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A Different Perspective: Ken Nwadiogbu tackles topical issues with art

A Different Perspective: Ken Nwadiogbu tackles topical issues with art

The memories of the enthralling exhibition at Retro Africa Gallery in Abuja still lingers in the mind of those who visited the modern art space to see sheer creative ingenuity on display.

From April 23 – June 23, 2022, the foremost Abuja-based art gallery presented A Different Perspective, a solo exhibition by Ken Nwadiogbu.

Curated by Dolly Kola-Balogun and Maurice Chapot, the one month-long exhibition featured paintings, NFT’s and several installations by the artist.

Moreover, the exhibition was held on the heels of the UK’s recent announcement of outsourcing Asylum seekers to Rwanda for processing. With the development, migration took the light once again as a serious and challenging matter of concern on the global stage.

While mostly spoken of in the (western) news in terms of threatening vertical North/South interactions, movement of populations predominantly occur horizontally within the Global South, Africa also remaining the continent providing the smallest amount of migrants worldwide.

Two bewildering facts are that both the specific treatment reserved in the European press for African migrants and the pervasive desire of so many Nigerians to leave the country keep antagonising, further impeding our collective capacity to tackle such intricate questions.

In playful colours and simple forms, Ken Nwadiogbu critically addressed the sensitive subject, enabling those who saw the exhibition to embrace new perspectives.

Using personified cardboard boxes as vivid metaphors of black migrants, he played around with the parcels’ disposable nature, underlining the dehumanisation process at work in the migration politics, and like boxes, black bodies used to be stacked up in ships and traded overseas.

Today, these same bodies are paying fortunes to pile up in dreadful rafts, with the insane hope to reach alive the shore of a continent that keeps fighting them back. A paradox Nwadiogbu interrogated in his installation ‘Journey Mercies’, in dramatic staging, and collective play-out.

But before exploring any given theme, Nwadiogbu’s art remains primarily daring to the audience. Behind its appealing look, it is deeply reflective, proceeding from an intentional will to disturb, trigger, and enrich the viewer’s perspective.

In the catchy monochromes trompe l’oeil of his Packages In Brown Skin series, he provided familiar moments of the typical Nigerian everyday to identify with; but in the same movement, he staged the irruption of reality through the hyperrealist and fearless glance of a third character peeping through a cut-out silhouette from behind the canvas.

Full of life, and determined to be seen, Nwadiogbu’s canvases scream out loud for notice, and let our mind wander inside a stranger’s shoes.

A Different Perspective was an invitation to get to grips with, and challenge our personal views on life and things. Mixing together a variety of mediums, ranging from the large monochromes illusions of his Packages In Brown Skin series, to his playful cardboard boxes installation Journey Mercies, Nwadiogbu pushed further the limits of his craft with theatrical staging, an experimental audio visual tribute to Lagos’s lifestyle, a spinning cube sculpture, and the release of five dynamic animated NFTs titled The Migrant, with the support of Nifty Gateway.

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The Migrant is a collection of 100 NFTs. Released gradually at the fixed price of 1 ETH, The Migrant NFTs are unique bundles, each piece being sold together with its corresponding personified cardboard box sculpture, to be shipped to its primary buyer worldwide.

The Migrant is part of the ongoing cross-reality project Journey Mercies, launched on the blockchain in November of 2021, and later continued in the physical world with critically acclaimed exhibitions in the UK, the US and Nigeria.

Acknowledging the need for extending our perspectives, and widening our critical horizon, The Migrant project is aimed at contributing to build critical thinking and opportunities locally, to foster the emergence of a more caring, accepting and loving societies ; to help achieve this objective, 20 percent of the sale proceeds was set aside to fund Five Cowries Initiative, a Nigerian NGO promoting art education as a tool to foster Critical Thinking, Communication, Collaboration and Creativity, through the implementation of art education programme country wide.

With the exciting mix of colours and forms, Nwadiogbu provided viewers with a unique occasion to step aside, and take a new look at both their collective and individual realities, for “the value lies in the perspective”.