Anyanwu and Her Reclaimed Moments in the Sun

A highly anticipated vibrant and thought-provoking exhibition in Lagos reimagines Ben Enwonwu’s iconic sculpture as a catalyst for exploring cultural renewal, identity, and the complexities of modern African experience through a diverse range of artistic perspectives. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke  writes 

Arms lifted to the sky, the bronze woman outside the National Museum in Onikan, Lagos seems to harness the light like a conduit, her lean spiral form poised somewhere between dance and incantation. For nearly seven decades, Ben Enwonwu’s “Anyanwu” has been Lagos’s most unblinking witness, catching both the grit and the glimmer of a nation’s fortunes. Cast in the mid-1950s as Nigeria edged closer towards independence, the sculpture was conceived not as decoration but as prophecy. A twin version presides over the United Nations in New York, a sentinel in bronze watching the world’s power plays unfold.

This September, “Anyanwu” is about to get a major reboot – a modern reckoning, untethered from the noise of the digital age. As she is metaphorically let off her plinth, her essence will be splattered across the museum’s exhibition halls – splintered, reimagined, and refracted through fresh perspectives that are more accustomed to binge-watching than reflection-inducing exhibits. Indeed, the exhibition Anyanwu: The New Light takes Enwonwu’s iconic dawn-of-a-nation metaphor and gives it a 21st-century remix. Gone are the days of colonial rule; now, the real challenge is surviving the algorithm’s echo chamber and global sameness. So, what does cultural renewal look like in an era where the audience’s attention span is shorter than a tweet? How does one balance ancestral memory with the instant gratification of now, especially when the latter is designed to be addictive? These are the questions Anyanwu: The New Light aims to tackle, and the answers might just surprise a dispassionate observer.

Curator Tony Agbapuonwu, no stranger to making art breathe differently, is –  like a tuning fork – intent on making this show resonate, letting the rich frequencies of Igbo cosmology vibrate through the gallery space. Myths, ancestral presences, and metaphysical systems are all invited to the party, given form in a riot of creativity – sculpture, painting, and digital media all get a turn in the spotlight. The Art Bridge Project, his brainchild since 2017, provides an ideal platform for creative collisions, where emerging and established artists can trade ideas freely, hierarchy-free.

The results are nothing short of breathtaking. First, there is Emmah Mbanefo, an Onitsha-born artist with over four decades of experience under his belt, who presents a sacred treasure box crafted from reinforced multimedia, titled “Ókpùlúkpu”( or Mortar), that is an examplar of Onitsha cultural heritage. His training at Auchi Federal Polytechnic and the influence of pioneers like Okpu Eze and Enwonwu himself lend the work a gravitas that is hard to ignore. Traditionally, this intricately crafted box would sit before a patrilineage priest, serving as a microcosmic house for an ancestor’s ọfọ – a staff that is invested with spiritual authority. But in the gallery,  “Ókpùlúkpu” doesn’t scream for attention; it purrs quietly in the background, more like a generator that one only notices when it suddenly falls silent.

As the exhibition further unfolds, the subdued intensity of Chinwe Uwatse’s watercolour on paper paintings – “I Carry the World”, “We Want More”, “Nightmare” and “E woo! Efuu Kwaam!” – and acrylic on canvas works – “Agadi Nwanyị” and “Entwined in Resilience” –  suggest that they are anything but static. Rooted in uli, the fluid, feminine body adornment she first noticed as a child during the Nigerian Civil War, her work spans from 1991 to 2019 but feels stitched from the same cloth. Studying at University of Nigeria, Nsukka under Uche Okeke and Obiora Udechukwu, she absorbed uli not just as a pattern but as philosophy: asymmetry as resistance, curve as memory. Her pieces here seem to breathe—emotional cartographies that bind dreams, vision, and reality in the looping rhythm of “akala na ejikoba ife nine.”

If Uwatse suggests, Obiageli Okigbo defiantly articulates with restrained passion. Architect-trained in the UK, she brings a precision-born rebellion to her art, marrying the formal rigours of her background to the untamed currents of Igbo myth. In “Remembrance of I AM” (I-VI), she conjures a surreal reunion, collaging Kivu sculptures from the Democratic Republic of Congo—currently gathering dust in Belgium’s African Museum—against star-studded cosmic backdrops. It is part séance, part daring rescue mission, a pointed reminder that these objects have lives, stories, and spirits that refuse to be locked away in vitrines.

JC Bright, with a penchant for the unapologetic, deals in chromatic maximalism. His Erigwara series – figuratively speaking, a feast for the eyes – draws on the Igbo tradition of food-sharing, those market-day pilgrimages where kinship is cemented over carefully prepared meals. Bright serves up a visual equivalent, translating the warmth and abundance of these gatherings into grids and pools of colour that refuse to be muted in his acrylic and oil on canvas paintings – “Ọfe Egusi”, “Ọjị”, “Ọfe Ọha”, “Ụkwa” and “Ụgba”. For him, hue isn’t just a garnish – it is the backbone, the lifeblood, the very pulse of the artwork. “The form itself, the raw emotion,” he says, and indeed, the paintings work like memory: layered, unreliable, yet insistent – a triumph of colour that evokes, provokes, and endures.

Where Bright lavishes colour, Mobolaji Otuyelu pours substance. This artist, organiser, and clay entrepreneur is a globe-trotting bridge-builder, straddling worlds from Nigeria to Morocco to the US, and fusing aesthetics with activism in the process. Her life-size clay pot, “Vessels of Remembrance”, is a curvaceous homage to the human form, a vessel of “Sankofa” that embodies the Ghanaian concept of reclaiming one’s roots. For Otuyelu, that root is decidedly down-to-earth: clay, soil, the very earth itself. It is a politics that is tactile to the core – a politics of nourishment, repair, and rejuvenation.

The youngest in the room, Chiagoziem Orji, is a temporal polyglot, conversing fluently with multiple centuries at once. With roots in Okwulofia Mmaku, Enugu State, and trained at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, she weaves a rich cultural heritage into her digital paintings, where uli and nsibidi converge in a vibrant spectacle of pixels. The rhythm in “Ike Ndụ” I and II is unmistakable – the syncopated beat of Igbo dance and masquerade pulses through each piece, as if the figures are about to step out of the frame. And perhaps they will, propelled as they are by their Chi, guardian spirits that seem less painted than summoned into being, their strokes conjured with a precision that borders on the mystical.

Agbapuonwu threads these voices together with a clear purpose: to deny globalisation’s airbrushed narratives the last word. “Anyanwu: The New Light disrupts the Western-influenced narrative,” he says, “replacing it with multidimensional perspectives and artworks with transformative energy.” His Majesty, the Obi of Onitsha, echoes this sentiment, calling it “a fertile platform for shifting our mindsets towards seeing art through life, and life through art.”

The exhibition, supported by institutional partners such as Ime-Obi Onitsha, National Commission for Museums and Monuments Nigeria (NCMM), ADEGBOLA Art Projects, and National Council for Art and Culture (NCAC), is more than a fleeting moment. The exhibition’s run from September 6 to 28 is only the beginning. A book-catalogue and short documentary will archive the works, the research, the conversations—ensuring that the impact of the exhibition endures beyond the final day.