Ẹ̀gbá by Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole consists of sixteen still life photographs of objects from Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, all in the museum’s collection, as well as a select number of the actual artefacts. To create the still lifes, the artist painstakingly combined into thematic sets and photographed more than 130 artefacts in the form of sculptures, textiles, tools, hats and accessories, domestic containers, ritual paraphernalia, medicinal plants, food, and beauty products. At first glance, it appears the artist wants the resulting prints to evoke our desire, a sentiment strengthened by the glossy, printed magazine found in the exhibition.
Above: Beauty, Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole, 2021
Yet, at the same time, the artist mocks this desire for the exotic as the magazine appropriates and mimics the gaze and mindset of 1930s bourgeois Europeans. Discerning members of the European upper classes had by then begun to find African art and craft fashionable. Paradoxically so, as most Europeans barely acknowledged the full humanity of African artists, and certainly not the sovereignty of African societies colonized in their name.
In Diana Agunbiade-Kolawole’s installation, tension is maintained between objects assembled according to local functions and meanings—mostly unimaginable by museum and collector alike—in the photographs, on the one hand. And on the other hand, the advertisement “copy” that attempts to convert the sculptures, everyday- and ritual artefacts into objects of desire and consumption.
