Art, Activism and the Stories We Carry Home

Through their work, Nigerian artists confront the tensions of a nation teetering between chaos and promise. The Nigerian condition is not merely lamented but interrogated, reimagined and reframed as a story of both survival and hope.

Spring in Winnipeg, Canada is very stubborn. The kind that teases warmth in the morning only to pull it back by noon, leaving behind wind sharp enough to cut through layers. Back in 2021, on one of those days when cold still clung to the air, I wandered through the Exchange District, watching its red-bricked facades give way to the sweeping alabaster curves of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. Merely wandering, I had not planned to visit the museum, but I was impelled to by the building’s twisting form rising from the earth and gesturing toward something higher, like an unfinished thought. ‘Hope, maybe?’ I thought to myself. ‘Or just the weight of history itself.’ 

Reluctant yet curious, my footsteps echoed softly through the museum’s galleries, each room opening seamlessly into the next, inviting me deeper into the stories contained within.  

Four floors and many steps later, I found myself standing before the Artivism exhibition, where the dim lighting lent an almost reverential glow to the pieces on display. There were the haunting Masks of Yazidi Women by Rebin Chalak, cast from the faces of genocide survivors and tapestries of the Intuthuko Embroidery Project, stitching together South Africa’s apartheid wounds. Each piece bore the weight of its own history, its own reckoning. And yet, as I took them in, my thoughts turned inevitably to home. 

Art has long been a vessel for collective memory—a way to document, resist and reimagine. Since art mirrors life, it is inevitable that its practitioners, much like the practitioners of most forms of expression, channel both the beauties and brutalities of life into their practice. This long-standing tradition of transforming personal and collective realities into artistic introspection continues to define contemporary Nigerian art, fuelling its urgency and resonance. In a country where struggle and resilience coexist with everyday truths, art serves as both a record and a reckoning. 

Though rooted in the visual legacies of its pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial histories, Nigerian art has evolved into a bold dialogue with present-day realities. Contemporary concerns such as racial and gender identity, environmental issues, diasporan experiences and cultural restitution now take centre stage, alongside reflections on internal conflicts within the country, the disruptive force of digital spaces and global interconnectedness. For Nigerian artists, particularly those working at the intersection of activism and creative expression, the canvas, the stage and the installation space become spaces for resistance and dialogue. Their work does not merely document suffering but reframes it, forcing audiences to confront what has been ignored or normalized. 

For instance, the #EndSARS movement in 2020 became a defining moment in contemporary Nigerian art, amplifying a long-standing consciousness around resistance and memory. Much like writers who turned to language as a site of protest, visual artists and sculptors repurposed their mediums to archive, interpret and challenge the violence that unfolded. Capturing everything from the charged intensity of the protests to the resilience of demonstrators and the silence that followed the Lekki Toll Gate massacre in October 2020, their works are visual testimonies—refusing erasure, refusing amnesia. Two artists come to mind: Bob-Nosa Uwagboe and Ndidi Dike...