Gestures, Grid, Bodies, Placards, and Fragments by Adekunle Ogunleke

Curatorial Statement 

This exhibition presents a body of abstract figurative paintings that confront the representation of protest, civil unrest, and political resistance in contemporary visual culture. At its core, the work interrogates how such events are framed, mediated, and often diminished within mainstream narratives. Across global contexts, including Sudan, Nigeria, Congo, Gaza, Kenya, and the United States, the paintings explore not only the urgency of protest but also the fragility of how these moments are seen, remembered, or forgotten. 

Instead of offering direct representation, the works employ abstraction as both a formal strategy and a conceptual necessity. Protest, by nature, is dense, chaotic, and emotionally charged, and it resists simplification. Yet media systems frequently reduce it to fragments: a single image, a headline, a moment stripped of context. These paintings respond to that reduction not by restoring clarity, but by embracing fragmentation, asking what it means to represent something that is already distorted. 

The visual language of the exhibition is built upon a tension between order and disruption. A recurring grid structure spans the canvases, segmenting space into rigid compartments. Historically associated with modernist abstraction, the grid is reconfigured here as a metaphor for surveillance, control, and the bureaucratic framing of reality. It echoes the systems political, institutional, and technological that determine visibility: what is shown, what is cropped, and what is erased. Within and against this structure, gestural marks erupt. These marks, raw, expressive, and often chaotic, interrupt the grid’s authority and evoke the presence of bodies in motion, the energy of collective action, and the emotional intensity of dissent. Where the grid imposes control, gesture insists on resistance, and the painting becomes a site of struggle between these opposing forces. 

The structure of the paintings operates as both architecture and argument. Extruded grid forms create depth, dividing the surface into layered compartments that resemble screens or data fields. These structures guide and restrict the viewer’s movement across the canvas, preventing a single unified perspective. Instead, vision is interrupted, redirected, and fragmented. This spatial organization mirrors the conditions through which protest is encountered in contemporary media, where events are mediated through partial views, cropped frames, and controlled narratives. 

Figures emerge within this tension, though rarely in complete form. Bodies are fragmented, faces obscured, and gestures interrupted. This partial visibility reflects the precarious position of individuals within systems that render them anonymous, whether through media representation, state violence, or historical omission. Protesters appear not as fixed identities but as traces, evidence of presence that cannot be fully contained. Textual fragments drawn from protest placards and chants move across the compositions. Phrases such as “End the Siege,” “Stop Killing Women,” or “We Won’t Back Down” appear and dissolve within the painted field. Their legibility is often disrupted, mirroring the ways in which political speech is mediated, censored, or reframed. These words function not simply as messages, but as echoes of collective voices that persist despite suppression. 

Each painting engages with a specific geopolitical context, however the exhibition resists presenting these events as isolated or self contained. Instead, it constructs a transnational dialogue around shared conditions: displacement, resistance, censorship, and the struggle for visibility. The Sudanese civil war, the EndSARS protests in Nigeria, the prolonged conflict in Congo, the Great March of Return in Gaza, feminist protests in Kenya, and immigration struggles in the United States are not treated as distant crises but as interconnected sites within a global landscape of power and dissent. 

In this sense, the works function as fractured archives. They do not document events in a conventional manner, nor do they attempt to provide complete narratives. Instead, they preserve fragments visual, textual, and emotional that resist closure. This approach draws attention to the gaps within official histories and the silences embedded in dominant forms of representation. The exhibition is also in dialogue with art historical traditions, extending the legacy of history painting into the present moment. Influences from Baroque dynamism, Romantic intensity, and Abstract Expressionist gesture converge within a contemporary framework. Yet unlike traditional history painting, which often sought to stabilize meaning, these works deliberately destabilize it, refusing resolution and reflecting the ongoing and unresolved nature of the events they engage. 

This exhibition asks viewers to reconsider their role as spectators. To look is not a neutral act; every act of seeing is shaped by structures; cultural, political, and technological that influence interpretation. By interrupting visual coherence, the paintings challenge passive viewing and require active participation. Meaning must be reconstructed from fragments, just as understanding must be reconstructed from incomplete narratives. In this space between visibility and obscurity, control and resistance, silence and voice, the paintings assert that what is missing is as significant as what is shown. They do not seek to resolve the tensions they present; instead, they hold them in place, insisting that the complexity of protest, memory, and human experience cannot be reduced without consequence.