Rele Gallery, Lagos is pleased to present Bodies! Bodies! Bodies! a group exhibition of works from contemporary Nigerian artists. Presenting works by Musa Ganiyy, Daniel Obasi, Ayanfe Olarinde, Yemi Osokoya, Jimi Agboola, Adaeze Okaro, Laja, Ojo Ayotunde and Dennis Onofua, the exhibition brings together artists whose practice employ the body — across diverse materials and approaches — in creating distinct scenes, scapes and narratives grounded in issues and contradictions of the present. From realistic depictions to more stylistic renderings, the body is considered both an autonomous subject fixed in its physical state as well as an evocation of formless, abstract ideas and worlds. Bodies! Bodies! Bodies! is focused on showing experiments with the human form in exploring the production and experience of interiority, body politics and sexuality; spirituality and transcendence as well as a complex, lateral excavation of history.
Over the years, amidst developing artistic, cultural and social traditions, the human body has served as an important — if highly contested — vehicle for examining and responding to contemporary and historical concerns. From its display as a passive object catering to the desires of the artist and viewer, to its use as a direct subject for interrogating the political through the personal, the body has been quietly observed and meticulously staged. Presented in its entirety or in disjointed fragments, moving and frozen through space, it serves as witness, protest and archive.
As part of an extensive, storied history of figuration —from indigenous artistic practices in Africa and Western classical academism to modernist and avant-garde experiments across locations — the artists presented in this exhibition offer new narratives on representation, consciously pushing the limits of what a body means, how it moves and the spaces it occupies; from the physical to the psychological.