O’DA Art Gallery is proud to present Marks of Our Future Past, the debut solo exhibition by Lagos-based artist Soji Adesina, featuring a commanding body of work that transforms ancient scarification and drawing practices into contemporary visual language. Representing a distinct evolution of his work, Adesina transcends his acclaimed portraiture and vivid deployment of colour to examine how memory, heritage and identity resonates across generations. Working between two distinct series—Cicatrix and Ife Dialogues—the Lagos-born artist reveals how ancestral marks become maps for navigating our present moment.
Through graphite, charcoal and careful use of negative space, Adesina foregrounds line as both medium and meaning. His refined visual language reveals that the marks of our past are not museum pieces but living systems that help us understand not just where we came from, but where we are going. In Adesina's hands, ancestral practices become contemporary tools for psychological and spiritual navigation, proving that the deepest cultural marks are always marks of our future past.
In the Cicatrix series, scarification becomes a contemporary visual language that merges personal memory with ancestral reference. Hair is rendered as cloud-like afros, magnifying Black hair's natural beauty while recalling the artist's memory of his sister's soft, liberated hair. Deliberately distorted proportions—thickened necks, emaciated facial planes, deep-set eyes—evoke the monumental brass heads of Ife that scholars like Suzanne Blier and Henry Drewal have traced through Yoruba court traditions. But Adesina's reference is not simply historical. Scarification marks trace personal and cultural biography, inscribing history and identity onto living forms. Faces worked with intricate line and shadow often border on the gargoyle-like, a deliberate shock that privileges meaning over conventional beauty. As the artist notes, "the larger portions of any figure indicate power." These works reclaim African aesthetics and counter colonial narratives with fierce dignity.
The Ife Dialogues series takes a different approach to the same urgent question: how do we read the marks that connect us across time? Here, dense cross-hatchings and tonal gradations model head portraits that recall topographical studies. Rather than debating the 700-year genealogy of Ife mark-making—sometimes outlawed, later reinstated by successive kings—Adesina treats the lines themselves as primary organizing principles. Single, double, or triple marks arranged horizontally or vertically, sometimes radiating like whiskers from the lips, become compositional tools that preserve sculptural and emotional presence.
The heads appear in profile, three-quarter view, and full face. Some figures are bald, others retain subtle traces of hair. Mouths left slightly open, eyes occasionally closed, yet no visible extremes of emotion. This restraint suggests interior psychological states where stillness itself contains feeling. These are not specific individuals but composite, mature figures whose emotional lives emerge through projected calm.
What Adesina conjures through such restraint forms the connecting thread between historical artifacts and contemporary identity in 21st-century Lagos. He removes these works from museum presentations and anthropological studies to reveal their psychological complexity. Cultural continuity spans centuries, but underlying it lies emotional complexity, resilience, and psychological depth that only the right artistic approach can illuminate.
Marks of Our Future Past speaks to this precise moment when heritage becomes prophecy. In a time when cultural identity faces constant negotiation, Adesina's marks function as both archaeological evidence and future blueprint. The scarifications and cross-hatchings that define his visual language suggest that our ancestors' marks were never just decorative. They were technologies for encoding resilience, dignity and continuity into the very surface of being.
