In a Pot of Hot Soup: A Review of Ground-breaking Creativity of Nigerian artists at Brunei Gallery, SOAS, London

By Charles Gore PhD

This summer in London offers a must-see exhibition ‘In a Pot of Hot Soup’ which highlights the verve and creativity of Nigerian contemporary artists to European audiences. It has been remarked that over the last decade, Nigeria has experienced a renaissance in the contemporary arts with a wealth of local commercial galleries and major art festivals in Lagos and Abuja, attracting an audience from across the world, especially for festivals such as Lagos Art X or the Lagos Biennale. This British AHRC-funded exhibition focuses on the visual articulations of politics in Nigeria curated by Dr. Paula Callus, assistant professor of animation studies at Bournemouth University and Dr. Charles Gore (SOAS). Gore, an artist and leading specialist on the arts of southern Nigeria has lived in Benin City for two years and published a book titled “Art, Performance and Ritual in Benin City Nigeria.’’ Other co-curators include Professor Peju Layiwola of University of Lagos and Dr. Oliver Ginrich a digital artist from Bournemouth University. Its title borrowed from a comment by Jerry Buhari that he made at his symposium on the Zaria Art Society: A Celebration of its Legacies (The Art Foundation) where he used it to describe how the political situation in Nigeria can change in a short time and put artists in “a pot of hot soup”, and as a culinary metaphor its advertises that this exhibition is a mix of different tastes.
The show focuses on the relationships between the visual arts and politics in a range of digital and non-digital mediums, including the use of Instagram by photographers and video artists. These include the fine arts, sculpture, photography, installation, video and performance art; but also the use of textiles in political campaigning, animation, comics. It highlights the relationships between these different art worlds and showcases artists at different stages of their career providing an inter-generational dimension often lacking in many shows.  These include senior artists such as the much loved Bruce Onobrakpeya, or Sokari Douglas Camp C.B.E. who works in metal, to mid-career artists such as Peju Alatise, to young artists such as Nelly Ating who is taking a PhD on photography and human rights or 1884 photo collective member Ebunoluwa Akinbo. A key mission of the exhibition is to present the artists’ voices from their Nigerian perspectives rather than impose curatorial Eurocentric or Western-centric narratives on their artworks.
Many more senior artists act as mentors to younger artists, as individuals or as a collective, and this is perhaps a key element in the resurgence of Nigerian arts in a variety of fields in the 21st century. Female artists in Nigeria are making major and leading contributions in achieving new creative possibilities in the arts for the past decade. They are telling their gendered stories and presenting female perspectives that have a powerful impact. This is reflected in the exhibition as can be seen by the works of Peju Alatise, Sokari Douglas Camp and Peju Layiwola, or in Jumoke Sanwo’s virtual reality installation Lagos at Large or Nellie Ating’s rigorous social documentary photography which explores the ambiguities and moral complexities of conflict in Northern Nigeria.
The show is divided into four main themes including the struggles of everyday life; envisioning the environment; the gendering of art; and the art of politics.
Struggles of Everyday Life
The struggles of everyday life capture the ways in which politics shapes daily life whether in poor power supply as in the artwork of Jerry Buhari which documents the multiple electricity substations that still fail to produce constant supplies of electricity or catching the crowded bus. Ayo Akinwande conjures up one such bus stop and its attendant news stand in his video installation “The Peoples Parliament” in which bystanders argue among themselves of the inequalities and injustices of daily life accompanied by a musical soundscape. 1884 photo collective features both in an Instagram installation to highlight the new social media landscape while some of its members Neec Nonso, Omoregie Osakpolor and Ebunoluwa Akinbohave show printed images. The 1884 photo collective is named after the 1884 Berlin conference in which European countries carved up the African continent as an injunction for 1884 young photographers to tell their own African stories from their perspectives and those of their subjects, thereby decolonising the African continent. Multimedia artist and curator Jumoke Sanwo’s digital artwork “Lagos at Large” provides a visionary narrative of living in Lagos, both its pleasures and its challenges, which confront the viewer in a virtual reality space that is at the forefront of digital technologies in 2022.
Envisioning the environment
Nigerian artists engage with and document their urban and rural environments shaped by the politics of resource distribution and acute disparities of wealth and poverty.  Lagos is already identified as an emergent mega city. Nigerian artists explore the impact of these challenges on both its diverse and unique environments and the new ways of living that mega cities demand.
The photographer Christopher Nelson draws a fine-grained attention to the step by step transformation of bar beach in Lagos into Eko Atlantic. The site has become home to a massive elite urban development of gated skyscraper blocks yet to be completed which has had a disproportionate impact on the marginalised communities affected. Jerry Buhari highlights the pervasive impact of oil extraction in the Delta with the pollution of the unique mangrove rich swamps of the Delta and the poisoning of its local fishing economies. This has resulted in mass protests and insurgency across the Delta, as the sculpture by Sokari Douglas Camp attests, that have often been repressed brutally. Her artwork titled “Underskirt Protest”, has the figure of a woman protesting by stripping to the waist that in its public transgression, articulates powerful female demonstrations in the Delta against the national and international oil companies.
Plastic waste permeates Lagos and highlights how the expanding population of Lagos overloads its infrastructure capacity. In a video installation the artist and filmmaker Bubu Ogisi follows the young performance artist Omokeko Olufela’s Egungun masquerade made of plastic waste (commissioned by the NGO hFactor campaigning against plastic waste) as it performs through the streets of Lagos.  She mediates it by focusing on the plastic sheen of the discarded plastic bottles that give this egungun a surface beauty while celebrating local culture and creativity that memorialises in performance the ancestors.
Gendering art
In the 21st century, female artists have gained a more central role offering artistic approaches that equal and even surpass those of their male colleagues. The artist Ngozi Schommers’ installation and performance “If not for a child”, responds to the societal pressures of motherhood by evoking the celebratory Igbo practice of Omogwo, that typically takes place with the birth of a child through performance and the assemblage of an installation to reconceptualise the woman’s role. In leading protests against social issues both in the colonial and postcolonial period, womens’ voices have been strong and deliberately forceful to bring about changes in their societies. Both Onobrakpeya’s artwork “Ancestral Women in Protest” and Sokari Douglas Camp’s sculpture” Underskirt Protest” record long-standing modes of female protest.
By way of contrast in her monumental artwork “If Nigeria will not wear her cloth, she deserves to go naked,” multimedia artist Peju Alatise focuses upon the diminishing manufacture of local textiles and its wider effect on the creative sectors and the Nigerian economy. Cloth is seen as an important articulation of Nigerian identities and the diversity and range of colours in this artwork celebrate this rich history, whilst the absences or gaps within the artwork mourn its loss. Alatise often highlights the gendered struggles of women in Nigeria in multiple visual media as well as in storytelling and two published books.
Meanwhile Peju Layiwola, one of the curators of the exhibition, directs her attention to the gendered labour that women provide, exploring new innovative possibilities by referencing the longstanding practices of womens’ kampala and indigo dyeing, especially the tradition of adire (tie and dye) as part of Yoruba genderings.
A new generation of emerging artists recontextualise gender through their own artistic lens, raising challenging questions in a global world. The Nigerian-born Mikael Owunna captures queer African identities in the diaspora in his series ‘Limitless Africa’. ‘Four Queer Women Defying the Snow’ (2017) speaks to ideas of community and expressions of identities from the diaspora.’. Tyna Adebowale’s work ‘Tell Am as you see Am’ captures individual experiences of gender in her motherland. Kehinde Awefeso’s art addresses the visible norms and concealments of the body, capturing fluid conceptions of gender and transience of those sexual conformities in the context of her native Nigeria.
The Art of Politics
The art of politics considers the direct impact of politicians as they campaign at election times embellishing the streets with their posters and giving out gifts and textiles to their supporters that promote their image and make them highly visible in the heat of electoral competition. In one of his video installations in the exhibition the performance artist Jelili Atiku challenges these politicians’ narratives with his independent campaign to become president with the People’s Welfare Party offering a set of policies to benefit ordinary people rather than the political class. He presents a youthful profile to contrast with the older politicians who control the political discourse by using a photograph of himself ten years younger than he actually is to contrast his youth with the old politicians. Cartoonists perhaps provide the most direct rebukes and commentaries to politicians as they publish in National newspapers. Albert Ohams the celebrated cartoonist known as the Brush for his drawing skills features prominently along with Jimoh Ganiyu (aka Jimga) feature in this section. The exhibition showcases comics and clips from animation studios such as Spoof studios. Comics historical, political and Afro-futurist, provide a similar means to critique and many illustrators have moved into animation with Nigerian animation studios gaining worldwide attention accentuated with the global success of the Black Panther Hollywood film.
Conclusion
In short, one can see that at the time of this exhibition a multiplicity of art spaces, institutions and artistic creative possibilities have emerged in Nigeria, pioneered by the earlier advocacy of Bisi Silva and the  Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) Lagos in the private sector and the ongoing mission of the art departments of the various universities and similar institutions that have maintained formal art training from independence onwards (some of whom are the projects’ partners in Nigeria such as University of Lagos and Bayero University). In Nigeria today it is not difficult to say that an artistic renaissance is taking place at the present time, of which this exhibition hopes to offer a small taste to return to the culinary metaphor of the exhibition title.