Victor Ekpuk
By Briana Ellis-Gibbs
One cannot describe Victor Ekpuk’s art; one must see it. On view at the Princeton University Art Museum through October 8, Victor Ekpuk: Language and Lineage pushes against the boundaries of the Western art world via 30 paintings, drawings, and sculptures incorporating Nsibidi, a system of symbols and proto-writing created by the Ekpe secret society in the southeastern part of Nigeria.
Born in 1964 in Eket, Nigeria, Ekpuk started his career as a graphic designer at the University of Ife, taking classes in textile design, sculpture, and ceramics and went on to specialize in painting. He had learned Nsibidi from his grandfather, who was part of the Ekpe society, and in college, he discovered that the writing system could be a form of abstraction — a way to reduce ideas to their essence.
Between 1990 and 1998, during the dictatorship of General Ibrahim Babangida, Ekpuk worked as an illustrator for the Daily Times, a government-run newspaper in Nigeria. To combat the increasing restrictions placed on the press, he and the rest of the newspaper staff adapted different techniques — including subdued caricatures, subtle satire, metaphors, and Nsibidi — to continue to express their ideas. To this day, Ekpuk’s experience living under the Babangida regime shapes his art practice, which he describes as a way of illustrating the United States’s return to a time when Black people were fighting for civil rights and against police brutality. Since moving to Washington, DC 24 years ago, Ekpuk has analyzed the state of America in unique and innovative artworks exhibited all over the world. In 2021, he presented “State of the Union, Things Have Fallen Apart, Can the Center Still Hold?” at the Phillips Collection, a work inspired by US presidents’ State of the Union addresses each year and William Butler Yeats’s apocalyptic poem The Second Coming (1919).
Ekpuk continues this dialogue at Princeton. “What is America becoming?” the artist said in an interview with Hyperallergic. “What is this land that prides itself on its democracy evolving into?” These are the questions he hopes visitors will ask themselves.
Curatorial Assistant Annabelle Priestley divided the exhibition into four galleries, with the first one, titled Masks, illustrating Ekpuk’s fascination with portraits and the human psyche. “I look at the head not just as a physical head, but as a spiritual or psychic space that is our seat of consciousness,” the artist said. “Mask” (2022), a gold, hand-painted steel sculpture, depicts one half of a face with Nsibidi script covering a portion of the eye; in “Mask Series 1” (2018), black and red Nsibidi symbols in the background enhance the abstracted subject matter.
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