Entering into Tate Trendy, the proposition is rapid: modernism is plural and Nigeria is one in every of its centres. ‘Nigerian Modernism’ opens as a dialog, not a line. Media and generations collide. Ceramics reply portray. Print meets sculpture. Osei Bonsu and Bilal Akkouche curate with a choreography that mirrors the experimental drive of the work itself. Opening tomorrow, the exhibition brings collectively greater than 250 works by over 50 artists, spanning the Nineteen Forties by to the late twentieth century. What emerges is just not a tidy lineage however a stressed dialogue – a testing floor for freedom, creativeness, and battle.
JD Okhai Ojeikere, Untitled (Mkpuk Eba), 1974, printed 2012
(Picture credit score: © reserved. Tate)
By the point Nigeria gained independence in 1960, a era of artists had already begun to craft a brand new visible vocabulary that challenged colonial hierarchies and asserted cultural pleasure. The exhibition maps this shift as each a private and collective journey. It opens within the Nineteen Forties, within the early stirrings of decolonisation, when British governance nonetheless formed Nigeria’s training system, and lots of artists left to review in Britain. They absorbed European strategies, but their ambitions lay elsewhere: to centre Indigenous varieties, to wrest again sovereignty, to put Nigerian artwork inside the broader story of modernism by itself phrases.
Ben Enwonwu, The Dancer (Agbogho Mmuo – Maiden Spirit Masks), 1962
(Picture credit score: © Ben Enwonwu Basis, courtesy Ben Uri Gallery & Museum)
The gallery vibrates with ambiance. Work, sculptures and prints are accompanied by the soundscapes of Lagos, threaded by by a playlist curated by Peter Adjaye. The rhythms name up town’s nightclubs at their top and, extra deeply, the transatlantic journeys that carried diasporic traditions again to West Africa. Out of these returns got here highlife, a style born of fusion: half reminiscence, half invention, a cultural lingua franca that transcended borders. To listen to its pulse contained in the museum is to know that Nigerian modernism is just not solely a visible mission however a sonic and social one, alive with political consciousness.
Justus D Akeredolu, Thorn Carving c.Nineteen Thirties
(Picture credit score: © Justus D. Akeredolu. Analysis and Cultural Collections, College of Birmingham.)
Strolling by the exhibition, one is struck by a way of magnificence that has been lacking from London’s cultural panorama. Till now, town’s relationship to African modernism has been mediated by the artwork market, with Bonhams among the many few establishments to determine a world profile for contemporary and up to date African artwork. Right here, nonetheless, the works are liberated from the public sale room. They seem as tales and legacies, as textures of belonging. The galleries really feel virtually home, acquainted in palette and rhythm, resonant in sound. It’s as if an untold historical past, lengthy on the margins, has been ready for this second to announce itself.
The exhibition’s closing act centres on Uzo Egonu, an artist who spent a lot of his life in Britain and whose Stateless Folks collection from the Nineteen Eighties is reunited right here for the primary time in 4 many years. His solitary figures – a musician, an artist, a author – are each portraits and archetypes, reflections on displacement and the unstable seek for belonging. Egonu demonstrates that Nigerian modernism didn’t finish with independence or the trauma of civil warfare. It continues within the diaspora, within the friction between reminiscence and exile, within the act of carrying fragments of house into different worlds. Although later embraced by the British Black Arts Motion, Egonu refused neat categorisation, insisting on a radically impartial follow that secured his place as one of the vital necessary Nigerian artists within the international diaspora.
All through, Bonsu and Akkouche resist the consolation of chronology. As an alternative, they stage connections: Lagos to Zaria, Ibadan to Nsukka, London to Munich and Paris. The exhibition strikes like an internet, tracing networks between follow, medium and geography. Historical past is stored alive, not pinned down. The curators argue persuasively that Nigerian artists are usually not adjuncts to modernism however its engine, its rhythm, its core.
What emerges is just not a monolith however a refrain. Experiments collide. Traditions are bent and reshaped. Native information is folded into worldwide kind. The questions raised are urgent, not previous tense. How does a nation narrate itself after an empire? How can inheritance flow into globally with out being consumed? What would it not imply for museums to jot down histories that maintain multiplicity and mastery collectively, with out compromise?
El Anatsui, Solemn Crowds at Daybreak, 1965
(Picture credit score: © El Anatsui. Tate.)
The rooms themselves thrum with tactility. Ceramic vessels incised with geometric pores and skin. Prints thick with reduction. Canvases alive with warmth and procession. Objects sit in deliberate proximity, sparking visible conversations: a Kwali pot beside an Enwonwu canvas, an Onobrakpeya reduction catching gentle close to an Egonu geometry, studying tables scattered with Black Orpheus and different journals that when formed cultural debate. The rhythm of the exhibition encourages gradual wanting, drift and return. Eight rooms maintain half a century of labor, carrying us from the euphoric pulse of independence to the quieter registers of reckoning, resistance and renewal.
Jimo Akolo Fulani Horsemen, 1962
(Picture credit score: © Reserved. Courtesy Bristol Museum and Artwork Gallery)
To stroll by ‘Nigerian Modernism’ is to come across artwork as inheritance: ancestral varieties carried ahead, reshaped, made new. It is usually to see artists holding a mirror to the nation, reflecting not solely vitality but additionally fracture. Historical past right here is just not supplied as a hard and fast account however as a sequence of encounters – between continents, between generations, between custom and innovation.
At its core, ‘Nigerian Modernism’ does greater than fill a niche within the canon; it rewrites the canon altogether. Every room reveals how artists turned information into motion, method into language, artwork into infrastructure. They constructed colleges, based golf equipment, created varieties the world had by no means seen. Their mission was not about model, however about freedom.
The lesson is inescapable. These are usually not ornamental footnotes to historical past. They’re historical past. They bear the burden of accountability, the devotion to talent, the urgency of a nation imagining itself anew. To depart the exhibition is to depart instructed, altered, unable to look away.
‘Nigerian Modernism’ is at Tate Trendy, London from 8 October 2025 to 10 Might 2026, tate.org.uk
Supply: Wallpaper
