embryo series was about. It’s a combination of sculpture as well. The collage and drawings were more to convey the birth, and sculptures were more about death. Because there was this steel wool that was rusting, and rust is a form of decay and death, embryos are signs of life. The colour scheme is also a part of the work in looking at how we genderise colour. When a baby is born, blue - it’s a boy, pink - it's a girl. The titles I gave the work are also boy names - a sign of a child coming. It was playing with the ideas of life and death.

Taiye Idahor. Osarume #1, 2017. Collage on paper. 

Taiye Idahor. The day we are born is the day we begin to die, 2015. Steel wool.

And the other set here, "Ivie", is there a reason behind the different choice of colour and material?

For the Ivie series, colour has no significance, to be honest. When I started the series, they were on transparent paper - and I wanted paper because these are delicate subjects. When I was in Benin,  when it came to things of the palace, people didn’t like to speak about it. It’s just respect that they have that you don’t speak about certain issues. It is a very hush-hush thing - a very delicate subject. For people who even tried to talk about it, it was in corners. Which is why I used that kind of paper. This kind of soft and transparent paper to reveal that delicate nature of the subject. Also, they were not framed. I had just about 3 or 4 [sheets] just hanging on a line and for me, it was to reveal that they were vulnerable- because it was outside affected by the wind, sun and everything. For paper, usually you would frame to keep away from light, from air and those kinds of things - but they were exposed. So for me, it was a way of showing that delicate subject matter. That’s the main project but over time, you want to expand and try your work on other surfaces and see how it is. So the colour, not so much significance but the transparency - yes.

Taiye Idahor. Ivie, 2017. 

In sculpture, are you considering expanding this work to fully fledged sculptures?

We’ll see how it goes. When I started the work earlier, I collected a lot of beads. I was hoping to do something with it but I still haven’t. But I’m sure I will. I always somehow like to bring sculptural elements into my work - if space permits. I think most times, space to create sculpture is usually the limitation that I face. I think that’s one of the reasons why for now.

Òkhùo is on at Tyburn Gallery in London until the 9th of May be sure to check out the fantastic exhibition!

MOYOSORE BRIGGS: PHOTOGRAPHY AS A MIRROR

By Stephanie Amata.

It’s an unsurprisingly dull day in London, Briggs and I sit in a dark room in the tower block of London College of Communication (LCC), the only light source is from the grey sky through the wall-wide windows of the room. It sets a melancholy tone.

I start off quite conventionally asking Briggs to introduce herself, her response is humorous yet telling, “Have you seen that meme where its like ‘when someone asks you who you are but then you don’t know who you really are’. That's how I feel right now.” we laugh but in hindsight, I find it interesting since the strongest theme in her work is herself. She goes on, “But I’m Moyosore Iyanalu-Briggs and I’m a first-year photography student at the London College of Communication and I’m also mainly a portrait photographer”.

We begin to discuss her work, I hint at the style of it: the world of her photographs exist almost solely at night with whatever light source brightly shining through contrasting with the enveloping darkness. Her subjects are awash with light, be it deep reds, warm yellows or pale whites while a darker, both in tone and luminance, soft-focus world looms behind them. She disagrees, she doesn’t think she has a style yet, “Its weird because to me, I don’t have a photographic style when I look at my work, I don’t see it.”

GTK: PAINTER ABE.

And we are back again! 3 GTKs back to back to back because we really are just trying to put you on to greatness. Finishing off the trio is the dynamic Painterabe. Painter, musician, muralist you name it and he probably can do it. Watch as he explains the intentions behind his work and patterns and as he talks about his passion for growth:



Here's more of PAINTERABE's work:

GTK: JOSHUA ASIEGBUNAM

Our GTK pick for this week is none other than Joshua Asiegbunam (aka ADAM). You might not know who he is but chances are you've come across some of his work. He was one of the creative minds behind Sao and the Muse II, an exhibition I raved about last year. He does everything from graphic design and photography to music, interior design, and creative direction. He is sickeningly talented and having had the pleasure of conversation with him I've also come to find that he's rather modest about it.

Watch the vid to get to know more about ADAM's processes, influences and his many many talents: