ART CITIES:London-Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby negotiates the cultural terrain between her adopted home in America and her native Nigeria, creating works that expose the challenges of occupying these two worlds. She has created a sophisticated visual language that pays homage to the history of Western painting while also referencing African cultural traditions.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Victoria Miro Gallery Archive

The title of her solo exhibition, “Portals”, is immediately suggestive of windows or doorways. In Akunyili Crosby’s work, doors, windows and screens function as physical, conceptual and emotional points of arrival and departure, while in a broader sense the work itself is a portal through which mutable ideas about transcultural identity flow back and forth. Many of her images feature figures of family and friend, in scenarios derived from familiar domestic experiences: eating, drinking, watching TV. Rarely do they meet the viewer’s gaze but seem bound up in moments of intimacy or reflection that are left open to interpretation. “Ike Ya” (2016), captures an embrace between a couple that seems as conciliatory as it does affectionate. These are, on one level, snapshots of everyday life, and an invitation to share in the artist’s world. However, ambiguities of narrative and gesture are underscored by a second wave of imagery, only truly discernible close-up. Vibrantly patterned areas are created from images derived from Nigerian pop culture and politics, including pictures of pop stars, models and celebrities, as well as lawyers in white wigs and military dictators.  Featuring a lone figure in an interior, an unwatched TV and a tea tray set for two, “Super Blue Omo” (2016), is, again, a scene of deceptive simplicity whose tilted planes become, on close inspection, an invitation to consider a more complex narrative. While the artist’s formative years in Nigeria are a constant source of inspiration, Akunyili Crosby’s grounding in Western art history adds further layers of reference. Just as the genre of still life has since its infancy been used as both a representation of the quotidian and an expression of the symbolic, Akunyili Crosby’s still lifes are both highly personal and freighted with cultural meaning. The “Twain Shall Meet” (2015), for example, is one of a number of works that incorporates an image of the table owned by the artist’s grandmother, who appears in a framed portrait. Laden with familial and other possessions it also plays host to a range of visual cues about geographical and of changing socio-economic circumstances. Here, ideas of home, hospitality and generosity mingle with thoughts about cultural inheritance in a broader sense. There are references to a tea culture derived from British colonialism. Christianity, another colonial import, is alluded to in two framed images of the Virgin Mary.

Info: Victoria Miro Gallery II, 16 Wharf Road, London, Duration 4/10-5/11/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.victoria-miro.com