Making Face, a group exhibition featuring works by Kainebi Osahenye, Alimi Adewale, Mobolaji Ogunrosoye, Soji Adesina, Plantation (Ayomide Tejuoso) and Jimi Agboola will open today at Rele Gallery in Lagos. Time is 3 pm.
“The consideration of diverse elements, stories and forms that make up the human experience is at the core of the exhibition premise. It asks, how do we create portraits of complex lives situated against a shrinking and dynamic landscape? From layered explorations of the relationship between the city and the individual to intimate explorations of pleasure, the exhibition is concerned with representations of beingness and becoming,” reads a statement announcing the exhibition.
Making Face, the statement goes on, is also focused on exploring the relationship between the main image and areas of interstice.
Osahenye’s practice tackles issues of mortality, spirituality, consumerism, identity and the environment. His trademark of layering, stacking and sequencing objects, creating repetitive, multi-media works, has gained him critical acclaim, as he transforms simple objects into intricate, sometimes monumental pieces.
His installation Community explores the importance of communality in strengthening relationships and birthing new energies. Done primarily with newspaper prints soaked in paint and built in layers, it imagines ways of belonging and shared connections that contribute to building better societies.
Incorporating elements of minimalism, expressionism and abstraction, Adewale’s work explores urban issues and the lives of everyday people in modern cities.
His presented series ‘Courage’ begun in 2018, presents striking and dynamic portraits of black subjects in a bid to question and challenge stereotypical representation in mainstream media. Alimi’s portraits present a range of complexities and layering that explores the varied and composite nature of his subjects.
Using photography and collaging techniques, Ogunrosoye documents and re-imagines physicality and emotion by observing images of daily life, neighbourhood activity, and general landscapes; introducing the viewer and herself to alternative versions of reality.
Her ‘Portraits’ series is a project conceived to explore and illustrate the nuances of Lagos and her inhabitants. Combining text and portraits of Lagosians, the body of work explores the complex relationship between the individual and the city. Ogunrosoye’s work draws from nostalgic, yet ambivalent experiences of Lagos in illustrating the textures and conflictions of the city.
Plantation’s work is centered on how to create and maintain methodologies focused on developing vulnerable and invasive imagery.
Her work ‘Portraits in Madness’ is a series of portraits taken during a period of pure OCD compulsions. They reflect the unstable, and violent nature of the artist’s mind as she went through daily ruminations and repetitive attempts at controlling intrusive thoughts.
Working primarily in acrylic, recurrent themes addressed in Adesina’s works include identity, language, migration, science and evolution, globalisation, and conflict.
His presented series ‘Gods and Goats’, is a fictional visual narrative that combines the realities of cultural appropriation, post-colonial influences and cultural hybridization which is fast dominating as a result of globalization. Conceived as a long-term series, the body of work visually investigates how the combination of western and indigenous aesthetics have come to create a new sense of identity for Africans.
Inspired by black physicality and form, Agboola’s work employs portraiture in exploring the black experience, expression and identity.
His film HEAD is at its most basic, an act of suggestion. A moving image that inverts the default performer-observer dynamic and for the length of its runtime attempts to mutate the viewer and HEAD into self-reflexive spectacles. Shot in a country where queerness is criminalised, and the body is rendered evidence, HEAD shrinks the (policed) surface area of narrative and frames an implied sexual act in the reach of no one watching.
Making Face opens today Sunday, July 25, 2021, by 3 pm with Covid-19 protocols fully observed.