IN CONVERSATION WITH RYAN ECCLESTON

Jamaica-born photographer and filmmaker, Ryan Eccleston, came onto our radar recently. His main aim of documenting the black experience in its vastness drew our attention to him. He seems to be both writing and rewriting the story of the Global South in his own way with his constant exploration. We had the opportunity to ask him a few questions about his work and travels.

Tell us a bit about yourself. 

Hi, I’m Ryan Eccleston. I am a photographer & filmmaker. I was born in Kingston, Jamaica. However, I would describe my childhood as being very nomadic. So one could say it wasn’t a “normal” childhood. At 6 months old I moved to Cairo, Egypt and then later on to a small beach town in Northern Israel called Nahariyya. I pretty much spent my early years traveling between Lebanon, Cyprus, Syria, Jamaica, and The U.S as well. All this traveling was due to my dad working as a field service officer for the United Nations. We were always in transit and some form movement. But at 8 years old my father wanted us to get more acquainted with our culture. So he decided to settle us in Jamaica.

What ignited your interest in travel and documenting humanity within different cultures?

Because of the situation in my household where we would be in one situation for 6 months or a year etc. The fact that within a 2-hour flight we could be speaking a different language and being around different people. This was really highly stimulating to me as a child. It made me understand that this same world and time could be viewed totally differently. Considering who you were speaking to and from what perspective.

Could you recount a particular experience you’ve documented which struck you as particularly memorable?

A memorable experience for me, hmm… I would have to say filming and photographing in the Afar region of Ethiopia was an experience that stayed with me for many years. This was back in 2009. I had just moved to Ethiopia, my mind was just so open. I was 28 at the time and was just ready to see more of the world. It started out with me seeing images of the Afar region while I was in Addis Ababa. After that, I just began to read so much about the area and people. Then I made up my mind that I wanted to go. The region is very hot, the hottest place I’ve experienced ever. It was a very physically grueling experience, I fell ill due to the heat. But I overcame that to create a body of work that I was proud of. The landscape, the people, everything! I had never experienced anything like that before or after in my life. The frankness of the people that lived in the region and how they dealt with the reality of living in that environment. Even though I had been to many places and many experiences, this was something that stuck with me over the years. I have fond memories of those times.

Tell us about how you build relationships with your subjects (if at all you do), and how this contributes to the storytelling in your pieces.

I love having conversations with people whether we have the same viewpoint on a matter or not. I love learning! I really don’t mind being wrong. So many times, a lot of my work comes from an organic place. It normally starts with an itch I want to scratch (knowledge wise). So, many times a relationship is built around a debate or viewpoint on a subject. Many times my camera doesn’t even come out until the very end of that journey of discovery. So a lot of my images are results of conversations and some form of extensive research.

Your work centers on the human condition - specifically the black experience. What are your observations on what this experience is? Why have you chosen to report it, and how does it reflect in your work?

Well, I will start with by saying this, my choice of documenting the black experience was because it was a mirror to myself and my experiences. Being black, there were certain experiences that my subjects and I could connect on, even though being black is not a monolith. I like looking at the diversity of that experience, which goes from the Caribbean, mainland U.S.A, and the African continent and so on.

At what point do the narratives in your work develop? Is it something that is preconceived, or found in the editing room?

I would say the narratives are preconceived. 100%, these are things thought about beforehand consciously or subconsciously.

There is a wealth of documentation of the Global South. Many of which come from external voices. How do you think your voice, as someone from this area of the world, contributes to telling its story?

Yes, definitely there is a wealth of documentation about the Global South. But even though we are increasingly more privy to information etc. there are still stigmas, misconceptions, and half-truths that exist. A single narrative is always a dangerous thing. Growing up I would always notice how developing and poorer “Third World” countries were often portrayed and illustrated by the news. There was rarely, if any, nuance to a story. “These people were to be pitied not respected”, you the viewer should be thankful that you did not suffer this misfortune of being from one of these God-forsaken places. I think my voice contributes to telling the story because it is my reality. Being from the Caribbean and living in Africa we have similar challenges and concerns. Different but similar. There is a familiarity there, so my aim is to use my privilege of being able to travel and tell stories from a more intimate standpoint.

To discover and learn more about Ryan Eccleston as well as see more of his work visit his website here or his Instagram page here. Thank you for reading. 

EDDY KAMUANGA-ILUNGA: A HISTORY LESSON

By Stephanie Amata 

Fragile 1, 2018. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 

One way to look at Eddy Kamuanga-Ilunga's work is as a deeply personal retelling of history. Kamuanga-Ilunga hails from The Congo and in the heart of his work is his perception of his country, a history lesson from his eyes.

Upon the first examination of his work, there is so much that greets you. The richly-colored fabrics jump out first, the deep black skin imprinted with circuits, the soft grey holding it all together. All these elements are not foreign in his oeuvre but there is something that sticks out in his recent body of work from his newly concluded exhibition at October Gallery in London, Fragile Responsibility. In this set, there's a new presence; a white face in the form of ceramic jugs, "Tunvas" that sits on the tables of the lamenting subjects in Kamuanga-Ilunga's set. The imagery is simple, plain as day, jolly, grinning white men overlook forlorn black bodies, but that is not all, Kamuanga-Ilunga has worked to fit in so much more in these pieces.

There's something about the space that I find compelling. It seems like it inherently belongs to the black subjects in these paintings. Maybe it is the familiar placements of lace-covered tables, the red coca-cola-like crates used as seats and the wooden stools that recall the settings of an African home or maybe it is how the subjects languish in anguish so comfortably; a safe space to cry. Which makes the intrusion of the grinning white man all the more sinister, echoing colonization in itself. The ceramic jugs also go beyond a mere presence of the white man but they also serve as a substitute for black bodies as these objects have their own history. During the slave trade, they were given in exchange for black bodies, also summing up another step in The Congo's history.

Fragile 7, 2018. Acrylic and oil on canvas.

But beyond the obvious presence of the white man as the ceramic Tunva, they exist in the presence of the most prominent feature of Kamuanga-Ilunga's paintings, the fabrics. In a talk, I attended with him, he thoroughly explained the history of the fabric as colonial merchandise, how Belgian cotton was made in Congo by the Congolese slaves. There are a few oddities that appear in the work, which Kamuanga-Ilunga uses to remind us that this is not just history but also the present. During the talk, one of the oddities was pointed out; the new presence of silk, while cotton is a familiar face in the work, silk was a new addition. He explained that silk and cotton have the same colonial relationship calling it "different timelines in the same history" as silk is also produced in Congo under similar duress.

Fragile 6, 2018. Acrylic and oil on canvas.

Then there's the grey that the subjects sit on top of. A vague, soft, untouchable grey. Quite poetically, Kamuanga-Ilunga likened the grey of the imagery to the actual far-fetched history of his home country. He knows it is there, it is present but just can't quite be reached or changed or touched. In a similar way, the text in the form of symbols that plague the background and occasionally hop into the foreground serve as another indicator of a lost and distant history. The lost language of a community with only gathered scraps of meaning left behind after being eroded away by colonizers. The layout of these symbols in Kamuanga-Ilunga's work recalls the style of the hieroglyphics on Egyptian relief relics, another strong tie into African history especially considering the relationship between Europeans and Egyptian history, its writing or rewriting and power.

To bring it all together to the present, I recall one of my first ever thoughts when I came across a Kamuanga-Ilunga piece. It had struck me as afro-futuristic which isn't the case now that I know more but somehow I can't seem to shake the reference. Maybe it was the cheap link between the black bodies and the motherboard-like circuits that flank them that made me arrive at my futuristic conclusion but I think there may be more. Excuse my film buff reference but I'd like to draw another link, hopefully not so cheap this time, between the Blade Runner franchise, specifically the replicants themselves and Kamuanga-Ilunga's black subjects. There's something quite deterministic about both sets of characters. Kamuanga-Ilunga's subjects are living lives doomed by their colonial history, caught in a cycle of forever addressing and facing this history, caused by (the white,though not unassisted) man. Similarly, the Replicants made by man are doomed to face their preordained fate (of expiration/being retired i.e. death), which they try to escape and be free from. In both cases, the subjects are trying to escape their fate arranged either via history or sheer manufacturing of ruin and continual destruction and erosion, unfortunately, this seems to forever haunt them and never really proves inescapable.


I've come to deeply appreciate this body of work. It is incredibly profound and striking. It is also worth noting the master craftsmanship that goes into the production of these pieces, some taking up to 3 months to be completed. These paintings are rich enough and beyond worthy of being in history classrooms as Kamuanga-Ilunga has provided, with his work, an education. 

Dá DESIGN STUDIO: VISUALISING IDENTITIES

By Eme Ukpong

There has always been some what of a distinction between art and design. Despite the shared ability of both in  providing aesthetic pleasure and communicating profound meanings, design (good design at least) almost always serves a purpose beyond this. As put perfectly by Brendan Dawes, "The difference between art and design is that design is all about answers and art is about questions". Design communicates information in ways that normative language cannot. In a world where first impressions are everything, good design can show you all you need to know about a brand before you have to ask.

This week, we got in touch with the two promising designers behind Dá Design Studio, a brand identity design firm based in Lagos. I was doing a bit of web surfing on design and came across an article on the pair. After looking into them a bit further, I stumbled unto a podcast series they had done detailing their experiences as designers living and working in Nigeria. Safe to say it was captivating enough for me to email them straight away! If you're into design, or just interested in hearing about navigating the creative industry from a business perspective then this is definitely a podcast for you! You can listen to their latest podcast here.

The pair were kind enough to answer some questions on how they started the studio, the importance of 'visual identity', and being taken seriously as a creative business in Lagos:

Tell us a bit about yourselves.

We are Dami and Seyi, founders of Dá Design Studio. We are both Architects by training but individually and collectively passionate about brand identity design. As a team we are very laid-back people. We are design nerds. *laughs We are either designing or discussing design. Yeah, and we have a T.V culture, break time is for Netflix, watching The voice or MTV’s Are you the one? and of course, This is us.

How did you find yourselves in the Design industry in Lagos? 

During our time together at UNILAG. We were both very confident about our design thinking. We knew we were good at solving problems- the problem was the outlet. We were certain Architecture wasn’t the route we’d like. We both individually chose Graphic Design, then eventually we collectively found our niche in brand identity design. 

The Kofe Club - Brand Identity, Illustration, Motion

How did Dá Design studio come to fruition?

To be very frank. Outside of loving the idea of being our bosses, we just couldn't find a suitable agency or studio that was doing it in the way we strongly believed it should be done. Of course, our way isn’t the only right way, but it was very important for us not to loose sight of the why; you know? why we chose design to begin with. We always wanted to create a new narrative for design in the country, we wanted to actively push boundaries and enlighten our community about what design is and can be. We still do. So, setting up our own studio was for us the most feasible attempt at achieving our goals without distraction. So we did just that and we hope the studio becomes a safe haven for designers who share similar perspectives and dreams.

Warpaint- Branding, Packaging design, Illustration, Motion

What does your design process look like? Is it guided by any beliefs? Do you think your Nigerian background has any influence on your approach?

We really believe in resolution. From the moment we get a brief, to the first line drawn, we are working to reveal the solution from an almost essentialist perspective. We don’t have any specific styles we rely on, visually, we keep a very open mind. The only constant is our obsession with honest, resolved and effective communication. All this means is our work revolves around being highly contextual and conceptual. Considering that context is a very big part of how we design and we have a majorly Nigerian clientele, you can definitely see that Nigerian sauce in a lot of our work. Often times not out-rightly, but it’s right there, subconsciously breeding familiarity. As Nigerian designers, we get a lot of visual inspiration from our day to day lives in Nigeria. For instance, we are working on a typeface called Danfo Std. We can’t wait for it to be out, it’s really exciting. 

Danfo Std- Font Design

Are there any challenges to working as a designer in Lagos? What about any benefits?

The challenges are enormous because there isn’t a design movement. Modern design culture is relatively young. There’s a lot of convincing involved in the business. Aesthetic value is not a priority for many Nigerians and it is easy to see design through the narrow lens of aesthetics alone. People often omit its problem-solving aspect and label it a luxury venture as opposed to a fundamental aspect of building a brand. Aside from the regular infrastructural challenges of running a small business in Lagos, this is our biggest challenge. Design is not an intimate idea for many Nigerians, hence not often prioritized or well valued.

That said, this challenge is in itself also a blessing. We get to define what it means to us. There’s no enforcing of expectations or styles or even practice. We get to define the rules and make mistakes without guilt. Design in Lagos is untapped and underutilized, this means that those of us willing to depend on it and contribute to it at its infancy are very likely to be pioneers.

There's also a lot of inspiration here. There’s always something so deeply Lagosian to inspire you. Lagos gives us a unique perspective. We are inspired by its problems and it’s energy. We have a playing field to create design that impacts and communicate with a diverse and vibrant people often forgotten by the global design scene. 

In your podcasts, you talk a lot about ‘visual identity’. Can you talk a bit about what that means and its importance? Can you also talk about some Nigerian brands who have hit the mark in that respect?

Visual identity is basically the visual characteristics determining who or what a person or brand is. It encompasses the visual devices and visual language that help people recognise a brand. It includes a logo but it’s not limited to it. A logo is just one of the many visual devices that can be a part of a brand’s visual identity. Visual identity is an external appearance of the internal resolutions around a brand. Say, a happy playful brand that uses the colour yellow, they aren’t happy and playful because they use yellow, rather, they use yellow because they are. In turn, when you see the yellow, you get the sense that they are a happy and playful brand.Visual identity is a visual reflection of what a brand is, in a way that its audience can behold and relate to.

Visual identity should be both visually and conceptually strong. For us, good visual identity tells a story, the logo being just one part of it. With a good visual identity, your audience should think it’s you before they know its you. You don’t need to see the Glo logo on a billboard in Lagos before you think the ad is likely from Glo. Their adaption of the vibrant green, for instance, is very strong. We don’t exactly love their identity, but their use of colour is a good example of the point. Colour-centric visual identity; that is in the way MTN and Glo, for instance, both have bold colours that they own, can be quite predictable and old school, but it can also still be very effective and contextual. With where the world is headed, visual identity is much more than that… you know? Every visual encounter matters and people are doing mad things, really exploring the boundaries of brand expression and Nigeria needs to catch-up. A lot of the popular Nigerian brands don’t have cohesive visual identities, most times one part is strong and the other parts not so much. For instance, We like the typeface for Eco Bank, it’s really beautiful, but we think their dependency on color is boring. We also like Union Bank’s identity. That blue is special, we like how it contrasts the black and white patterns as well, but we also find the patterns themselves to be a tad bit pretentious. Alara seems to be headed somewhere nice, their identity is quite consistent, the architectural facadé feels like their patterns and their typeface fits just right, it also feels like just enough for what they do, so yeah, they are in the right direction and on tarred road.

Alara's visual identity (images sourced from https://www.instagram.com/alaralagos/)

Can you tell us a bit about how you handle running a professional business as a creative and being taken seriously in Nigeria?

The key is to know your spice. Understand that what you offer is important. We take ourselves seriously so it's hard  for others not to be seduced into taking us seriously too. We know that what we offer is valuable and we own it. There’s absolutely no reason to be humble about presenting the work you do as valuable. The default reaction in Nigeria isn’t “oh, let’s go and spend a ton of money on design” lol. That’s why you need to be loud about your value. When we say loud, we don’t mean forcing your views about your work down people’s throats. Naa, it’s more like speaking from a position of expertise. Recognize their problems before they even know it, tell them the value they can get from adopting a different perspective, value your time, speak with the right terminology, empathize with your clients.. etc. The more aware you are of your value, the easier it is to stick to a cost and convince others. The quickest route to that awareness is information and know how, invest in your skill, invest so much in learning about design. Invest so much that you are confident and you start to see making certain financial compromises as foolishness because of how much you've invested. Imagine going treasure hunting in the belly of a rare whale in the Amazon, then finding a rare ruby that turns ice to silver, will you not laugh in the face of anyone asking you to sell it for a few bucks? This analogy is quite silly and unrealistic but, it’ll do *laughs 

How do you balance pleasing the customer and at the same time staying true to creating good design?

Pleasing the customer for us is more about listening to them, empathizing with them and letting them know we have their back. We don’t even fake it, we genuinely get fond of our clients, learn from them and trust them back. This trust makes it harder for you to rely on the design to please them. Our clients know we truly care about their business and they understand that sometimes pleasing them design wise may not be what’s best for their business. If you genuinely connect with your clients, identify their problems and design to solve their problems, there’d be minimal clashes around design. They may have comments, which is perfectly fine, but they’ll trust your opinions. We also maintain a humble stance, where we are not afraid of our clients’ comments and feedback, we genuinely want to listen to them and solve their problems. Good design and pleasing the client are not on opposite sides of the coin. That said, please note that there are bad clients, eg; people who don’t respect their own business enough let alone caring about solutions regarding that business… there are so many other examples of bad clients. With bad clients, their repentance isn’t your duty. Close up the project the best way possible, either by a polite termination, refund or caving in, whichever works for you and the terms and policies agreed at the beginning of the project. 

You mentioned in a previous podcast, the lack of- and the need for- an established design community in Lagos– do you still feel that way? And what else would you like to see from the Nigerian design scene in the future?

We need better design schools. We also need an aspirational gratification system that really focuses on the quality of design work. Like our equivalent to the DandAD pencils. We don’t necessarily believe awards are the true reward or score for work, however having something of that sort will make it easier for us to collectively raise the bar. There are currently many setups doing something similar in Nigeria, however, none has really nailed it from an almost academic perspective of what exactly good design is. 

Community is really needed, individual growth is good but communal growth is even better. When we can collectively create standards and expectations around working as designers in Lagos or Nigeria even, we can progress much quicker and much more optimally. There’s so much we can learn from each other.

For more on  Dá design studio:

Website- https://dadesign.studio

Twitter- @da_dsgn

Instagram- @dadesignstudio

ACQUE PERICOLOSE - BASQUIAT.

By Abayomi Folaranmi

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Acque Pericolose, 1981. 

I.

“Before you get to him, you have to walk through a lot of hot air, because he became a local and then a global legend, and you have to ignore the screeches of the vultures who deal his work. Had he turned up for the opening of the recent show nominally celebrating his fiftieth birthday (he, in fact, died in 1988, at the age of twenty-seven), he would surely have turned up several days late.
When you find yourself, however, face-to-face with what Jean-Michel Basquiat made, it’s a revelation, as the many thousands of Parisians, queuing for an hour recently to get into the show at the Musée d’Art Moderne, had sussed out for themselves. They were of all ages, but the majority were young.
Confronting his work, or being confronted by it, has little to do with High Culture or VIPs but a lot to do with seeing through the lies (visual, verbal, and acoustic) that are imposed on us every minute. Seeing those lies dismembered and undone is the revelation.”

Those words are from an essay on Basquiat by John Berger, to whom much of the rest of this essay is indebted to. As stated, he was speaking of the exhibition in celebration of Basquiat’s fiftieth birthday at the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris, but he might as well have been referring to any occasion of seeing Basquiat, anywhere else in the world and at any other time. Most recently, the Barbican Art Gallery held the ‘first large-scale exhibition in the UK’ of his work.

Basquiat’s paintings are strange, difficult to grasp. They demand to be met on their own terms. They are an expression of a profound, highly individual sensibility, and require a selfless, entirely subjective response.

II.

Let us consider Acque Pericolose, which Basquiat painted in 1981 when he was only twenty-one years old. From the Italian, the title translates as ‘dangerous waters’. It is also known in English as Poison Oasis. Crudely rendered in what we might take to be a desert - whatever the setting, it is clear that it is barren. A figure stands in the centre, arms folded across its body in a gesture of vulnerability. It is a man; the phallus inscribed at the meeting of legs are telling. So, a naked man. He is black, and wears a shock of dreadlocked hair. Uneven white lines within his frame evoke a skeleton. He is flanked by two animals: a poised rattlesnake on the left and a bovine carcass on the right, with flies buzzing over the rotting remains. In what we may take as a background, there are arrows crudely drawn, primitive like the rest of the picture, reminiscent of cave paintings. The colours are jarring, patchy, psychedelic. And what of the titular waters? Above the bull, a daub of blue, defaced with black and red lines. Perhaps a pond. The red smears about the painting suggest blood.

III.

Let me lean on Berger again:

“He sensed that hidden truths cannot be described in any of the languages commonly employed for the promotion of lies; he saw every official language as a code of conveying false messages. His strategy as a painter was to discredit and split open such codes and to let in some vibrant, invisible, clandestine truths – like a saboteur. His ploy as a painter was to spell out the world in a language that is deliberately broken – ontologically broken.”

With Basquiat, the image comes before the word. This is true to nature:  the infant looks, sees, feels before he ascribes names to objects. Adam named the animals only after the Lord had created them. Whatever man called a creature, that was its name. We explicitly identify the snake and the bull as animals out of habit. Subconsciously, we place the man, the black man, among them. Basquiat is the night marauder, smuggling images into our minds, shaking up the place, leaving with our innocence as bystanders.

IV.

“This remark provides the key to the problem, how much truth there is in solipsism. For what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

V.

In a way, this painting, like so many others of this painter -and arguably all of them are- is a self-portrait. The dreadlocks, the undeniable blackness of the central figure.

VI.

An existentialist thread is woven into Basquiat’s work and it serves us to pick at the seams. There is always the problem of being-in-the-world, the original, inescapable problem. And especially for the black man. The negro, who in a racialised society is variously an animal or a zombie - a dead man walking, or standing still; always subhuman, is surrounded by death, danger and decomposition. Such a society is inimical to self-realisation.

VII.

May I be excused then for my skepticism upon seeing the well-informed, well-meaning white people of all ages, coming and going, talking of racism and tortured artists in the gallery rooms of the exhibition at the Barbican? How could they possibly claim to understand? And there were so relatively few black attendants too, for reasons I do not see much point in speculating on at present. The farce rather set my teeth on edge.

I must concede, of course, that being African and being voluntarily resident in a European country (to the extent that England can be called that), there’s a limit to what I can say about racism. That is to say, I can only practise some humility when I hear of the racial struggles of non-white people who have known no other reality than as minorities. The same applies even more so for people from such historically discriminatory societies as America or South Africa.

And yet, no one has a monopoly on existential struggles, with racism being just one of the several difficulties we must contend with. So, while I still doubt that white people can fully grasp the racial undertones of Basquiat’s work (that is, if even black people can do such a thing) there are certain universal things which speak to everyone: alienation, stagnation, hopelessness. Basquiat is a portal to radical freedom. As Berger tells us so insightfully, “each painted figure or animal or object imagined by Jean-Michel Basquiat has borrowed a T-shirt from Death in order to become impossible to arrest, invisible and free. Hence the exhilaration.”

VIII.

He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
-T.S. Eliot, ‘The Waste Land’

VLADIMIR: …Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance....at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say?

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

IX.

This painting, again not unlike the rest of Basquiat’s oeuvre, functions as a memento mori. Death, or should I say mortality, was a subject which preoccupied Basquiat. And like so many great artists, he seemed to have an acute sense that he would die tragically (although, with the drugs he did any fool might have guessed it). He lived his brief life passionately, before overdosing on heroin at the age of twenty-seven, seven years after he painted ‘Acque Pericolose’. At the height of his fame, he was the among the most famous artists in the world, the first popularly recognised black painter. He remains one of the greatest artists in history; a paradox, at once primitive and modern, crude and nuanced. His was a tortured life, colourful and vigorous but in the end, quite dark.

X.

Art, of course -even popular art, with its inherent ephemerality- is one of the few means available to us of securing immortality. In spite of all the decay around us, art survives. Basquiat, with his complex, variegated consciousness are inseparable from his work. I have tried to avoid the hackneyed phrase, but I think is true that Basquiat lives on in his work, and therein he remains for those who are willing to go and meet him as they are.

REGARDING OTHERNESS AMONGST US

By Immaculata Abba

Earlier this month, I went to see the ‘Another Kind of Life: Photography at the Margins’ exhibition at the Barbican thrice. I intended to do so because I am obsessed with marginality: this quality of being, or regarded as being, outside the mainstream or centres of power. I am interested in alienation and resultant loneliness, in how the margins are brimming with creativity (because outsiders only have the option of creating another centre for themselves), and in the oppression, present in marginality more often than not, that makes marginal people marginalised. With these interests at heart, I went to the exhibition curated by Alona Pardo because it looked like an exposition on another way of regarding marginality and otherness. I was going to add it to my repertoire of tools on how to see, think about and engage with otherness.

GEORGE OSODI'S NIGERIAN MONARCHS: UNITY IN SUPREMACY

George Osodi. HRM Solomon Akenzua, Oba Erediauwa of Benin Kingdom. (2012)

George Osodi’s Nigerian Monarchs is a long-term body of work starting from 2012 up until 2017 in which Osodi aimed to display a unity in the diversity of Nigerian Monarchs. But what unifies them?

In January, 7 images out of the many were featured in Tafeta Gallery in London, in an exhibition entitled Royalty. Upon my first examination of Osodi’s sundry collection of Nigerian royalty from our multitudinous ethnicities is a rich exploration and presentation of Nigerian culture within our traditional forms of governance. But my second look finds something darker. A quite overt flex and showcase of wealth and power. Each image but a few holds in it a buff-chested exhibition of sovereignty, which I don’t believe comes from Osodi’s capturing of them but from the subject themselves, the kings and queens. Osodi’s goal was to document these images for posterity; where in the past there has been a lack of documentation and therefore a loss of identity or a documentation from the colonial perspective which coincided with moments where the traditional leaders were rendered powerless by the colonial masters. But now in a post-colonial, corruption-ridiculed Nigeria where the bourgeoisie has sub-alternated for the colonial masters to be the exploitative governing body these images of these ornamented extravagant leaders is almost like a slap in the face.

SUBJECTS IN THE MIRROR.

In Zanale Muholi’s 2015 photograph, Look or See from her Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness self-portrait series, the question of looking and seeing now burdens me. Muholi lays on her back in bed straining to look into a mirror she holds above her. Her look is somewhat curious, inquisitive even. Is she being looked at or is she being seen? Is she just looking or is she seeing? This may then become a question of gaze. Whose gaze is it? This is the question I believe the piece poses. How does a viewer see from a camera?

Zanele Muholi. Look or See (2015). Charlottesville.

Hans Memling’s 1485 painting, Vanity is a full-length portrait of a woman standing amongst lush and vibrant greens, her body a warm white as her red hair frames her silhouette. She stands facing the viewer, presenting her body to us but her gaze is focused on the image in a mirror she holds in her hand, thus she is given the implication of vanity as the title suggests. We look at her, she ignores us, unaware of our presence while we feast our eyes on her fleshy body, instead, she looks at a warped image of herself in the mirror as presented by the painter Memling. This depiction by the renaissance painter may be an active metaphor for the male gaze and women’s perception of it.

500 years later, a painting of the same title and similar subject matters emerges, Vanity, a 2018 piece by Chigozie Obi. A melancholic man sits in a moody room, a dressing table mirror in front of him. Much of the image is obscured in loose and quick brushstrokes except his face in the mirror. We follow his eye line into the image of himself. His expression seems to be suddenly aware, suddenly present in a look of what may be realisation after contemplation. His face is lit up by a cold - compared to the rest of the image - side light; the only clear source of light. The space around him is heavy with warm pinks, reds and oranges that dance freely in the atmosphere.

Hans Memling. Vanity (1485)

Chigozie Obi. Vanity (2018)

The question of seeing then lies with us and the artist. What do they want us to look at or see? With Muholi and Obi, we look at the subjects seeing themselves. Muholi’s piece suggests a studied curiosity of her identity as she almost peeks into the image reflected back with uncertainty, this could be an implication of where this image was taken, Charlottesville, Virginia, a predominantly white area. One can imagine the reactions—better yet looks—she would have gotten as a black woman there.

As implied by an accompanying poem by Adulphina Usomineh Imuede, Obi’s piece seems to raise fresh a realisation of the colour of skin and the given title “person of colour”. As in Imuede’s poem that asks “what does it mean to be a person of colour?”. We can look at this piece as an examination of the new awareness of the colour of one’s skin. Meanwhile, with Memling, we are not looking at her reflection but her body, our focus is elsewhere. Furthermore, we are looking at her, looking at herself, her reflection is not something that plagues or even simply faces us. Her knowledge and awareness of herself is not something that burdens us. This to us, is easy viewing, soft porn.

The mirror is one of the most curious objects. Its unnatural in its nature yet when we stand in front of it we expect to see truth looking back at us. Art in a way is a mirror that reflects the world, artists can use art to reflect their own realities and as viewers, we do expect to discover a level of candour within most artworks, a sense of the artist. So when faced with situations like these of mirrors within mirrors we begin to wonder and open up to a deeper exploration of honesty and truth in depictions, questions of intention arise and then you find yourself looking at double images wondering "who am I looking at?"

“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.