At home with Kadara Enyeasi

In the Nigerian seemingly ‘conservative’ society where nudity is seen as a taboo, a few visual artists have gone out of their ways to capture the unspoken visuals.

The youthful Kadara Enyeasi is among the few who have drawn the society’s attention to what is beneath the cloth through his works. While some artists reveal more of the female body, Kadara chose the male body in a provocative way that most people will never imagine.

In the early days of his artistic career, the self-taught photographer took the Nigerian art scene by storm with the unveiling of some thought-provoking nude portraits of himself before engaging models as his subjects. The development, which drew more critics and few commendations testified to his guts, inspired him to dare more and later won him popularity in less than five years of practice.

“My work centres on the black male nude specifically. In a highly religious and traditional country like Nigeria, the male figure is seen as a taboo, and its exploration in art is minimal. My work challenges that”, he explains.

But despite the critics back home, Kadara enjoyed the most commendations from the exhibition of his self-portraits with Nataal at Red Hook Labs. “People seem to appreciate my works better when they travel outside the country”, the artist says.

For his love for photography, Kadara, a graduate of Architecture from the University of Lagos, abandoned his profession to follow his passion. Aside photography, he is a multidisciplinary artist whose creativity ingenuity cuts across various fields; sculpture, fashion, and digital art. His versatility and guts make him an upcoming artist to watch in the Nigerian art circle.

On the rationale for self-portraits, Kadara says, “I use self-portraits to see myself. It was all about understanding myself”.  But he later decided to use models as his subject on discovering that he was either honest or telling lies with his pose. With models, he says, “I try to reveal the reality of my subject’s mood behind the lens”.

Trailing his works is a fantastic endeavor. From 2010-2014 he created works he tagged ‘Human Encounters’ due to his focus then. Lately, his interests have gone beyond photography to travelling, fashion, social documentary work, looking at architecture from a cultural perspective among others.

“I have been working on collage. I enjoy juxtaposing images, colours and text. And I continue to take fashion commissions with brands in Nigeria and Ghana. Fashion comes easily to me because I like form, silhouette, line and perspective”.

In his less than a decade practice, Enyeasi has many exhibitions and collaborations to his credit. His feats include; the Africa Centre in London, Bozar Festival in Brussels, La Triennale expo in Milan, Odessa/Batumi Photo days in Ukraine and A White Space in Lagos. The artist was also a 2017 participant in the Arthouse Foundation residency programme.

Trailing his journey to artistic stardom, Kadara recalls his encounter with photography when he was 13 years, photographing his sister (who then was an aspiring model) to practice.

“I starting by taking my sisters photographs with a 2MP Nikon camera, and later moved on to take my family members, myself and the public much later”.

Kadara is truly progressive in his career. At present, he is learning the rope a curator at the African Artists’ Foundation, he hopes to show his collages at Foam 3H in Amsterdam in May, a collaborative exhibition between AAF and Foam, alongside Bob Muchiri Njenga and Osborne Macharia. Besides taking up painting, he is also working on a book.

OBINNA EMELIKE