The young lady’s first solo exhibition, featuring paintings, will be on for a week at Nike Art Gallery, Lekki, Lagos .After over a decade of building her career through several group art exhibitions and fulltime studio practice, Olawunmi Banjo takes a step further to consolidate on her achievement. This much she does with her first solo art exhibition titled ‘Mind Revolution’, showing at the Nike Art Centre, Lekki from November 1 to 7.
Speaking on the show and its goals, Banjo stated that it is tailored towards re-orientating the mindsets of people towards progressiveness, and how creative minds and ideas in Nigeria and Africa at large can be empowered.
She said: “If people start to develop the initiative of thought to invest adequately in creative mind resources and ideas, then attention will be a bit deviated from focusing mainly on natural resources.
“From my observation as an artist, I have discovered that many creative talents are discouraged and frustrated in attaining their creative potential due to the lack of adequate structures and sufficient support. Our best export is human resources and capital. On a daily basis, we export our best and finest minds that we sorely need for our overall development.”
The artist explained that Africa should quit being the largest consumer of global innovations, and our ideas should be part of the global market and contribute relevant innovations for global consumption.
She noted that many intellectuals and creative minds have left, and some are even still leaving the continent due to a lack of appreciation of their creativity in their home countries.
“They are adding enormous value to other continents. People from other continents observe us, create basic solutions to our problems, and then they eventually sell those solutions back to us. We have not taken a step backwards to notice the intellectual decadence we’re swimming in,” she said.
Regarding her interest in art, she disclosed that: “art is my passion and is the medium that I use to create my ideas, add value, and convey messages to the people. I am very optimistic about the development of Africa; in my works, I infuse the mindset needed to achieve this. I have found surrealism and realism useful in depicting my ideas. This enables people who view my works to grasp the embedded message in each piece.
“I am influenced mostly by things I see, experience, and feel. Most of my new body of artwork takes a mental depiction of the real world and the realities of some aspects of life. I mostly talk about the mind, which is one of the most profound mechanisms for either positive change or total destruction of the globe. Seeing that, the first thing that can be changed in the world is the mindset of an individual and how he perceives himself and his environment, then the next person, his society, and the world at large.”
Some of the works that will be shown during the exhibition include ‘Hidden Potential’ that speaks to people who do not explore their inner-mind abilities’; ‘Conscious Break’, which encourages non-conformity to societal ideologies and structures that keep people bound in thoughts and decisions and ‘Consciously Thriving’, a painting that affirms that a conscious mind survives and thrives in seemingly hopeless situations.
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