The work of Cameroonian-born British artist and scholar Adjani Okpu-Egbe is multifaceted, interdisciplinary, and powerfully engaging. He infuses his personal experience into expressive, harmonious colors, inventive symbolism, an expansive use of materials, and an authenticity grounded in rigorous research. Known for his layered visual language and abstracted figures he refers to as “manimals,” Okpu-Egbe’s cross-demographic shaping of cultural thought is far-reaching. The three works presented as a constellation for the 36th Bienal de São Paulo mark a pivotal moment in his practice.
With a style first described as “shelving” by the Bienal’s chief curator, these motifs expand the artist’s technique and incorporate sculptural objects embedded with stories. They complement the door panels – playing with the idea of “open” and “closed” doors in our daily lives – as a potent metaphor for what we shelve, share, or discard. The piece Fortitude (2018-2024) advocates against erasure by shelving books authored by Black women, most notably the Afro-Brazilian educator Conceição Evaristo, whose poem “Da calma e do silêncio” [Of Calm and Silence] inspired the Bienal’s title. Through this gesture, Okpu-Egbe embodies the themes of the event and proposes a diversified canon in place of a dominant, misleading, white, colonial, and patriarchal repertoire.
Premonition of Ngarbuh (2020-2024), produced in response to the 2020 Ngarbuh massacre in Cameroon, confronts the horrors of state-sanctioned violence,in which women and children bear the brunt while the “international community” remains silent. Harrowing and emotionally unflinching, the depiction of ghost-like figures flanked by a scorched landscape – with children playing a jump rope game surrounded by strange animals – evokes a haunting sense of insecurity. The shelved objects speak to loss, spiritual desecration, and resilience. In documenting this tragic failure of decolonial processes and the forgotten armed conflict that has engulfed the English-speaking regions of Cameroon since 2016, Okpu-Egbe echoes Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and makes an urgent contribution to art history – a gesture that answers the call for public intellectualism. Displayed alongside is An Allegorical Conglomeration of Origins and Inevitabilities (2024), rooted in envisioning Black futures. Its dense layering – a tapestry of autobiographical content foundational to the artist’s storytelling – includes symbols such as vine-bearing lemons, braids, clocks, and lanterns. These elements meditate on inevitabilities intended to shape what the artist describes as “Black Consciousness in Black Futures” (BCBF).
