Kelani Abass: Àsìkò

In this body of new works, Kelani Abass explores the possibilities inherent in painting, photography and printing, strategies already suggested in his 2009 solo exhibition Man and Machine.

In Àsìkò, he highlights personal stories against the background of social and political events built around three interrelated bodies of work, which also engage time and memory. The first and most symbolic is the "Family Portrait" series. Instead of portraits of people, an object — the first typewriter purchased by his mother to start the family printing business — is used to signify the beginning of the story of the family's trajectory. 

In the second body of paintings, the "Calendar" series, Kelani appropriates the template of the "Bomode Oku," an engaging way of telling stories and remembering events that have happened in a community. As a child, Kelani recalls clients coming to the family printing press with images of a loved one (usually deceased) and asking for a "Bomode Oku" calendar that highlights the story of their town and community. Kelani pays homage to this form of archiving and remembering and uses it for his own purposes in the "Calendar" series by superimposing within the painting images of his late father, maternal grandfather, and grandmother to create his own family "Bomode Oku."

The last series, "Family Album," are large paintings embedded with photographs that place the nuclear family within the group at social gatherings and important events. By making a private narrative part of the social collective, he comments on the universal reality of his experience. In these paintings the images of the past and present, analogue and digital, painting and photograph coalesce seamlessly, conflating space, time, and medium. Àsìkò, meaning time in Yoruba, is a nostalgic as well as a cathartic tribute to a father whose, despite the passage of time, memory remains embedded in the fabric of the present. This is most visible with the inclusion of a book of "knowledge," a material witness to the thoughts, ideas, encounters of the artist's late father, Alhaji Sumola Ajani Kelani.

Àsìkò is a critical and artistic milestone that has accumulated over the past four years through a search for a personal visual language borne out of lived experiences. He looked for and took advantage of opportunities that involved exploring, experimenting, collaboration, research and critical thinking. As with many painters, Kelani uses photography as a preparatory tool for their work but very few artists in Nigeria have placed it on the same level as painting reinforced hierarchical barriers between the "art" of painting and mechanical procedure of photography.

until 21 December 2013
Kelani Abass
Àsìkò: Evoking Personal Narratives and Collective History
curated by Bisi Silva and co-curated by Jude Anogwih
Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos
Lagos, Nigeria