For its final exhibition of the year, O’DA Art presents Others, a meditative exploration of materiality, transformation, and the expanding language of object-making within contemporary African art. Occupying the transitional space between sculpture, craft, and installation, the exhibition turns deliberately away from the canvas to foreground practices rooted in wood, ceramic, and plexiglass. In doing so, Others proposes a widening of the frame; a space for the tactile, the dimensional, and the unexpected.
At the centre of this presentation is a collective enquiry into how form can carry history, memory, and emotion outside the plane of paint and surface; how objects become vessels of presence.
Boma Joe Jim unveils a striking new direction in his sculptural practice. Known primarily for figuration and narrative-driven forms, he departs here into abstraction, allowing curvature, void, and rhythm to lead. These works ranging from wall hung compositions to intimate tabletop structures reveal a sharpened sensitivity to balance and movement, suggesting bodies without bodies, and stories without characters.
Alongside this, Djakou Kassi Nathalie offers a series of miniature ceramic and wood works that embody restraint and delicacy. Her pieces, often no larger than a hand, invite close attention. Rooted in traditional techniques yet open to experimentation, they evoke architecture, protection, and the sanctity of small forms. In their scale, they ask us to reconsider the monumental.
Completing the triad, Isaac Emokpae introduces an expanded ensemble that now includes both his signature plexiglass works and a series of bronze family pieces. The plexiglass works which reference hand fans rendered in a stained-glass aesthetic invite light to become both collaborator and subject, shifting across layers, refracting colour, and activating memory. In contrast, the bronze pieces ground his practice in weight and permanence, evoking lineage, intimacy, and the quiet symbolism of familial bonds. Together, these works, at once playful and devotional, hold a dynamic tension between translucence and solidity, spirit and form.
Taken together, Others foregrounds the material as a site of possibility and reinvention. It reflects O’DA Art’s ongoing commitment to artists who expand the field, who insist that the story of contemporary art in Africa is not bound to medium, format, or expectation, but thrives in the margins, experiments, and the quiet risks taken out of sight.
In this final gesture of the year, we celebrate the many forms that exist beyond the frame and the artists who make space for them.
Obida Obioha
Curator
