Reflecting on an exhibition where art transcended boundaries, connecting history, ritual, and contemporary expression.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Interstellar, 2025. Watercolour, watercolour pencil, gouache, and ink on premium arches archival paper, 111.76 x 76.2 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Efie Gallery.
‘Dance Will Be You’ was a dialogue with artists practicing art as an act of transcendence, devotion, and freedom, collectively offering a presentation of nuanced explorations into the symbolic and performative dimensions of contemporary African art. At the core of their works lay the notion of multiplicity, where the self became everything, everywhere—between the physical and fictional, tangible and intangible, the within, around, and beyond.
Borrowing its title from Sonia Sanchez’s We a BaddDDD People (1970), the exhibition echoed her reflections on transformative expression and unity. The title reflected the rhythmic and dynamic essence of Sanchez’s poetry, where movement became both a metaphor and a call—a dance that embodied the multiplicity of forms, states of being, and expressions.
Watercolor, gouache, and ink blended into one another in Interstellar, a triptych by María Magdalena Campos-Pons composed of three panels, where the piece unfolded through a layering of techniques, materials, and processes. In it, Campos-Pons navigated the mysteries and depth of celestial spaces. The process itself became a site of multiplicity, where various approaches converged to embody her deep exploration of the divine and the transcendent. This sense of layering extended into her glass work, such as Reservoir for Love #2, where molten glass took on fluid, abstract forms that interplayed with its static qualities and vibrant colors. Campos-Pons’s practice moved fluidly across disciplines, creating bodies of work where materiality became a portal for ancestral and cultural reflections. Rooted in this dynamic interplay, ‘Dance Will Be You’ extended these conversations into broader realms of multiplicity and transcendence.
J.K. Bruce-Vanderpuije’s photographs offered a glimpse into the collective frequencies of ritual and celebration, where gestures of gratitude and remembrance stretched across generations. Liberians in Ghana, dancing and paying homage to the Jamestown stool, Accra, 1960s showed Liberians migrating mid-motion across the image. A raised sword glinted in the light, surrounded by a haze of shadow and fog, faintly pausing the surrounding motion. The photograph was part of a selection from Bruce-Vanderpuije’s archive, documenting Liberians who settled in Jamestown, Ghana, for work and became part of the community’s cultural rhythms. Homowo, meaning “hooting at hunger” in the Ga language, framed this durbar—a celebration of resilience, gratitude, and joy. The festival, celebrated by the Ga people of Ghana, commemorated the end of a historic famine, transforming scarcity into abundance through communal rituals, feasting, and dance. Each year, these gatherings reaffirmed cultural bonds, connecting communities through shared acts of remembrance.
Dina Nur Satti’s ceramics carried this sense of continuity across historical snapshots, informed by her research into pre-colonial African objects and their enduring significance. Her Lotus Series carried the symbolism of the lotus flower—rooted in the mud yet blooming toward light—into vessels that spoke to cycles of transformation and renewal. For Dina, each piece became a vessel of intention, where the act of making connected to histories of ritual and the quiet resilience they embodied. Like the objects she studied, her practice moved fluidly between the spiritual and the functional, bridging ancient knowledge with contemporary expressions of care and reflection.
From the intimate space of Satti’s vessels, Myles Igwebuike’s ECHICHE bench unfolded as both an offering and a meditation. Drawing from the architectural traditions of Igbo Mbari houses—communal dwelling spaces—ECHICHE bridged the spiritual and the functional. Adorned with carved symbols and motifs derived from Igbo cosmology, ECHICHE materialised Igwebuike’s research into how ancestral practices could inform contemporary design. As a site of contemplation, it embodied a delicate balance between stillness and movement, where echoes of devotion and cosmological thought converged with the present. Igwebuike’s work reimagined the Mbari tradition as a portal, threading past and present through the enduring language of form and space.
‘Dance Will Be You’ invited intentional dwelling. Between layers of history and material, it offered a space to reflect on how influences from the African continent and her diaspora adapted and endured, how they reshaped themselves in the present.
The works in the exhibition resisted the temptation to resolve or define. Instead, they invited viewers to move—between forms, between ideas, between worlds. Through the works of Campos-Pons, Bruce-Vanderpuije, Satti, and Igwebuike, audiences glimpsed how multiplicity might guide them to embrace the continuous act of curiosity: as an expansion, a way of being that was infinite and ever-shifting.
The exhibition is on view from the 24th of January until the 20th of March. For more information, please visit Efie Gallery.
