Sixty-five years ago this month, Nigeria gained full independence from the British Empire. It marked a period of enormous cultural fecundity in which artists sought to create a new visual language reflective of the developing West African country: one that embraced indigenous culture, tradition and the buzz of modern life — all while reckoning with, and resisting, its fraught colonial past.
It is this “Renaissance era”, as the artist and theorist Uche Okeke described it, that forms the backdrop to Nigerian Modernism, a rich new exhibition at Tate Modern that occasionally veers into overwhelm with its more than 50-strong gaggle of artists, a handful of whose works fall into kitsch territory.
