Whitehot Magazine
"The Best Art In The World"
Nigerian artist Viktor Ekpuk, is currently showing at Princeton University Art Museum's gallery project space. Stephen Chung / Alamy Stock Photo.
By DAVID JAGER, August 2023
Viktor Ekpuk is a Nigerian born artist based in Washington DC who uses the ancient Nigerian cipher of NSIBIDI as a prompt to create immersive spaces and installations where viewers can interrogate the curious intersection of writing, art, representation, and culture. He is currently showing at Princeton University Art Museum's gallery project space Art@Bainbridge.
We caught up a couple of weeks ago and spoke about his practice, culture, communication, and his experience with state censorship as the illustrator for a Nigerian Newspaper.
David Jager: Really wonderful to meet you. I suppose where we want to start is… I'm very intrigued with the fact that there is apparently a Nigerian cipher. An ancient script, which is referred to as... forgive me if I'm not pronouncing it correctly... NSIBIDI?
Viktor Ekpuk: Correct. Right.
What is your relationship to this script? How did you come across it? Is it part of your cultural heritage and how did it become integrated into your work?
My relationship to it is part of my as you might say, cultural heritage - I'm From southeastern Nigeria, I'm Ibibio by ethnicity. So, I won't just call it a script. It is always a whole system of communication for which the script is only a part of it. It is all communication that uses symbols of different types and registers. It could be symbols that come to mind, it could be speech, it could be gestures, anything used to convey ideas.
Now, the graphic aspect of it is really what drew me to it. While I was in art school, I was looking for some more indigenous ways to express myself, I gravitated it towards it, it's also a form of abstraction in that sense. But it was the main fact that my ancestors used this system of communication. It's still being practiced - as a coded means of talking to one another within a certain group of people.
A kind of secret society that existed, an elite group in pre-colonial times that were responsible for instilling civic order. You had to be a certain type, a certain caliber of man to be asked to join this group. As a contemporary example, we could compare it to the Freemasons - if you look at the masons and how they came to be accepted as leaders across America. So NSIBIDI is about coded communication carried on by this very tight inner circle.
Victor Ekpuk, born 1964, Eket, Nigeria; active Washington, D.C. Earth Mother, 2021-2022. Collage textile, pastel and acrylic on paper. 76.2 × 50.8 cm (30 × 20 in.) frame: 95.2 × 73.7 cm (37 1/2 × 29 in.) Courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art
So there's a spiritual aspect to it as well. And is there a musical aspect to it as well?
There is a spiritual aspect to it as well - it was spiritual. It was social and it was also sort of, communicative. It was always described as an open secret, one you couldn’t understand if you weren’t part of it. You can only recognize it when the language is being used, but you would understand that it was not for you.
Right.
When you are a member and see it being used, you just stay away from it. But there is actually also a performative aspect to it, when the members of this secret society are masquerading as society as well. They come out to perform these secret codes for the performing public. They invite the public to come and watch them perform. So in their choreography, which to a lay eye, is simply beautiful choreography, but to them on the inside they're communicating, they are coding and decoding messages to each other with body movements
Victor Ekpuk, born 1964, Eket, Nigeria; active Washington, D.C. Royals and Goddesses #3, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 × 121.9 cm (60 × 48 in.) Courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art
I wanted to know in what way does your work speak to this legacy of diaspora in the Middle Passage, and how these coded languages helped people to stay unified, stay alive in situations of extreme displacement?
Good question. That's actually really important, because I've moved to the United States, and I’ve become really interested in what happened to African knowledge systems in the Diaspora. How much of the memory of these systems was returned? I speak about these performances with the audience, how that retention is still there. My work also explores the memory in the African Diaspora and explores these themes in several instances. One of the most powerful ones when I was invited to the Havana Bienale, in 2014. When I was there I made a drawing of a huge hall in this collective space, directly onto the walls. When they performed Cuban dances and songs, I could hear some of the phrases from my language, and so that confirmed to me that these groups went to Havana and continued to thrive.
Victor Ekpuk, born 1964, Eket, Nigeria; active Washington, D.C. Royals and Goddesses 2, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 152.4 × 121.9 cm (60 × 48 in.), Courtesy of the artist and Morton Fine Art
Victor Ekpuk, born 1964, Eket, Nigeria; active Washington, D.C. Still I Rise, ca. 2020, Serigraph, 76.5 × 56.7 cm (30 1/8 × 22 5/16 in.) frame: 91.4 × 72.4 cm (36 × 28 1/2 in.) Collection of the artist
When you worked in Nigera at newspapers, you had to use coded language in order to get past the sensors. Could you give me one example of how you managed to do this?
I remember one instance very well. Because the newspapers I worked with were partly owned by the government and partly open. So we could criticize them. When there was a military Junta that came into power, they tried to pretend they were Democratic. The government hired a managing director for the paper, who was also a very political activist, to help the newspaper. So he set us up in our own department, both writers and artists. We were hitting hard all the time, but sometimes, if it was too heavy, our work would be turned down.
So, what were the consequences that people faced for publishing this kind of thing? If they pushed it too far, or ridiculed the wrong people?
Some of the consequences, for a lot of my writer friends was being chased down by the Secret Service and facing imprisonment. Some of them had to leave the country.
Victor Ekpuk, born 1964, Eket, Nigeria; active Washington, D.C.Untitled, 2020, Ink and gouache on handmade paper, 33 × 22.9 cm (13 × 9 in.), frame: 48.3 × 45.7 cm (19 × 18 in.) Collection of the artist
Victor Ekpuk, born 1964, Eket, Nigeria; active Washington, D.C. Mask Series 2, 2018, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 63.5 × 48.3 cm (25 × 19 in.) Courtesy of Morton Fine Art and the Collection of Jeanne Adu-Brako.
You talk about the dissolution between writing, art, and what you call sacred collective space across cultures. Could you speak to that?
I tend to believe that, intrinsically, all humans share similar experiences. Is humanity something that is exclusive to only one set of certain experiences? Yes, I have come from Nigeria now - I live in the United States. Now I'm just exploring the human condition in the total sense of it. I find commonalities in different cultures and other cultures outside of our practice of these writing systems.
So these kinds of implications are interesting to me in terms of creating spaces. I'm actually also interested in spirituality - in the human condition, and whatever that may be, which serves as the basis my work touches upon. Sort of an elemental spirituality that addresses the psychic nature of our collective being. WM
David Jager is an arts and culture writer based in New York City. He contributed to Toronto's NOW magazine for over a decade, and continues to write for numerous other publications. He has also worked as a curator. David received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 2021. He also writes screenplays and rock musicals.
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