Africa carves out its own renaissance

Sixty-five years ago this month, Nigeria gained full independence from the British Empire.

-  Anny Shaw

It marked a period of enormous cultural fecundity in which artists sought to create a new visual language reflective of the developing West African country: one that embraced indigenous culture, tradition and the buzz of modern life-all while reckoning with, and resisting, its fraught colonial past.

It is this "Renaissance era", as the artist and theorist Uche Okeke described it, that forms the backdrop to Nigerian Modernism, a rich new exhibition at Tate Modern that occasionally veers into overwhelm with its more than 50-strong gaggle of artists, a handful of whose works fall into kitsch territory.

In fact the exhibition begins before independence, at the turn of the century, with an eclectic grouping loosely connected by their concern with portraiture. There are penetrating photographs by Jonathan Adagogo Green, one of Africa's first professional photographers, of deposed chiefs in full ceremonial garb alongside miniature thorn carvings by Justus D Akeredolu from the 1930s. They are paired with paintings by Aina Onabolu, a pioneer who opted for the imported technique of easel painting over the classical forms of Ife and Benin sculpture to express academic realism. It is a thought-provoking, if scattered, introduction to the exhibition: a primer for what is to come.

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