Ndidi Dike’s Thesis on the Nigerian Condition

Thought-provoking and luminous, starting from the neon green motifs layered in the entrance hall of the sixteenth-century Palazzo Canal where the Nigeria Pavilion is located, Nigeria Imaginary blends into the ruins of the walls and the wide interior spaces. In the rooms and halls, with doors opening contiguously into another, the works of the cross-generational group of featured artists delineate points in the country’s existence in a way that forms a visual synthesis. Central to this idea is the formation of the Mbari Club in the 1960s by pioneering Nigerian artists, writers and scholars—including Uche Okeke, Ulli Beier, Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka—to serve as a meeting point of art, literature, and politics. The concept itself comes from the traditional Igbo Mbari House, which served as a confluence of deities. The principle therein, in Emelife’s words, applies to Nigeria Imaginary as an exchange of ideas, of forms, and of imagination.

Thus, we can say that the conceptualization of the phrase ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ is the literal imagination of Nigeria. One representative feature of the exhibition is in the vitrine displays that introduce the exhibition, and, according to MOWAA, represent the thoughts, and dreams and nostalgias of everyday Nigerians, especially from a post-independence context. The objects seem to be arrested in time and include a copy of Achebe’s The Trouble with Nigeria; a showcase of the Ikenga—a deity of the Igbo pantheon—whose double-faced physiognomy symbolically connects the past and the future by simultaneously looking backwards and forwards. Not only does this bifocal lens of nostalgia and the future engage with all the art featured, one finds that it uniquely also becomes activated in Dike’s work, which is concerned with the politics of post-independence Nigeria.

A lot has been said about Nigeria in contemporary media, especially of the social and political paradox the country presents on all fronts. But above all the clamour of opinions, the issue that is the Nigerian condition—to wit, the problem—finds agency and expression in its representation in contemporary Nigerian art through Dike’s works. At the Biennale, Dike has presented the installations, Blackhood: A Living Archive and Bearing Witness: Optimism in a Disquiet Present. Her two-part presentation reflects on the 2020 #ENDSARS protests and their intersections with other global movements against police violence. They offer a cataloguing of the pain of existence as an individual in Nigeria’s febrile political and economic environment. The inclusion of Dike’s art at the Biennale, crucially contemporary in its penetration of the Nigerian dilemma of existence, articulately demonstrates Emelife’s vision of Nigerian art as a space for mythologizing the future of the Nigerian nation. And this being part of MOWAA’s aim of deepening the connection between contemporary art and the cultural heritage of West Africa, the concurrent insight into modern Nigerian life in the Nigeria Imaginary exhibition initiates viewers into microcosms of Nigeria’s cultural imagination.

The history of modern art is replete with the works of artists who adopt an intense relationship with their roots. Often, the impetus for their early work came out of their cultural and historical antecedents, and the later more exigent zeitgeist. Perhaps the most famous statement on art to this effect is Picasso’s declaration that an artist is ‘a political being, constantly alive to the heartrending, fiery, or happy events, to which he responds in every way, shaping himself in their image…No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war…’ An artist is, more or less, one with the site of their work, along with all the connections that come out of that state of being.

The palpable optimism of modern Nigerian art in its early years is evident in its projections of cultural pride and in the erections of sculptural and architectural monuments. A lot was built on the muscular hopes of the new country—confidence that persisted even beyond the dark period of the Nigerian Civil War into the buoyant age of the oil boom in the 1970s. Ladi Kwali’s renowned pottery (between the 1950s and 1970s), for instance, was an expression of a traditional skill in northern Nigeria that traces back to the ancient Nok terracotta art.

In the late 1950s, the ‘Zaria Rebels’ movement, which included the likes of Uche Okeke, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko, Simon Okeke and Yusuf Grillo, sought to project novel, if sometimes deliberately distorted, versions of Nigeria. Their works synthesized traditional forms and modern mediums of expression, a recourse to fauvist, surrealist and expressionist techniques. Their later individual works cut across different media from sculpture to architecture through a conflation of materials from iron, wood, waste, and found objects (materials that would prove integral to Dike’s art), each attempting to define the still ambiguous lines of the Nigerian identity. The spirit of the times is exemplified in the benign cultural fusion that marks the works of Uzo Egonu and Taiwo Jegede. But within them, as in Jegede’s Expectations III (1994), there are recordings of the conflicting national furores that defined twentieth-century Nigeria.

This awareness is why a piece like Ben Enwonwu’s Storm Over Biafra (Enwonwu exerts particular influence on Dike’s career as a sculptor, most overtly in her complex 1998 woodwork, Agbogho Mmụọ) reflects the despair of the Nigerian Civil War. The same awareness of what the Nigerian identity means as a whole—shown in individual vistas, images, figures, and narratives—is the overarching template that guides Nigeria’s outing at the Biennale. Many Nigerian and African artists have, over the years, become increasingly aware of Africa’s volatile political environment. From the visual meta-narratives of the pre-colonial, the colonial and the immediate postcolonial eras, African art has moved towards a graphic confrontation with contemporary concerns. Such concerns range from expressions of racial and gender identity, environment, diaspora and cultural restitution to depictions of internecine conflicts, the titillating exertions and uproars of the digital space, and global integration and development. Artistic productions from Nigeria today, as we see in Nigeria Imaginary, are mirrors of the artists’ immediate societies and, invariably, chronicle this crucial point in time.

This kind of programmatic art can be seen especially in the works of featured artists like Shonibare who, like Dike, approaches art through multimedia forms. Their unique temperament is in the documentation of Nigerian cultural identity and its modern postcolonial conundrums through the use of simple objects already bestowed with the symbols and complex associative images of the modern world, from Ankara to a vibrant collage of other disparate materials. See, for instance, the deceptively simple figuration in Shonibare’s installation, Monument to the Restitution of the Mind and Soul. Shonibare’s installation is a powerful reimagination of how historical restitution can lead to the restoration of a people’s soul; and here in the pyramidal placements of the looted Benin figureheads and icons, we find that a bust of a British colonial officer is placed on the lowest rung. This trumping of symbols and meanings, not uncommon in the work of multi-medium artists, is a strong feature of the vast, vivid and variegated visual landscape that Dike erects in her installations, an example being Blackhood: A Living Archive (2024). Everything in Dike’s artistic vision brings us fully into the reality of images that show us where Nigeria as a country stands at present. Panoramically, Dike’s work overtly bridges the distinct imaginative canvases of different periods in Nigerian art; in her work, there is a seeking to connect what Nigeria was and what it has become, a lacerating awareness of the subtle and not-so-subtle economic decline; her work thoroughly interrogates, in very dynamic ways, all facets of the country’s painful journey towards the present.

The site—the moment, the place, the history—from which Dike’s work emanates is a significant one. Her unflinching political gaze is completely trained upon almost every aspect of Nigeria’s predicament. Her use of mixed media is a reflection of her eclectic influences, a practice that captures the diverse images and symbols of modern Nigeria. That multifaceted approach to exploring her political vision reflects her art education and upbringing in the UK where she finished secondary school and her formal artistic apprenticeship at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where she specialized in Mixed Media Painting, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984. Perhaps, most crucially, it also reflects her familiarity with the dynamics of Nigerian cityscapes and her Nigerian hometown of Amaokwe Item, a place that holds some significance as an initial point along the trans-Atlantic slave route. This background—the diaspora, the torrid emanations of Nigerian urban environments, and the heavy history of the past—uniquely places her at the intersection of ideas and experiences that define the gamut of the Nigerian condition which crucially forms the Nigerian identity. Her first solo exhibition in 1986, ‘Mixed Media Expose’, showed this range of subjects through a variety of materials and mediums.

Through the years, having exhibited her work over 60 times, Dike’s prolificity has found outlet in a multiplicity of forms. Her work is usually in the form of researched-based multidisciplinary, multidimensional installations that use forms such as sculpture, paintings, photography, videos, digital art, and a collage of materials such as textiles, papers, and consciously chosen objects to comment on pertinent themes. Of this practice, she says: ‘The use of materials in my work is a conscious thing. There’s a lot of conceptualization and research that goes into selecting the materials of my work… they are not found objects, but consciously chosen because of specific metaphors that I employ particularly in my sculptural pieces…I normally employ metaphors in my work where I address issues that are not only global but may be unique to Nigeria.’