Curatorial Statement of Spirits and Souls by Usen Obot

Usen Obot: Spirits & Souls solo exhibition by Usen Obot

Text by Chepape Makgato, Chief Curator at William Humphreys Art Gallery, 21 May 2025

Spirits & Souls is a profound meditation on memory, identity, and the sacred by artist Usen Obot. Through a series of evocative sculptural works in wood and metal, Obot explores the metaphysical terrain of his Ibibio heritage, invoking ancestral knowledge systems that once governed, healed, and structured precolonial African societies. Developed during residencies in the Eastern Cape and Gauteng, the works in this exhibition are deeply rooted in the spiritual and performative traditions of the Ekpo society—an ancestral institution of the Ibibio people that historically merged governance, ritual, and communal accountability under the guardianship of the spirit world.

Drawing from the aesthetics and philosophies of Ekpo masquerade traditions, Obot’s sculptures operate as conduits between past and present, the material and immaterial. These ancestral archetypes—traditionally masked and shrouded in secrecy—were feared and revered in equal measure, acting as vehicles of justice, custodians of morality, and bearers of spiritual wisdom. Obot’s contemporary sculptural interpretation is not a romanticised revival but a radical reconstitution that affirms the enduring relevance of African spiritual and political systems in global discourse.

Obot explains: “In my work I seek to facilitate and bring into contemporary discourse and spaces the re-interpretation and presentation of an African narrative from the history of African culture and governance systems that fused religion, spirituality, and administration.”

His visual language is underscored by a restrained palette of whites, greys, blacks, and earthy browns—tones that evoke soil, ash, smoke, and memory. These elemental colours foster a sense of spiritual quietude, allowing the forms and symbolism to speak with contemplative clarity. They embody the dignity of ancestral presence and the liminal threshold between the seen and unseen.

Obot’s sculptural technique—through carving, engraving, and chipping—mirrors the deliberate pace of ancestral wisdom. Each incision into wood reveals latent memory, as though uncovering truths embedded within the grain. This process recalls the African proverb: “Wisdom is like a baobab tree; no one individual can embrace it.” The textured surfaces of his figures resist erasure, bearing the raw marks of remembering, surviving, and becoming.

A vital aspect of this intellectual and spiritual excavation is Obot’s engagement with Nsibidi, the ancient visual writing system indigenous to southeastern Nigeria. Historically associated with secret societies such as Ekpo, Ekpe, and Oboni, Nsibidi is far more than decorative symbolism; it is a complex semiotic system that functions as pictogram, logogram, and syllabary—encoding philosophies, rituals, and societal codes.

Obot subtly integrates these gestural and ideographic signs into his practice, situating himself within a lineage of modern and contemporary Nigerian artists who turn to indigenous epistemologies as acts of decolonial reclamation. As Chika Okeke-Agulu notes in Postcolonial Modernism, "Nsibidi became more than a source of visual forms; it served as a conceptual framework for artists committed to decolonising the very foundations of modern art in Nigeria" (Okeke-Agulu, 2015: 95). For Obot, Nsibidi is not a stylistic flourish but what Okeke-Agulu identifies as “a complex semiotic field through which artists explored African philosophical and political consciousness in the aftermath of colonialism” (2015: 101). His engagement is expansive, bringing Nsibidi into conversation with other African visual languages—such as the sacred geometries of litema and the symbolic codes of Ndebele mural art—revealing a shared visual grammar of spiritual and societal knowledge.

Echoing Es’kia Mphahlele’s insight that the African artist is “a transmitter of the society’s myths, its world-view, its idea of harmony between man, the spirit, and the earth,” Obot’s invocation of these visual traditions becomes a powerful assertion of African continuity and cosmology. These are not static forms, but living scripts—etched into walls, carved into wood, and carried forward through reinvention.

Yet Spirits & Souls is not solely concerned with metaphysical ancestries—it is also tenderly rooted in the everyday intimacies of Black life. Obot’s sculptures foreground family, unity, and the warmth of embrace. In the emotionally resonant Daddy Will Be Back For The Flowers, a joyful young girl—presumably a daughter—awaits her father’s return, clutching flowers. Though the father is absent in form, his presence is palpable in her anticipation and love. The work quietly but powerfully challenges stereotypes of Black fatherhood, asserting emotional presence even in physical absence.

In Utopian Family, Obot offers a sculptural vision of togetherness—figures lovingly intertwined, each one seen and held. It is a radical articulation of care and completeness in a world where the fragmentation of African family structures was a deliberate tool of colonial disempowerment.

The choice of materials—wood and metal—amplifies these thematic concerns. Wood evokes rootedness, tradition, and life; metal signifies endurance, rupture, and resilience. Together, they form a dialectic of continuity and change.

Obot’s work also intersects with a broader Pan-African visual epistemology. His engagement with Nsibidi finds resonance in Ditema tsa Dinoko—a constructed featural syllabary developed in Southern Africa to represent the phonetics of Bantu languages such as Sesotho, isiZulu, and Xitsonga. Also known in isiXhosa as isiBheqe soHlamvu, this script is inspired by the ideographic traditions of litema, where patterned mural paintings encode narratives of land, lineage, and spirituality.

Likewise, the Ndebele mural tradition—practised primarily by women—offers a language of colour, geometry, and resistance. These murals, painted even during forced removals under apartheid, are not mere decoration but symbolic affirmations of identity, continuity, and communal autonomy.

By drawing these traditions into dialogue, Spirits & Souls constructs a Pan-African cartography of knowledge systems—stretching from West to Southern Africa, from oral tradition to visual archive, from the sacred to the domestic. Obot’s sculptures are more than art objects; they are mnemonic devices, ancestral witnesses, and aesthetic archives.

As Chinua Achebe reminds us: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” In Spirits & Souls, Obot offers the voice of the lion—through wood, through metal, through form—restoring African knowledge, love, and spirituality as central to the story of now. 

References

Achebe, C. 2002. Home and Exile. Oxford University Press.

Okeke-Agulu, C. 2017. Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Duke University Press.

Mphahlele, E. 1962. The African Image. Faber & Faber.

Ndiba, A.L. 2009. The Semiotics of Nsibidi Writing. Journal of African Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 123–139.

Ralarala, M.K. 2019, et al. African Language Media: From Grassroots to Mainstream. UCT Press, 

Van Wyk, Gary. 1988. Ndebele: A People and Their Art. Abrams.

Chepape Makgato is an independent artist, freelance arts writer and chief curator at William Humphreys Art Gallery. He also serves as a deputy chairperson of the South African Museums Association Central (Free State and Northern Cape provinces region) He is currently completing his PhD in Art and Music Department at the University of South Africa. He is a Research Fellow of Department of Heritage Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Sol Plaatje.