6 October - 3 November 2021
VICTOR EKPUK I am my Ancestors Essence There is a divine energy, a cosmic force that flows from the hearts of our ancestors to the shorelines of our identity, and it gifts us with radiance, if we choose to accept it. Even more, it blazes new pathways for us to wander, into the future with the gift of the past. We wander forward, while flanked by echoes of ourselves, conversing as we journey, holding hands with our past reflections, our chattering voices, light with conversations of old and new, bouncing off of the dimly-lit corridors we pass through, into a future that promises self-discovery and a new generation of stories with which we may anoint our children.
For the greater portion of his artistic career, artist Victor Ekpuk has engaged the rich activity of excavating cultures. Hailing from the Cross River area in Southeast Nigeria, Ekpuk has thoughtfully translated sacred and traditional elements of his culture into works of art, and in the process of doing so, has developed a signature feature in his creations, with nsibidi ideographs functioning as atmospheric backdrops, body designs for his figures, and as textual subjects in monumental site-specific installations.
Ekpuk’s new body of work is perhaps best understood as an encore to previous schematic portraitures of traditional Nigerian girls woven into contemporary, transnational Black girls, in two series titled Mbobo Maidens (2004 – 2006) and Hip Sistas (2014 – 2016). While those works bore his signature aesthetic cultural amalgamations of the historically sacred and the present-day resonant, his current paintings mark his insightful return to subjectivity, but with images that offer immediate reflections of ancestral memories. In these newer works, he is engaging the activity of portraiture in order to unravel how his contemporary self can be found in the ancestral forms he addresses—this is the conversation of note in I Am My Ancestors’ Essence.
Furthermore, Ekpuk inspires us to a deep dive into the refining activity of locating ourselves in the past; tracing the lines of a face from generations’ old, and discovering our own startled appearances in the wood, gazing back at us from the ground. Ekpuk is stationed as an interceding figure, standing in-between two cosmic sites: The Ancestral and the Present, in a collaboration that pushes all of us into new territories of imagination, and new dimensions of understanding.
But it is through the ingenuity of his creations that we discover how are we are located in the Old Stories that we haven’t yet heard. Our new pathways forged by the wails and whispers of the ancestors are captured in his interpretative linear echoes in vibrant colors on canvas. Their Old Voices, thick with cocoyam soil, sound with authority through the windows that he constructs, and cause our 21st Century structures to buckle and rattle under their weight—shaking the dust off of our bodies, making us new. Making us new again.
I Am My Ancestors’ Essence begins with Ekpuk’s roots in Cross River, and the analysis of sacred objects that reside there, but quickly radiates out to enfold other cultures into this robust conversation, including the Yoruba, Dogon, and the Fang cultures. Familiar objects from these regions that are now the unwitting residents of museums around the world such as ekpu sculptures created by Oron artists of the Cross River Region, which were originally made to venerate the ancestors, or olumeye figures by artists of the Yoruba culture—maternity sculptures that also celebrate the feminine ideal, are activated with new voices and narrative possibilities in Ekpuk’s paintings.
Ekpuk feels especially connected to the ekpu figures, given their weighty task as connectors to the past, even as he seeks to build new bridges between our contemporary world and the ones in which the sculptures were originally crafted. In this way the painting His Father’s Son speaks to the layers of cyclical commemoration that is part of Ekpuk’s own familial and cultural lineage. But he also reaches far beyond the boundaries of Nigeria for this inspiring collection of ideas. The painting Lady with Gold Necklace, loosely inspired by a 19th Century daguerreotype of a woman of status from Madagascar, is a prismatic interlude against a tan backdrop featuring a powerful female posed with her hands clasped elegantly in the front, her sky-blue linear form and features dramatically eclipsed by a company of energetic, dancing textual characters in red—at the very center of this chromatic crossroads is her proud and beaming necklace: a four-lane pathway of gold and light. Ekpuk recognized the aesthetic similarities between the photographed woman from Madagascar and women of renowned status from the Efik culture in Nigeria, who traditionally donned highly ornate necklaces of a similar appeal during ceremonies. He was also drawn to the similarities in the women’s hairstyles, and to their attire’s apparent reflection of the Victorian era. Here, Ekpuk envisions these women and all of their cultural aesthetics and influences in this single and extraordinary portrait.
As a son of the African continent who is now offering a conceptual space for these works to breathe their unadulterated stories to the masses, Ekpuk’s voice and platform absolutely matter within the context of both the Art World and the Academy. Too often, these objects are regarded as having already offered all that they are able to. Ekpuk’s position is that we have not yet captured the fullness of what these Old Voices have yet to express.
For Ekpuk, this project’s reach is far beyond his place of birth. “My genetic gene goes beyond my immediate lineage,” Ekpuk expresses with sincerity. For him, this is a conversation about all of us and our interconnectivity as human beings, and genealogical miracles. And this is about a nuanced reality that we must come to understand, regardless of race, culture, or creed: Your future is found in your beginning.
And like the transcendental subject in his Dogon-inspired painting He Who Reads Tomorrow, featuring a seated figure against a celestial backdrop, who searches for the future in a blue Koranic board that is spangled with that artist’s improvisational designs, Ekpuk’s own eyes scour the heavens, his hands prod the ground—he is both stargazing and mining the rich universe for our faces and our old bones. Ekpuk stands as a purveyor of wisdom between the Old and the New, in an effort to cast us into a bright future, a new radiant space.
Dr. Imo Nse Imeh Associate
Professor of Art and Art History,
Westfield State University