Untitled Miami: Miami | USA
This year, AFIKARIS brings together four artists from West and Central Africa: Ozioma Onuzulike, Matthew Eguavoen, Saïdou Dicko and Hervé Yamguen, whose works reflect on care as a vital force that connects us to one another and to the world around us.
Through sculpture, photography and mixed media, they explore the many forms care can take: protection, solidarity, resilience, memory and collective responsibility. Rooted in personal experiences, cultural traditions and relationships between humans and the living world, their practices reveal care as a gesture passed between generations, a bond that holds communities together, and a way of inhabiting the world through attention and connection.
Across the exhibition, care emerges not simply as an act of protection, but as a shared condition of being, where caring for one another also means caring for the wider world we inhabit.
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Ozioma Onuzulike (born 1972, Achi, Nigeria; lives and works in Nsukka, Nigeria) revisits the shield, a powerful symbol throughout African societies. Traditionally an object of defence, identity and communal belonging, it becomes in the Shield Series a contemporary metaphor for survival in a fractured world. Constructed from ceramic palm kernel shell beads, chain-mail structures and recycled copper wire, these fragile yet resilient forms evoke the social bonds that hold communities together amid political, environmental and cultural challenges. For Ozioma Onuzulike, protection is never an individual condition, it emerges from collective structures, from the ties that connect one person to another.
Those invisible bonds take on a more embodied form in the work of Matthew Eguavoen (born 1988, Benin City, Nigeria; lives and works between France and Nigeria). Drawing on the symbolism of laamb, the traditional Senegalese wrestling practice, Matthew Eguavoen explores protection through strength, dignity and collective endurance. His wrestlers, adorned in ceremonial attire and sacred earth, embody both physical and spiritual resilience. While the arena becomes a stage where struggles for recognition and self-determination are played out, the artist pays equal attention to the moments that surround the fight: preparation, reflection and communal support. These scenes reveal that no struggle is faced alone. Sustained by culture, history and community, protection emerges here as a shared responsibility, passed from one generation to the next.
From these collective and intergenerational forms of protection, the presentation turns to the formative experiences through which care is first learned. Saïdou Dicko (born 1979, Dori, Burkina Faso; lives and works between Paris and Ouagadougou) approaches protection through memory and childhood experience. Inspired by his early years as a Fulani shepherd, his painted photographs evoke moments of play, companionship and discovery. Children, cousins and friends appear caring for one another as well as for the animals that accompany them, instinctively learning responsibility and solidarity through everyday life. Rooted in personal memory yet universal in resonance, Dicko's work suggests that protection begins long before it becomes a social value: it is first experienced through shared gestures, mutual attention and the bonds that connect individuals to one another and to their environment.
This attention to the relationships that connect humans to one another and to their environment expands further in the work of Hervé Yamguen (born 1971, Douala, Cameroon; lives and works in Douala), where protection extends beyond human relationships altogether. His bronze sculptures, inhabited by hybrid human, animal and plant figures, celebrate the interconnectedness of all living beings. Through processes of metamorphosis and communion, Yamguen proposes a vision of care rooted in coexistence, where humanity is inseparable from the wider living and spiritual world. The protection of one becomes inseparable from the protection of all.
PRACTICAL INFORMATION:
Ocean Drive and 12th Street, Miami Beach, FL
