Ayodeji Rotinwa
28 August 2026
At a time when the Black Atlantic is renegotiating its history with itself: Ghana and Benin Republic calling on descendants of enslaved Black people in the Americas to return home; Puerto Rican, Bad Bunny releasing an album with strong Central African influences which made its way across the water thanks to slavery; cultural festivals from Bahia to Lagos; meditations on music, food, art, spectacle, that shows just how much Black people from Africa, the Americas, the Middle East, are rather alike than different.
Nigerian curator, Wunika Mukan is making a case for visual art being part of that conversation. Although Brazil and Nigeria share such deep spiritual, cultural, socio-political ties (Brazilian families and festivals hold sway in Lagos and vice versa) there has not yet been much exploration of those ties, at least in the visual art side of things. The two lost twins are still – shall we say – discovering each other.
Mukan, then, bringing an artist to the shores of Lagos, and mapping out their her(stories), traditions, mores, is adding to a canon (that puts the Black Atlantic in conversation with itself) that’s in desperate need of tending. Soares’ work leaps from the canvas in assured colourful strokes, arresting landscapes construction both real and imagined.
The exhibition itself is brief – there are only seven works chosen – but nonetheless makes a memorable statement. In the economy of work, Mukan’s choices still shine through. She leans into melancholia – selecting scenes of brood, introspection; and in colours and palettes that call back to where Brazil is from. This is a clever – if predictable – choice. The Nigerian art market for all its success and position in the world can be full of fairly unsophisticated collectors who do not wish to be challenged. You say this artist is from Brazil? Where are the works in yellow, blue and green (Brazil’s flag colours) And yet Mukan still makes it work within what could be read as within the safe choices she has made (or has been imposed on her?) We start with the somewhat mystical: “I don’t think I can make it on this earth” and “Woman with swans”, figures in luminous black; with curiously close compatriots in frame – the former, pigeons. The other, swans. Both works – both seemingly hopeful and wondering, clearly bookend the five works in between which lean more into melancholia; in which there’s a runthrough of the colour pink. The works are exhibited as though to follow a conversation in different scenes, here, a woman wondering; there, a man reflecting, another a man resting. The flow of works creates a heightened sensory – and dare I say delicious effect. We are able to recognise that yes, these are works that have more to say and yet are also decidedly beautiful and magnetic in the way they’ve been presented.
The curator’s most striking choice is giving pride of place to “Reflecting is my religion,” a portrait awash in yellow, a man’s head slightly bowed, eyes narrowed, in thought, in trasnit. The painting is the center of the gravity for the entire exhibition, and presented as such. In the Wunika Mukan gallery, you can see all the works in one 360 turn. You can go closer if you like but in front of this work, Mukan makes you stop.
I thought it was such a clever touch and was so moved by it; I purchased this work, even though it was significantly out of the price range of works I can afford. Mukan’s willingness to contribute to the conversation around Black solidarity, cultural continuity across the Atlantics – through visual art; her staging of a visually compelling show, her inventiveness in bringing soon-to-be-beakthrough artists to critical and commercial attention, speaks to her chops as a curator who doesn’t just echo ongoing conversations, she creates them. She sets the agenda. A few months after Mukan showed Soares, another Nigerian gallerist would have Brazilian artists on their roster.
Long may it continue.
