Ayo Akingbade’s exhibition, Show Me the World Mister, is a comparative case study on Nigeria’s industrial and mystical landscape. It comprises two films, and much like the title’s conversational tone, they are very much a call and response between feelings of certainty and curiosity. These equally fantastical pieces are near-portraits, animated by raw materials and rhythmic sounds. Representations of the self and many selves, they broach the subject of patrimony from two diametrically opposed points of origin, prosaic collectivity and whimsical individuality.
The gallery space mirrors these polarities in that it is centrally partitioned by a single structure designed by the artist. Screened on tandem loops at opposing sides of the room, Faluyi and The Fist (both 2022), exemplify Akingbade’s ongoing social realist practice wherein fact and fiction collide. Dialogue is all largely omitted from the latter, a hazed light slightly obscures the former; a juxtaposition in omission which affirms the artist’s interest in examining the experiential as well as the topical. All the while, simple colours, like ochre and rust, populate each frame which evokes a sense of nostalgia and austerity.
Faluyi is shot on a 16mm film stock that sweeps across the hills of Idanre in the Ondo State. It is a sublime fourteen-minute allegory that adheres to a traditional three-point plot structure, wherein it follows its protagonist, Ife, on a spiritual wandering through a panorama of forestry and sienna earth. Her journey is provoked by her mother and brother bringing news of her father’s passing and twists into an odyssey of discovery wherein she seeks the insights of an oracle. The melodic trill of crickets and water droplets echo throughout her quest. The film crescendos on the top of a hill, where she whirls with Yorba dancers and musicians, before waving to the future from the back of a motorbike in the darkness of night.
The dips and curves of the topography are in concert with the film’s emotional range of grief to naivety and optimism. Tender moments are captured in the features belonging to the film’s characters. Each point of pause that falls on a face or hand is like another step taken in the young girl’s path. These are the points where the viewer is drawn closer to Ife’s journey and the lived experiences of those around her.
Ife is as much of a fixture within her environment as she is a figment that hovers above it. She holds the place of Akingbade, who includes her personal experiences with a Nigerian palm reader in the story and endows both the character Ife and film title with her ancestral family name of Faluyi. This mirrors the very nature of personal reckoning with place and past, an inversion of a self-portrait wherein the individual self is relocated within the fabric of a cultural heritage.
This type of distorted portraiture is echoed in The Fist, a title that references both a Derek Walcott love poem and the gesture made by factory workers. Unlike Faluyi, chronology and dialogue mean little to this twenty-four-minute sequence. Rather, it is a cascade of frames shot on 35mm film wherein the central character would seem to be the industrial mechanisms pulsating in a Nigerian Guinness plant.
The supporting cast are the workers. Sporting brightly coloured vests with their jobs written in big block letters, the logisticians, brewers and the like bump shoulders on entering the building and in the cafeteria. The camera observes their labours without interrupting, instead focusing on the machines they are operating and facilities they are servicing. Spaces and sounds narrate the film in place of plot. The factory’s many chambers add visual depth and interest.
The workers filter in and out of the film, while the sonics of the environment are omnipresent. Forklifts beep, glass bottles clink, and conveyor belts hum, which activates impressions of labour without isolating the physical experience of it. Taken as an example of this dichotomy is the piercing sound of broken glass that for a time is heard being swept against the concrete floor. The hearing of clinking shards is uncomfortable, but seeing the act, or motion, of clearing it away is less so.
Moreover, the broken bottles could also be interpreted as both a metaphor for the fragility of the production’s ecosystem, as well as for the vestiges of colonialism. Construction of the facility concluded shortly after Nigeria had gained independence, thereby bookmarking the divided timeliness of authoritarian rule. This is also perhaps mirrored in the fact that the Guinness logo is hardly seen throughout the film. It is as if what the workers are producing means little, but the act of doing so as a collective means a lot.
Show Me the World Mister is more than a storied semblance of heritage but a conversation between two films about patrimony. Akingbade’s decision to combine youthful inquiry with the solemnity of industry to explore these topics was effective as both complimented each other in surprising ways: Ife is the pursuant of legacy, the factory symbolises it. The near dream-state that is encouraged from Faluyi would not have felt so poignant had it not been paired with the weighted industriousness of The Fist.
While both are accomplished films, they are far more provocative when viewed as two parts to one whole. The marriage between sounds and materials sampled from the alternating environments seem to orchestrate a singular aesthetic experience, an experience that guides a viewer towards an idea but leaves enough room for personal discovery. In this instance, the sights and sounds of a distant life, or daily existence, never felt so close.
Ayo Akingbade: Show Me the World Mister, The Whitworth, 3 May – 20 October 2024.
Tennae Maki is a writer based in Leeds.
This review is supported by The Whitworth.
Published 08.07.2024 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
971 words