When Egharevba, Akpang, celebrated Creolisation

‘Creolization’, a joint exhibition featuring two academics and artists, Sukanthy Visagapperumal Egharevba and Clem Akpang, held from April 12 to 18 at the Calabar Sports Club, Calabar, Cross Rivers State.

The show gave a visual perspective to the impact of new world in technology and travel, among other global changes.

Ex-Rivers State Governor Rivers State and Minister of Arts and Culture, Brig. Gen. Anthony Ukpo (RTD) opened the exhibition also billed for Lagos and Abuja around June/July.

During the show, Egharevba and Akpang noted that the artworld is currently reconfigured to an age of globalisation. The areas of such global contents that connect the world such as travel, migration, increased communication, technological advancement and cross-cultural meta-influences, the artists said, are all affecting how creative professionals live and produce art.

Paintings, mixed media, installation dated 2020, among others, were pieces exhibited by Egharevba during the opening. Among her works on display were: ‘Visual Momentum’, ‘Feminine perspectives’ and ‘Intertwined’.

Akpang’s works included wood/metal, sculptures,mixed media, art ink and designs. Among such pieces were ‘Sameference III’, ‘Indigenous Modernity’ and ‘Title: Interstice’.

While taking viewers through the exhibits, Egharevba explained that the idea of multiculturalism and identity have taken a direction she described as “conceptual creolization.”

Egharevba, who currently teaches Art at Cross River University of Technology, Calabar noted that artists and designers have stopped seeing the world through the “localized or discipline-specific perspective but with a globalized and multidisciplinary lens as cultures/disciplines continue to merge.”

The theme of the exhibition, according to a jointstatement from the artists explained that “Creolization’ is largely based on translations, subtitling and generalised appropriation of existing cultural forms and visual idioms transformed into new realisms, or on the merging of various genres of expression into a new stylistic vision.”

They further noted “that the crux of contemporary expressionism is defined by aesthetic paradigm, noting that today’s art explores the boundaries between cultures and continents, art and design, art and science.Also included in such explorations, they added, are “the bonds that text and image, form and color, time and space, weave between themselves.”

However, the artists saw all the mentioned factors as new phenomenon and a reflection of a contemporary conceptual movement. In such transition, they explained, artists respond to a new globalised perception, by traversing cultural landscapes and genre specifications saturated with signs, to create current pathways between multiple formats of artistic expression.

Speaking at the opening, Brig-Gen Ukpo affirmed his passion for the creative industry and that exhibitions like ‘Cleorization’ “promote culture and humanity as a whole. That’s why I have a strong liking for artworks and art shows especially as a great art collector.”

Also, during the opening, Akpang, a Senior Lecturer at Department of Visual Arts and Technology, Cross Rivers University of Technology said ‘Creolization’ 2020 presents a visual dialogue around what he described as “theoretical premise.” It’s a factor, of which he noted that “the artworld is experiencing the emergence of a global modernism through travel, cultural exchange, the examination of history, cultural re-invention and the transgression of genre boundaries as profound evolution in our artistic vision of the world today.”

He explained: “The exhibition promotes cultural hybridism, genre intersection and multiple modes of material experimentation re-invented through painting, sculpture, installation and digital arts, as an expression of this new modernity in the contemporary artworld.”

On multiculturalism, Akpang said the contents of the exhibits are rich enough to boost discourse on the subject. “The recontextualisation of Nsibidi, Adinkra, Uli, Tiv and Tamil traditional graphic systems into leitmotifs for modern art to instigate the rethinking of today’s creative and expressive notions (art and design) is a crucial conceptual and methodological feature propagated in this show. With its overarching promotion of appropriation, hybridization and visual translation asa creative viewpoint, this two-man show offers a new kind of gaze on contemporary culture, art, aesthetics and identity as a specific globalized perception hinged on trans-national artistic/cultural dialogue, bridging of traditionalism and contemporaneity, art and design, as well as African and Asian cultural peculiarities.”

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