Amaka Obioma's Portrait of an Artist as a G***l: Speaking to the Self in Multiple Forms

Exhibition Image | Courtesy Amaka Obioma

On Tuesday, July 22, I stepped into the multipurpose dance space at New Culture Studio, Mokola, Ibadan, by 12:30pm. I was there for Portrait of an Artist as a G***l, Amaka Obioma’s multimedia exhibition, an eclectic series of works across video, photography, beadwork, object art, poetry, and body art. Straight at the end of my vision, as I darkened the doorway, were two people: a guy and a lady. They sat on wooden chairs, at the end of the space, their backs to the doorway, talking. The voice, though low-pitched, reverberated in the studio. The space is silent but for them. The only other sound is that of an industrial generator going on somewhere in the neighborhood. The space is however silent enough to feel sacred. From my distance, I bowed to them in greeting. They replied. I looked around. There were pictures, framed black, on the wall. At a corner, on a stool, a chair in front of it, was a small retro Sharp TV and a Samsung DVD player. Not far from it, on the wall right of it, hung a circular mirror, synthetic stems of leaves around it like a garland.

Exhibition Image | Courtesy Amaka Obioma 

 

Just then I saw the exhibiting artist, Amaka Obioma. The other artist, Cheryl, the body artist who is featured in the photographs and in a final piece of video art, was not yet around. Obioma sat on a studio bench against the back wall, obscured from the doorway, busy with her phone. I asked if I was not too early or too late. She said I was on time. But I had come too late. The show began three days ago, on Sunday, July 20; today was the last day. The silence told me most people had come on the opening day and on the second day. Later, I overheard Obioma and Cheryl say exactly that. By the time I would leave, a number of people would come in, too, one after the other. Soon, Obioma asked if I would just look around at the works, and I did.

The Nigerian artist Amaka Obioma is one of the new wave of young performance artists from Ibadan, some of whom started performing in October, 2022, after a workshop by the world-renowned veteran performance artist, Jelili Atiku. In person, Obioma has an easy air about her and a big smile that makes her suspecting stares friendlier. But when she's performing, she is changed. Though still calm, she acquires a focused, deeply introspective look, her body moving through her gestures with a seamless rhythm, a self-possessed aura enveloping her. Later, during an after-party at an open field bar after the exhibition, we got into a conversation and she said, unprompted, that she enters a different mode when performing. “I become possessed,” she said.

Amaka Obioma | Courtesy Amaka Obioma

A multimedia artist, Obioma’s practice, which, in addition to performance, includes film, photography, and fashion, is grounded in ideas such as viscerality, materiality, spirituality, ecology, and collaboration. She explores transcendentalism, human connection, feminist concepts, and the corporeal body as art. The same intensity, awareness of her African heritage in her choice of costumes and props, her unorthodox approach to arts, that have characterized her projects can be seen in the new show. Some of her reoccurring symbols such as screens and mirrors (she frequently explores themes of identity: personal, spiritual, or artistic) reappear here, too. 

I answered Obioma’s request that I view the pieces. I started from the pieces on the wall against which she had placed her back. To her right, some feet away, were beads patterned into decorative shapes. They were hung on nails directly placed atop a studio bench like the one she sat on. On the bench are more photographs slipped into protective glasses, sheets of poetry, a sheet of the artist statement, shirt buttons, some facing down, some up, and plastic sea shells placed in between. I started with the artist statement. It is epigraphed by a Frida Kahlo quote: “I am my own muse. The subject I know best.” The show is faithful to the quote. While the viscerality here is not as painful as it is in Frida Kahlo's self-portraits, it aspires to the force of Khalo's corporeal work and is effective nonetheless. The quote remains, however, the perfect introduction to the show, an encapsulation of the experience about to be had.

Exhibition Image | Courtesy Amaka Obioma 

The photographs feature the body of a lady in nature, sometimes from the back, sometimes from the front. She's in black briefs, and a weightless piece of fabric (likely a scarf), the yellow of an egg yolk, is tied around her chest, the knot at her back, its two ends long like a muffler. The head is crowned with dreadlocks of average length. The body is wired with beads, the arms, the belly, the neck. In every picture, the face is not captured. We could see the back of the head, but never the face, in full or in profile. This subject is performed by Cheryl, the body artist. (She performs, too, in the short piece of video art that is played for viewers after they are done engaging with the other pieces – a performance so surefooted and so grounded in the idea behind the show.)

This mindful depiction of the body is one of the first things that stood out in the show. (Obioma took the photographs: the dour, tinged sheen over their surface, which reflects the mood of the show, attests to Obioma’s confidence and inclinations to multiple mediums.) The body has been centered, the subject has been scantily dressed, ample flesh has been shown – the belly, the arms, the thighs, the legs – yet the body has not been sexualized. This is so because Amaka has brilliantly employed beadwork. The beads on the body and the beaded patterns hung on the wall communicate this sense of self-adornment and self-aware elegance. They show us a body that is self-contained, a body made of, as one of the poems declares, “dust and magic, deep deep poetry.” They communicate a self-possession that isn't self-indulgence: a self at home in its body.

 

Exhibition Image | Courtesy Amaka Obioma

The short video reinforces that case. In it, a youthful body – Cheryl's – is alone in nature, chirpings of birds in the air, greens everywhere, leaves and trees. For a while, she circles a tree. Her steppings are elegant. A knee goes before the other. The thighs, long and sinuous, as if sculpted by Modigliani, weave themselves into motion. The waist swirls. Leaves crush under her feet. Birds chirp up above. Sometimes, she's sat on the ground, striking some yoga-like postures, the bones on her back like pearls. The highlight of the video comes at about half-way through. At that point, she sits, and the camera fixes its gaze on the center of her head. The rest of her body, her shoulders, her back, becomes a secondary focus. Then the dizziness starts. Her neck, her head, her dreadlocks, swirl sideways, slowly, for several seconds, as if in a drunken state. She is enchanted, and she is enchanting. At first I thought the moment was cameraed in slow motion. But it wasn't: Cheryl was acting. Later, Cheryl explained she was improvising. She was, she said, just being in the moment. She was being present. That single moment is both an embodiment of the rest of the video and Cheryl’s artistic sensibilities: visceral, grounded, graceful. The video is an emphatic final punctuation mark of the show. Cherly’s is a piece of raw and confident art performance.

L-R: Amaka Obioma and Cheryl | Courtesy Amaka Obioma 

All this still holds true despite the fact that there was a power cut, and I could not therefore see the video on the TV set. I saw it, instead, on Obioma’s phone. When she explained I should have watched the video on the TV if not for the power cut, she asked if, for me, the video tied everything together. “Absolutely, absolutely,” I said, a big smile on my face.

Exhibition Image | Courtesy Amaka Obioma

The video was shot by Obioma. She wrote the poems, too. In 2022, she told me. I asked if she had printed them as they were. She said she did. She had not edited them. I could see that. You could easily question the quality of the poetry. The untitled poems, if alone, would have been weak, in fact. But here is a multimedia, multidisciplinary show in which every form contributes to the total affect of the experience. Hence, the show makes the poems strong. The poetry is indeed a key piece of the show. Some of the poems are confessional, declaring the persona's love for someone. They are full of vulnerability. They air the emotional life of the persona. This is a brilliant counterpoint to the central idea. It balances the centering of the physical body (one half of a selfhood) with its emotional state of being (the other half of a selfhood). The cosmic athomeness that the video embodies had earlier been signaled to me while I read the poems. In one, the persona answers a self-posed question thus: “I am incarnate reimagined/Made of ultimate matter/Derived of past purpose…Lodestars of its beginnings…” Similarly, the sea shells and the shirt buttons placed in between the sheets of poetry and glass-plated photographs, Obioma explained, represent materiality. They are the things in the world. Their presence counterbalances the ephemeral nature of the body or performance art.

L-R: Amaka Obioma and Cheryl | Courtesy Amaka Obioma

Surprisingly, the collaborative approach to capturing self-hood in a show titled Portrait of an Artist as a G***l proves to be fruitful. The choice to make the photographs bear no face and the video contain no face is one of the most informed decisions of the show. The effect is that what is being represented here is not a body but the body. It is an ideal self-hood, an ideal bodily beingness. Often, a face is a spreadsheet of emotions. A lift of a lip, a blink of an eye, and an emotion is signaled. Including a face in the photographs and video, if the right face is not made, might have come in the way of the intended mood and tone of the show. In the end, the two artists have it both ways. The show is both a portrayal of an ideal self-hood and also their joint portraits. Cheryl, the performer, supplies the bodiliness; Obioma, the poet, supplies the emotionalities. 

The way the pieces have been arranged, the garlanded mirror is what you come to before you watch the video. When I came to the mirror, I did not look. I said, a smile on my face, “What about the people who have a phobia for their own image?” Obioma smiled back, said some people that have come to see the show said they could not look at themselves in the mirror. In retrospect, that moment sealed my disposition to the mirror: it should have been placed chest or body level, not face level. After all, the show is concerned with the corporeal body, not face. This, however, does not dull the enchantment of the show.

Exhibition Image | Courtesy Amaka Obioma 

Portrait of an Artist as a G***l is a powerful experience, an art of artists in sync in spirit and in vision. Their shared vision enriched the show and spoke of the good fruits of an informed collaborative effort. Every piece of art speaks a unique language. A good piece, therefore, must speak its own language lucidly and, beyond that, must make its viewers understand it but must not teach the viewers how to speak it. Mood must be felt, not spelt out. Emotions should touch, not overwhelm. This was how I felt standing among the pieces of art. I felt, I was touched, I knew. For the thirty or so minutes I spent in the space, I was suspended in the essence of the show, and I communed with my inner self, my selfhood washed up from my psych, brought ashore, as if by the wave, like a sea shell.   𖦹

Portrait of an Artist as a G***l at New Culture Studio, Ibadan, 20-22 July, 2025