Outside the museum, the wind was still sharp, still impatient for spring to fully arrive. I wrapped my scarf tighter around my neck and walked toward the bus stop, my thoughts trailing behind me as my boots crunched on the melting ice-slush hybrid that covered the sidewalk. As I waited for the bus, my thoughts drifted to early memories from home. My introduction to the world of ‘artivism’ came long before I had a name for it. It was through my aunt, the artist Peju Alatise, that I first understood how art could possibly be more than an aesthetic endeavour.  

When I was younger, her Lagos home was a living, breathing gallery, complete with sculptures, paintings and installations. I can still picture it: a life-sized bronze sculpture of a cow—or was it a bull?—looming in her front yard, miniature human figurines lining the walkway leading up to the front door and frozen mid-dance; bead works, paintings and canvases stretched across the entire living area. Each piece carried an unspoken urgency. 

As a child, I did not fully understand the magnitude of what I was seeing, but I knew something was different about the way Alatise’s work made me feel. It wasn’t just the beauty of the pieces; it was the way her practice seemed to insist on addressing something far greater than the self. Every piece demanded attention—not just to its form, but to the stories it was telling. And they weren’t always comfortable stories: her art called for conversations that couldn’t be ignored. 

Alatise, like many Nigerian artists, has harnessed creativity as a form of advocacy, making art that does not merely depict but disrupts. In a nation like Nigeria, her work refuses neutrality. Alatise seamlessly integrates sharp social critique with technical sophistication, producing a body of work that is both visually compelling and politically charged. One of her most haunting installations, Nation Interrupted (2014), embodies this intersection. The piece presents a mass of life-sized grey figures, damaged and disconnected, trapped in a maze of turnstiles, open windows and doorways that lead nowhere. The figures are neither fully formed nor entirely broken—they exist in a liminal space, caught between movement and stagnation, autonomy and entrapment. The architecture of the installation mimics the dysfunction of the Nigerian state, where bureaucracy and systemic failures become invisible walls that confine its citizens. There is no easy exit: the figures are lost within the structures meant to guide them. The installation is a visceral, unflinching confrontation with the precarity of existence in Nigeria, its people trapped in cycles of instability and deferred hope. 

If Nation Interrupted exposes a nation in crisis, Alatise’s Flying Girls offers an alternative vision, one that reimagines possibility beyond oppression. Exhibited at Nigeria’s first-ever pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017, the installation features eight life-sized sculptures of young girls with wings on their backs, encircled by birds and foliage. The scene is almost mythical, a moment of suspended flight. But beneath this ethereal imagery lies a layered narrative drawn from Alatise’s novel Flying Girls, which tells the story of Sim, a nine-year-old Yoruba girl who serves as a domestic servant in Lagos, Nigeria. In one world, she labours in silence. In the other, she escapes into a dreamscape of moonlight, talking birds and shadows as friends—a world where she can fly. The wings are both a promise and a paradox; they suggest the possibility of flight, but the girls remain grounded. Are they soaring or struggling to lift off? Alatise does not offer easy answers. Instead, she compels us to sit with the tension between hope and constraint, between dreaming and surviving.