On Movement and Migration

May Okafor

May Okafor is a visual artist who loves to interact with tangible forms that are able to evoke feelings through touch. She constantly explores materials from her immediate environment, particularly clay and found objects with her work often addressing and interrogating contemporary issues.

Her installation Rites of Passage rendered with polystyrene and ceramics depicts several dwellings representative of passageways. It investigates issues around transience, movement, temporality and permanence, and how these are evident in geographic and socio-political structures instigated by migration.

May considers clay and found objects as having innate features of countless dramatic and encapsulating tendencies. Her work is focused on liberating such tendencies, while investigating issues in historical, theoretical and contemporary contexts as they contribute, in unique ways to the viewers' visual experience, in which she also carefully posits herself.

Monsur Awotunde

Monsur Awotunde is a visual artist and communications practitioner. His initial art and design apprenticeship training was under Shamseen Adagunduro and Olusesan Adebayo in Lagos before proceeding to academically train at The Polytechnic Ibadan in Ara studio under leading contemporary artist Mufu Onifade. He later furthered his studies at the Auchi School of Art in Nigeria and University of Bedfordshire, Luton, United Kingdom

Drawing observations from his migratory experience in a decade of shared occupancy between his native Nigeria and United Kingdom, Mosur Awotunde abstract expressionist paintings explores the sociological effects of being in an unfamiliar space and the ambivalent experience of moving back home.

His paintings are characterised by dark colours and emotive strokes to visualize socio-political lines,question identity formed in certain spaces or territories and the generosity or lack thereof of unacquainted spaces.

He notes “my personal experiences, those of other migrants during my stay in the United Kingdom and other political lapses present here at home all make visual compendium for this show. It is a visual information about the struggles to survive, missions of making marks, and the eventual probable failure and success of the foreigners abroad”.

Ngozi Schommers

Working from a pointillist approach with scraps of confetti and traditional painting techniques, Ngozi Schommmers creates intricately detailed, stylistic paintings that interrogate socio-political, religious and cultural homogenization, as well as issues of identity and ecological destruction. Her use of materiality imbues her work with a mosaic-like quality creating richly-textured and complexly-layered surfaces and forms.

The selected works – shown as part of her solo exhibition We Are Not Welcome Here – aims to represent millions of refugees or displaced persons, most especially women and children, victims of unending visible and invisible wars; thousands that know no other home but refugee camps and unbearable resettlement shacks.

An immigrant herself, moving from Nigeria to Germany in 2014, her experiences have been diverse and she notes that, ‘’This time Europe doesn’t look so much as land of hope and opportunities. I see people go through waste bins, so many street beggars. People displaced in a land where no one really wants them; in a land where the culture and language is strange to them. It might seem like a safe haven to so many but a lot has changed… from my observation, I have realized that we are in a repeat pattern of life. Same continuous cycle, irrespective of where we are. As someone that lives in two different continents, I am inspired by what I see around me’’.