Fragments of Being and Belonging

Looking through my dad’s archive, I am taken on a journey into the collective consciousness of pop and cultural values in Nigeria around the 70s, a post-colonial era dominated by ethnic, regional, and political conflicts. This project Engages the dynamics of identity through socio-cultural concepts of family, culture, and community. It reflects and reconstructs a relationship between the past and the present through alternative narratives by incorporating self-portraits into old family pictures, following the tradition of portraits popularized in that era with striking poses, fashion, and textile patterns; interrogating the material qualities of a physical photograph to create new realities through layers of visual textures. It sparks conversations on how the past is never really dead but evolving and indicates substantial importance attached to being a part of a family, such as receiving love and having a sense of belonging.