Exhibition Review · Tate Modern, London
A personal account of an exhibition that refuses to be contained
Tate Modern · Until 10 May 2026
The title alone is a provocation. Nigerian Modernism — two words that, placed together, quietly upend the assumption that Modernism was ever a purely European affair. I arrived at Tate Modern not quite knowing what to expect, and left feeling as though a door had been opened that I hadn’t known was closed.
The exhibition, which runs until 10 May 2026, brings together over 50 artists working in the decades surrounding Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960 — a seismic moment that reshaped not only politics but the entire visual language of a culture. Painting, sculpture, textiles, and poetry all find their place here, and the result is something vast: a history, a continuity, a melting pot of influence and resistance.
A world greeted you at the door
The first thing you encounter is impossible to ignore. Ben Enwonwu’s seven wooden sculptures rise with a quiet grandeur, setting the tone for everything that follows. These were originally commissioned by the Daily Mirror in 1960 — the very year of independence — and there is something both solemn and defiant about them. They do not perform for the viewer. They simply stand.
From there, the exhibition unfolds across the networks that shaped Nigerian modern art: the Zaria Art Society, the Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club, studios in Lagos and Enugu, and — crucially — time spent in London, Paris and Munich. These were artists in conversation with the whole world, absorbing European modernism while remaining deeply rooted in Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba traditions.
Hair, spirit and the weight of history
J.D. Okhai Ojeikere’s photographs of Nigerian hairstyles are among the most unexpected delights in the show. To look at them is to understand that hair — its architecture, its ceremony, its social codes — is a form of art and of identity. Each image is a portrait of a tradition: intricate, considered, alive.
Elsewhere, the spiritual dimensions of Nigerian life press forward insistently. Akinola Laserkan’s image of Ajaka of Owo — the Yoruba deity descending from the heavens to create humanity — carries a power that is not diminished by being placed in a gallery. And then there is the work that stopped me entirely: Sangodare Gbadegesin Ajala’s batik textile, depicting a Yoruba priest transforming into a warrior god, surrounded by worshippers, dance, ritual, food and water. Layers of colour, cracked lines, animated figures — it hums with something close to trance.
“A country without foresight, common sense and ambition for the good of all is, in effect, non-existent — and to inhabit such a state is to be symbolically stateless.”
— Uzo Egonu
The exile’s eye: Uzo Egonu
Born in Onitsha in south-eastern Nigeria, Uzo Egonu spent much of his life in Britain, driven out of his homeland by political conditions he refused to remain silent about. His work fuses abstract expressionism with traditional Igbo visual languages, and the tension in his paintings is palpable — beauty and grief occupying the same canvas.
Egonu spoke of painting in darkness — and the corruption and post-civil war disillusionment of the Nigeria he observed from afar are present in every brush stroke. He was not bitter so much as unsparing. His words, quoted in the exhibition, are as lucid now as when he wrote them.
What colonialism takes, and what it cannot touch
A consistent thread through the show is the question of colonial influence — how it shaped, limited and sometimes fractured artistic expression, while never quite managing to extinguish it. Enwonwu’s masquerade images feel like a direct answer to that pressure: masquerades in full movement, shapes and colours cascading, inherited heritage held aloft as both celebration and refusal.
There is something extraordinary about standing in a London gallery — in the former territory of the empire that once governed Nigeria — and watching that inheritance assert itself so completely. The richness of what is gathered here is not a concession. It is a reckoning.
A personal note
Personal reflection
I came to this exhibition as someone who began creative life as an abstract artist — working with batik and tie-dye, making textile patterns, translating colour and movement into scarves and printed works. Seeing batik elevated here, as a spiritual and political medium as much as a decorative one, felt quietly significant. Art finds its way through. It always does.
I was also in London that day to install my own piece, What Holds, at the Tavistock 2026 exhibition — a work born from the same desire to make meaning in uncertain times that I felt reverberating through every room of this show.
Should you go?
Without hesitation. Nigerian Modernism is one of those rare exhibitions that feels genuinely necessary — not because it corrects a historical record, though it does, but because the art it gathers is magnificent on its own terms. Jubilant and mournful, spiritual and political, local and global, it refuses every simplification you might have brought through the door.
Go slowly. It rewards patience. And perhaps arrive wondering, as I did, not only what these artists gained from the world around them — but what the world gained from them.
Nigerian Modernism is at Tate Modern, London, until 10 May 2026.