Amsterdam-based Nigerian artist Tyna Adebowale treats motherhood like an encrypted code—one she is determined to crack open. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke writes
Behind the gabled façades and in the mist along the canals, Amsterdam’s secrets are kept in plain sight. If its cultural division had a dossier of assets—individuals shifting the paradigm under deep cover—the file on Tyna Adebowale would be marked essential. The Nigerian-born artist, for some time now a restless presence on the Dutch art circuit, is resolutely making a career out of dismantling conventional notions of motherhood—prying it loose from biology, smuggling it into the realms of memory, community, and survival. Her language is encrypted not in words alone, but in brushstrokes that map emotional landscapes, in lenses that capture stolen moments of truth, in projections that cast shadows of the unsaid, and in soundscapes that intercept raw, psychic frequencies. Each medium is a different weapon, a tailored tool for a specific phase of the campaign.
Only yesterday – on Saturday, September 6 – her latest solo exhibition, They Call You Mother; They Call Me Mama (#thereisalwaysamother), opened at Amsterdam’s Ellen de Bruijne Projects. On paper, the show runs until October 18. In practice, it feels untethered to calendars, as if it had been fermenting for lifetimes before its unveiling. The title itself—half proverb, half hashtag—sets the tone: a dialogue between ancestors and algorithms, between a Nigerian village square and the scroll of a smartphone feed. Adebowale has learned to walk both roads without snapping the cord that binds them.
At the heart of her exhibition, numbers are irrelevant. When asked for a headcount of the number of works she has on view, she deflects with a laugh. “I do not quantify my works in numbers,” she states, with the absolute certainty of someone who knows arithmetic cannot measure a storm. To step into her exhibition is akin to walking into a family gathering where no one waits for introductions: classified paintings engage in silent, heated argument with flickering video terminals, performances lean in from the edges, and collaborative pieces swagger into the room like relatives who have long since lost the invitation but know the door will open anyway. Disorder is the point, and somehow so is harmony.
The seed of this chaos is biographical. In Akoko-Edo, Edo State, where she grew up, motherhood was never confined to biology. Her great-aunt, Mama Nii Dezedo, bore no children but mothered entire communities. Adebowale, still young, absorbed the lesson: motherhood is not a possession, but a public trust. It echoes a far older injunction—“Thou shalt honour father and mother!” This commandment, as Abd-ru-shin the Author of The Grail Message, expounds, elevates fatherhood and motherhood into sacred offices, ennobling human life and binding marriages to a spiritual anchor. In such a light, women like Mama Nii embody not absence but abundance, turning the role of mother into a communal inheritance. Years later, in 2019, Adebowale returned from Europe and saw again the women who mother without children, and the realisation bloomed into Motherwomb—her ongoing research project and the subterranean current of her work.
This new exhibition is not all tribute and tenderness; it also bristles with protest. Adebowale names the systems—capitalism, patriarchy—that feed on women’s care while denying them rest. Against such theft, she stages rest not as indulgence but as a demand, enjoyment not as frivolity but as justice. Her works reveal that the sacred office of mothering – long exalted yet endlessly exploited – cannot survive without recognition of its right to renewal. Thus, the women in her art do not merely nurture—they claim the dignity to sit, to breathe, to live.
Her preparation time? “FOREVERRRRR!” she exclaims, as if parodying herself. But the exaggeration is its own kind of truth. This show was stitched together not in months but across seasons of memory, across fieldwork in Nigerian villages, across the persistent ghost of women like Mama Nii who refuse to fade.
Adebowale’s trajectory has been steady, unflinching. Her first solo show, She Called Me Woman, opened in the same gallery in 2020, under the spectral quiet of lockdowns. It honoured a Nigerian queer activist and unfolded without the bustle of openings, without the cocktail glasses clinking. Yet she counted it a triumph—not because of sales or reviews, but because the right eyes and ears found it. Resonance is her currency.
Now, the resonance swells. Even as Amsterdam hosts her second solo, her work threads itself into group exhibitions elsewhere: Good Mom/Bad Mom at Centraal Museum Utrecht, and earlier, Vrouwen van Amsterdam – Een Ode at Museum Amsterdam. Each one feeds into Motherwomb, a project that has slipped out of the studio and into the public, accumulating voices, songs, fertility dolls, soundscapes from Dam Square, stories of women who raised nations without raising children of their own.
Kinetic and multifaceted, the artist herself is unpinned, unboxed. Painter, videographer, installation artist, performer—yes. But also trickster, storyteller, griot in the gallery. Her shows feel like carnivals of mediums, noisy yet deliberate, anarchic yet disciplined. At their core lies the narrative drive of African night-time storytelling: the cadence of memory, the insistence on communal inheritance, the refusal to let silence claim what must be said. If her most radical gesture is to demand rest for women, it is also her most intimate. Rest as reparations. Leisure as resistance. Her altar to care doubles as a manifesto against its theft.
And yet, for all the acclaim in Europe, Adebowale’s gaze does not drift far from home. “OF COURSEEEEEE,” she declares when asked if she intends to exhibit in Nigeria. The insistence is both patriotic and practical. Her soil is Akoko-Edo; her ghosts are Nigerian; her art may travel, but its anchor has never left.
From her grandmother’s compound to Amsterdam’s cobbled streets, from Dam Square to Utrecht, the threads weave a tapestry not yet finished. Each exhibition is another knot, another stitch, another layer. She works in “forever”—the time signature of memory, of care, of maternal inheritance.
So when visitors step into Ellen de Bruijne Projects this September, they are not only stepping into a gallery. They are stepping into Adebowale’s Motherwomb—a chamber of stories and ghosts, a protest staged as art, a reminder that in her world there is always a mother. The question that remains is whether the rest of humanity will finally grant her what she demands: a chair, and the right to sit.
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