‘Community history, ecology politics, indigenous environmentalism, extractive capitalism, and cultural evolution – these meditations on my homeland demonstrate how the art and film-making process can be employed to promote youth empowerment, challenge colonial narratives and disrupt systems of knowledge production.’
(Wilfred Ukpong)
Autograph ABP is a gallery dedicated to work by contemporary Black artists. It’s located just off Shoreditch High Street and is well worth a visit. It contains two gallery spaces, one on the ground, one on the first floor, and admission is FREE. The only slight snag is the opening hours which you need to check before you go (for example, it only opens at 12.30 on Saturdays).
But the thing about Autograph ABP is the work they display is always good and frequently outstanding. It has a case for being the best small gallery in London.
Strongly, We Believe In The Power of this Motile Thing That Will Takes Us There #2 by Wilfred Ukpong © Wilfred Ukpong. Courtesy of the artist and Blazing Century Studios
Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos
Currently the downstairs gallery, gallery 1, is hosting a display dedicated to recent work by Wilfred Ukpong, titled ‘Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos’.
The basic premise is an environmental one. Ukpong is protesting – as Nigerian artists, poets, playwrights and film-makers have been doing for decades – about the ruination of the Niger Delta by 70 or more years of ruthless and often careless oil extraction.
Nigeria and oil
Notoriously, Nigeria is a kleptocratic state in which various factions of the ruling elite vie with each other to gain control of the nation’s phenomenal oil revenues in order to steal them for themselves. See the relevant chapter of Tom Burgis’s searing 2015 exposé, The Looting Machine. So cynical is Burgis that he doesn’t bother referring to the president of Nigeria by his formal title but as ‘the captain of Nigeria’s looting machine’ (Burgis page 201) and quotes Nigerian analyst, Clement Nwankwo, describing the country’s largest political party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) as: ‘not a political party. It’s a platform to seize power and then share the resultant booty’ (Burgis p.203).
Oil was discovered in the delate of the river Niger in 1956 and the enormous wealth it generates for a small elite has been ruining the country for nearly 70 years. Oil currently accounts for 80% of Nigerian government revenue (Burgis p.63).
As a political economy took hold that was based on embezzlement and manipulating public office for private gain, government contracts for the upkeep of public goods that support industrialisation – a functioning electricity system among them – were diverted to the cronies of the rulers of the day. The pattern was the same [in Nigeria] as in Angola or Congo: the more the non-oil economy withered, the greater the impulse to embezzle, perpetuating the cycle of looting. (Burgis p.76)
Countries whose economies are largely reliant on oil production are commonly referred to as a petrostates. A country where the ruler entrenches power in himself and his clique, using authoritarian security forces against any form of protest, is called a petro-dictatorship. But so extreme is Nigeria’s corruption that Burgis coins the phrase petro-nightmare to describe Nigeria’s descent into universal corruption and an endless series of military coups.
To give a sense of the scale of the theft, in 2014 reforming banker Lamido Sanusi estimated that corruption at Nigeria’s national oil company, NNPC, was robbing the national treasury of $1 billion per month (Burgis p.205).
‘By and by,I Wil Carry this Burden of Hope, till the Laments of my Newborn is Heard #2’ by Wilfred Ukpong (2017) © Wilfred Ukpong. Courtesy of the artist and Blazing Century Studios
Niger Delta pollution
But not only has oil production corrupted and undermined Nigerian politics for over half a century, but it has had a catastrophic impact on the region where most of the oil extraction takes place, in the delta of the mighty river Niger, which covers 27,000 square miles and makes up 7.5% of Nigeria’s land mass. Beside the predictable impact of gas flares and burn-off into the atmosphere, the oil industry in the area has a long sorry history of disastrous oil spills, which has been compounded by a terrorist and insurgent attacks on pipelines from a variety of motivations, from siphoning off raw oil to sheer destructiveness.
The cumulative impact has been to make the Niger Delta one of the most polluted places on earth, and local activists, Nigerian writers and artists, and Western environmentalist groups have been publicising the issue for a long, long time.
- How six decades of oil extraction have made the Niger Delta one of the most polluted places on earth
- Ruinous oil spills in the Niger Delta
- How Shell is devastating the Niger Delta
- The human health implications of crude oil spills in the Niger delta, Nigeria: An interpretation of published studies
Afrofuturism
How on earth can you, as an artist, respond adequately to such an enormous, ongoing, unstoppable social and environmental apocalypse? Ukpong’s response is simple and compelling – Afrofuturism.
Afrofuturism expresses notions of Black identity, agency and freedom through art, creative works and activism that envision liberated futures for Black life. (National Museum of African American History and Culture)
(I first encountered Afrofuturism at the Barbican’s 2017 science fiction show, Into The Unknown, where it was represented by the mysterious 2009 film Pumzi, directed by Wanuri Kahiu. Ukpoki’s vision has many things in common with Kahiu’s.)
Niger-Delta/Future-Cosmos
So Ukpong has taken his response to this disaster in his home region into an alternative reality and a strange and visionary future. The show consists of just eight photos and 2 videos but they are all riveting. All the photos are fantastic expressions of Ukpong’s vivid and striking Afrofuturism, very big, super-clear digital photos of Black people painted a deep shade of oil black and wearing strange curled headpieces, photographed in strange poses holding mysterious devices or artefacts.
‘The Advent of the Visionaries – A Screen To Behold’ by Wilfred Ukpong (2017) © Wilfred Ukpong. Courtesy of the artist and Blazing Century Studios
As the curators put it (and I apologise for the recap of the economic and social issues I’ve outlined above):
Once a major producer of palm oil for British colonisers, the Niger Delta is considered the mainstay of the Nigerian economy for its large oil reserves and its rich biodiversity due to the presence of rivers, mangroves, freshwater forests, and marine estuaries. In recent years, the region has been at the centre of environmental and social justice campaigns, challenging the pollution caused by major spills and flares at the hands of oil and gas industry giants.
The works in the exhibition are all set in the Niger Delta, Ukpong’s homeland. Driven by a profound desire to effect change, the artist worked with more than two hundred young people from marginalised, oil-producing communities to collectively address the historical and environmental issues in the oil-rich region.
The resulting photographs and film powerfully reference local rituals, ceremonial motifs, and symbols interwoven into a complex future cosmology.
All the photos are beautifully composed, beautifully clear, sunlit of strange objects, rituals, dress. I loved the weirdness and otherness of it. I loved the digital clarity of the images. I love science fiction so this pushed all my buttons right down to the great way all the photos are embedded in frames made from shiny black plastic folded into metal rods in such a way as to convey the sense of a rippling flood of black oil cascading around the alien future people captured in the photos.
Installation view of ‘Are My Dreams Too Bold for the Carbon Skin I Bear #1’ by Wilfred Ukpong (2017) Photo by the author © Wilfred Ukpong. Courtesy of the artist and Blazing Century Studios
They are so strong and clear and strangely imagined and beautifully designed and stunningly photographed. In their strong incomprehensibility they make perfect sense of mankind’s absurd destruction of the natural world. When reality is absurd, why not respond absurdly?
First film: FUTURE-WORLD-EXV
As well as the eight photos there are two films in this exhibition. The first, in the main room alongside the wonderful photos, is titled ‘FUTURE-WORLD-EXV’ and is 16 minutes long.
It is set in the year 2060 and follows a (Black) oil worker who is haunted by dreams of environmental disaster before coming to a grisly end on a wide smooth beach where his corpse is discovered by women members of a people who live in a watery environment and worship a water goddess. It is weird and it is absolutely wonderful.
In the particular scene I watched one particular woman covered in freckled white paint laments over his corpse, rubs and strokes it before climbing onto his body and then, lo, the body has also become white and speckled and the corpse animates, he gets up, they hold hands and walk into the waves. Sounds a bit clichéd but I found it genuinely strange and intense and riveting.
Installation view of ‘FUTURE-WORLD-EXV’ by Wilfred Ukpong, showing the final scene as the speckled man and woman walk into the waves, wearing the distinctive headgear of Ukpong’s futureworld. Photo by the author
Second film: Earth Sounds
The second film is set apart from the suite of 8 photos and the first film, which are linked by the vibrant colours and strange headgear of his science fiction futureworld. This one is titled ‘Earth Sounds’ and dates from 2021. It is 30 minutes long and less plotted and structured than ‘FUTURE-WORLD-EXV’.
It is the film of a performance in which Ukpong, again almost naked, flanked by two masked women carrying heraldic black flags, journeys on a wooden boat (a traditional canoe?) across a narrow waterway cluttered with mangroves or swamp plants, bushes and trees hemming them in. In this boat Ukpong is a shaman, performing obscure rituals, often involving a peculiar artefact, a yard-long circular wooden chest, painted red with yellow insignia of some sort, bound with heavy black metal clasps and with carved faces at each end.
Maybe the shaking of branches and the strange sounds he makes are invocations, designed to protect the Niger Delta from its dreadful despoliation. Whatever’s going on it is weird and wonderful up to the moment when the shaman kisses the wooden face on the chest and then, ritualistically, throws it into the polluted swamp water, and then dives in after it.
This isn’t high-budget Hollywood production values, there’s an obvious amateurishness to the camerawork and the sound quality, but this makes it all the more vivid and immediate, in all its mysterious, hypnotic power. Strange, compelling.
Summary
All this, all these ideas, designs, visions, images, sounds and movements, all of it happens in just one medium-sized gallery, but I came out reeling from the brilliant conception and luminous enactment of Ukpong’s brilliant vision.
Related links
- Wilfred Ukpong: Niger-Delta / Future-Cosmos continues at Autograph ABP until 1 June 2024
Nigerian corruption
- The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005)
- The Looting Machine by Tom Burgis (2015)
- Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018)
Nigerian fiction
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
- No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe (1960)
- Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe (1964)
- Arrow of God: Sayings of Wisdom by Chinua Achebe
- A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe (1966)
- The Trouble With Nigeria by Chinua Achebe (1983)
- Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe (1987)
- Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2003)
- Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
Environmental art reviews
- Eco-Visionaries: confronting a planet in a state of emergency @ the Royal Academy (January 2020)
- Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis @ the Hayward Gallery (July 2023)
- RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology @ the Barbican (October 2023)
- A World In Common: Contemporary African Photography @ Tate Modern (November 2023) [in the last section, with its photos of rubbish dumps and environmental collapse]
- Extraction/Abstraction by Edward Burtynsky @ the Saatchi Gallery (March 2024)
Books & Boots 