Code Switch: Icons & Inheritance

Lagos, Nigeria

9 - 11 July 2025

In collaboration with VVS Lagos

"To inherit is not a passive act; it is a process of reworking, reframing, and rewriting."

Code-Switch: Icons and Inheritance gathers contemporary Nigerian artists who navigate the tension between past and present, tradition and innovation. They operate as cultural translators, drawing from inherited iconographies and systems — oral traditions, sacred symbols, textiles, and mythology—and recoding them into new visual languages. Code-switching, in this context, becomes a metaphor for survival: an agile movement between multiple cultural, temporal, and aesthetic registers.

At the heart of this conversation is the question of how heritage is remembered, represented, and reclaimed. Ade Adekola addresses this directly through two visually striking series. Symbols as Essence layers mirrored portraits with Adinkra iconography to explore identity as a fragmented, reflective construct. In Yesterday, Today, he reimagines displaced Nigerian artefacts as shimmering contemporary relics, adorned with diamond dust and precious stones — a poetic restitution that transforms objects of historical loss into luminous vessels of cultural pride.

This notion of visibility and symbolic unveiling continues in the work of Alex Peter, whose pyrography portrait reveals a woman lifting her colonial-era hat to expose her Isi Òwu hairstyle—a crown of cultural rootedness. Her body, surrounded by burnt maps and symbolic cards, becomes a quiet battlefield of inherited narratives and chosen identities.

Where Peter excavates personal history through fire, Anthony Azekwoh turns to literature and mythology as sites of emotional intensity. In The Death of Ikemefuna, drawn from Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, he captures the psychic weight of grief and rigidity. Mami Wata explores spiritual inheritance as a struggle, rendering myth as a force that both haunts and empowers contemporary life.

This entanglement of personal, cultural, and spiritual inheritance deepens in Haneefah Adam’s textile works. Deconstructed stitched into jute and anchored by kiko hair-threading techniques, her portraits embody generational care, matrilineal wisdom, and the labour of becoming. Here, tradition is not static; it is repurposed through thread, gesture, and cloth.

Like Adam, Kelechi Nwaneri constructs identity through codes—tattoos, patterns, and marks that transform the human body into a living archive. In Crowning of the Oba of Lagos, Yoruba ceremony becomes a complex tableau of political symbolism and sacred power, revealing how tradition is both inherited and performed.

From ritual to reimagination, Lawrence Meju repositions Nigerian subjects within canonical Western compositions. His surrealist reinterpretations of Napoleon Crossing the Alps and La Danse foreground joy, motherhood, and intellectual triumph as sites of Black sovereignty. Meju’s work invites us to rethink where history is written, and who gets to be its icons. Ken Nwadiogbu extends this inquiry into visibility and space. His practice—where hyperrealist figures tear through paper or gaze from fragmented surfaces—asks what it means to be seen across borders, and how Blackness is framed and reframed in a global context.

If visibility is contested, then Obinna Makata insists that fragments can still speak. Using discarded Ankara fabric, ink, and paint, he builds collaged portraits that critique consumerism and salvage cultural meaning from waste—offering repair as a visual practice.

The artists in Code-Switch: Icons and Inheritance do not simply look backward. They reconfigure the archive, translating icons into codes for the present, and crafting new grammars of identity, beauty, and belonging.

Lawrence Meju

Ade Adekola

Ken Nwadiogbu

Anthony Azekwoh

This idea of inheritance as resonance—something heard and felt—takes sonic form in Peter Okotor’s Orin àkókó. Composed of layered field recordings of Nigeria’s musical traditions, the work invites deep listening as a mode of remembrance and resistance.

Finally, Stacey Ravvero grounds the exhibition in the soil itself. In Roots in the Rubble, she draws from permaculture, ritual, and sculpture to reimagine land as a site of memory and healing. Her work affirms that what we inherit is not only historical—it is ecological, embodied, and collective.

Together, the artists in Code-Switch: Icons and Inheritance do not simply look backward. They reconfigure the archive, translating icons into codes for the present, and crafting new grammars of identity, beauty, and belonging.

WORKS

Lawrence Meju

Under the Moonlight

46 x 34 in.

Giclee Archival Canvas Print 400 gsm (10 Editions)