This depicts the last day of the civil war in Nigeria.
Capturing the angst and aspirations of a culture caught in an inescapable loop of history. Conceived from 2022, the artwork represents the distillation of exhaustive research and deeply personal reflections into a monumental canvas—a kind of cartography of cultural memory. With each brushstroke, I've woven a rich tapestry of unspoken narratives, punctuated by potent symbols: a flag occupying the upper-right corner serves as both a mournful elegy and a defiant anthem, a burning figure stands as a visceral monument to our collective suffering, and Nsibidi inscriptions imbue the tableau with a lexical subtext, acknowledging a linguistic heritage too often suppressed.
This work confronts cultural silence, spotlighting forgotten atrocities to disrupt present-day cycles. It's a demanding reconciliation—a call to confront, understand, and perhaps, finally move on. The canvas, my largest yet, doesn't portray; it insists: This happened.
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