Since June 26, 2022, Rele Gallery has been exciting art lovers, collectors and the general public with its latest exhibition at its new location on #32D Thompson Avenue, Ikoyi, Lagos.
The bigger location, which opened in May this year with an inaugural exhibition titled ‘Subtle Textures’, featuring works by six contemporary artists, is being refreshed again with an enthralling show.
This time, it is a solo exhibition by Neec Nonso titled Transcendental Signified.
The works featured in the debut exhibition of the Aguleri, Anambra State-born artist include; cut across still images, augmented reality, installation, sound and performance.
Moreover, the enthralling works are set against the backdrops of rural and vegetative scenes, while images of multiple often translucent bodies, mostly of the artist, are arranged uniformly around a central subject, as if posed for a camera.
Of course, the solo exhibition is building on his earlier series ‘What Was Dead Was Never Dead’, and moving further to blur the lines between the living and the dead, presenting bodies in a non-linear performance of continuity.
Through his work, he looks at the body across time and worlds, drawing connections between the spectral and corporeal.
Again, his visual duplication positions the artist’s body as a site for unraveling notions of memory, lineage and reincarnation, as well as rituals of life, death and the afterworld. Combining his body with portraits of individuals met during his research travels, Nonso assumes an ancestral and otherworldly state, initiating a dialogue with family histories as well as sites of memory and remembrance.
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His works are sheer vestiges of the past layered onto the fabric of the present, which engage the audience in more than one way.
Moreover, Rele offers reasons to see the exhibition in its gallery statement, saying that in Transcendental Signified, the built space becomes a witness to the passing of time and its continued existence serving to contain the stories of impermanent bodies.
“Mining personal experiences and research across places and perspectives, Nonso narrates intimate family stories and histories, imagining the present body as an embodiment of all that has come before; an ode to departure and continuance”, the gallery said.
The exhibition is still on at Rele Gallery.
Born in 1990 in Aguleri, Anambra State, Nonso is a visual artist working across photography, performance and augmented reality. His practice spans from the documentary to the deliberately posed, capturing textures of everyday life and rites of passage as well as their nuances in communities across Nigeria.
Driven by a goal to catalyse critical conversations, Nonso aims to evoke emotions while inviting audiences to excavate memories and experiences as they encounter his work.
In October 2018, he founded Aguleri Stories, an online-based media platform that focuses on telling the inside stories of Aguleri; an Igbo community of south-eastern Nigeria, notorious for its boundary wars with neighbours.
In 2019, he emerged as the winner of Best Portfolio, LagosPhoto Festival, and was awarded a one-year residency programme with African Artists’ Foundation, Lagos.
He has participated in many group exhibitions including; Young Contemporaries 2022, Rele Gallery Lagos, Good Things Come in Threes, Rele Gallery Los Angeles, A Pot of Hot Soup, Brunei Gallery/SOAS, London, 4000 daily, Kunsthaus göttingen, Germany and Wa na wari, Wa na wari Art space, USA. He lives and works in Lagos.
