CURATORIAL STATEMENT
Text(uality) entails many things: intentionality, informativity, intertextuality and many more, all of which are captured in The Path of Those Whom You Bestowed Favour, Aderemi Adegbite’s ingenious solo exhibition, produced as a rich and varied art of (inter)mediality across many different media and cultures. In four related parts that draw inspiration from both spatial and temporal sources as it were, the artwork is essentially multimedia in transition. Wónyòsi 1& 2 combines disparate materials that include jeans, a fabric produced in 1871 but became a popular fabric which was later incorporated into mainstream fashion and clothing culture in the1970s. Along with it are the appropriation of popular music, street vernacular and portraiture, all of which combine to show its multimediality.
In Bólèkájà, street slang for “come let’s fight” and also a descriptive word for a particular type of transportation in Lagos until the late1980s,nuances of Lagos vibes and text that are synonymous with the hustle and bustle of transportation, billboard metaphors and the likes. Siraatal-lazeena an’amta alaihim from the title of the exhibition was derived, makes a creative use of the walaha, Arabic slate that symbolizes both knowledge and spiritual awareness.
On these art/religious objects are attached “spiritual capsules” and images that foreground the metaphors inherent in this particular artwork. Ìrìnkèrindò speaks to migration, physical and ideological, as a channel and/or route that advances human connectivity and mobility that is represented in part by such objects as shoes and related objects. Guide Us to the Right Path completes the metaphor that is embedded in Siraatal-lazeena an’amta alaihim, as it stresses knowledge contained in literatures, books and various other textual materials. Adegbite presents the artwork as reminder of our increasingly interactive universe, one in which meanings overlap, and thoughts traverse space, linking technology with traditional resources of knowledge generation and acquisition.
As already established, artists in various field are always the first to discover how to enable one medium to use or to release the power of another, from orality to new media, we continue to experiment with text which in turn leads to our own transformation. I hope you have a wonderful experience!
Lekan Balogun, PhD
Curator.