This multi-media exhibition explores the enduring legacy of the Nigeria-Biafra war through a powerful collection of artwork that examines both the local and global repercussions of this pivotal conflict. As one of the first civil wars in post-independence Africa, this struggle profoundly shaped international perceptions of the continent while fundamentally altering Nigeria's social and political landscape. The exhibition presents what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the "emotional truths" of those who lived through the conflict while exploring the spiritual dimensions of post-war healing and reconciliation. The exhibition features works from the Nigeria Art Society UK (NASUK) artistic collective, displayed alongside pieces from the Iwalewahaus collection, archival materials, oral testimonies, and a curated selection of short films that capture the lived experiences and intimate stories of survival. [....]
All artists are dreamers, but there are some whose quest for the ultimate dream takes them away, irrevocably, from the here and now. Like Paul Gauguin, the French artist who exiled himself to Melanesia in search of the ideal and capturing the soul of those beautiful islands in such vivid colours that the world for an instant had a glimpse of Paradise, or what it might have looked like, through Gauguin's eyes. Chike Azuonye is in every sense a modem painter, living and working in London, the art capital of the world. And yet, like Paul Gauguin, he insists on dreaming the world anew- or rather, daydreaming the world of his Nigerian childhood in vivid Technicolor. In evoking an Arcadian past to confront the steel and glass of the European megapolis, Mr Azuonye is walking a well-beaten path, like the writer Camara Laye whose classic story of his Guinean childhood, THE AFRICAN CHILD, provided a refreshing counterpoint to the grey and sombre Paris of his student days.[...]
"True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it. For those who feel it, nothing makes the soul more religious and pure" — Michelangelo. For a long while these images prodded the mind of Chike Azuonye — images of an age of fiendish busyness; demonic unrest; widespread unrealness; seemingly featurelessness; and suffocating restrictiveness. But in the true nature of an artist, he sought to provide an escape, not only for himself but for the millions of humanity for which these images were realities. His method to represent these concepts and their causes in paintings of aggressive, strong and fascinating brush-manship, reflective enough to make the souls of those who feel it, in the word of the legendary Italian Poet, painter and philosopher Michelangelo, "more religious and pure". [....]
“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
– Pablo Picasso –