Currents of Memory: Stories Carried Across Water and Time
Dive into Buki Mariam’s mural diptych, Legacy of Water, and explore how water becomes a vessel of migration, resilience, and ancestral memory.
Legacy of Water (Diptych) (2025/2025) by Buki Mariam AnimashaunOriginal Source: https://museum.pau.edu.ng/
Introduction
Water is never just water—it is a witness, a carrier, and a keeper of stories. In Legacy of Water, Nigerian visual artist Buki Mariam invites us to journey through the currents of migration, resilience, and ancestral memory, drawn from her own lineage.
Portrait of Buki Mariam Animashaun (2025/2025) by Buki Mariam AnimashaunYemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Pan-Atlantic University
About the Artist
Buki Mariam works across painting, textiles, and digital layering to explore heritage, migration, and memory in her visual practice. Drawing from archives, oral histories, and her own lineage, she creates art that bridges contemporary practice with ancestral inquiry.
Legacy of Water (Diptych) (2025/2025) by Buki Mariam AnimashaunOriginal Source: https://museum.pau.edu.ng/
Historical Roots
Grounded in the life of her Bahia-born great-great-grandfather, Candido da Rocha, Buki Mariam’s work reflects the Afro-Brazilian returnees who reshaped 19th-century Lagos—its architecture, commerce, and culture. Their stories remain vital to understanding the city’s heritage today
Visual Language: First Impression
From a distance, the diptych presents a field of dark, shifting water moving toward the Lagos Marina. The composition suggests motion, depth, and the pull of memory across time.
Visual Language: Grids
Beneath the painted surface, faint grid structures appear. These lines reference systems that organised movement during enslavement and later during colonial rule. Their presence introduces a quiet tension between order and fluidity within the work.
Visual Language: Alphabet Forms
Letters embedded in the composition signal the shifting linguistic realities that shaped Afro-Brazilian identity. They recall the enforced learning of new languages in Brazil and later in colonial Nigeria. These forms explore how identity is shaped, fractured, and reassembled.
Visual Language: Stitching and Texture
Metallic threads and netting weave across the panels, symbolizing connection, repair, and resilience. Their subtle shine introduces light into dark waters, evoking prosperity and cultural inheritance—echoes of Afro-Brazilian influence in Lagos.
Layered Technique
The work combines layered paint, digital prints, hand-stitched elements, and textured surfaces. These layers create a material language that mirrors the layered nature of heritage. Each gesture contributes to a quiet accumulation of memory.
Themes
The work considers: memory and ancestry; movement and return; language and identity; water as witness; prosperity & cultural inheritance. These themes arise through changes in texture, pattern, and material, inviting viewers to engage with the layered histories within the work.
Process
Created over thirteen months and shaped by a long period of research, the work brings together archival exploration, personal reflection, and material experimentation. The slow build of layers mirrors the slow and deliberate work of reconnecting with heritage.
Significance
As part of the permanent collection of the Shyllon Museum, Legacy of Water supports the museum’s educational mission and commitment to works that encourage reflection on history and identity. It contributes to ongoing conversations about memory and cultural continuity in Nigeria.
Buki Mariam invites viewers to look with patience. The surface of Legacy of Water reveals how stories move through families and across landscapes, and how memory continues to shape the present. The work stands as both a visual archive and a personal act of return.
Story by Buki Mariam Animashaun
Presentation and Voiceover by Solomon Nkwagu
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