THOSE

THAT
WERE
CRUSHED
 An exhi bi ti on of i nks and meta l s

MUYIWA
A K I N WOLERE 22. 0 4. 1 8 - 0 5 . 0 5 . 1 8

CU RATED BY MICHAEL EN EJISO N

T H O S E T H AT WERE CRU SH ED
A WHITESPACE LAGO S, IKOYI LAGO S, N IGERI A
FOREWORD
Those Who Were Crushed
Uzodinma Iweala
I first encountered Muyiwa Akinwolere’s work during a time of intense transition in my life. I had
just moved to Abuja from New York, and found myself often at the Salamander Cafe contemplating
the meaning of this intensely beautiful and frustrating country we all call Nigeria. I was immedi-
ately struck by Muyiwa’s angular, almost comic book like paintings of Nigerian scenes, a refreshing
and interesting perspective in an artistic sea of younger expressions, that often feel like a mimicry
of the old Nigerian masters. After purchasing my first work by Muyiwa, I was introduced to the art-
ist, a man about my age with a closely shaved head, a goatee and intensely engaged stare.
Muyiwa Akinwolere, whom I met almost five years ago was the absolute antithesis of the aloof and
distant painter. We immediately launched into a deep conversation, that touched on the intense
relationship between art and politics, his words as fine a form of expression as his brush strokes
of oil and acrylic.
Nigerians are not known for our silence. We are a wildly vocal bunch, unafraid to express our opin-
ions — just witness the multitudes that appear as if from nowhere to offer instructions when you
are trying to park. This one will say “straight your hand”, that one will shout “turn am, turn am,
turn am” while someone at a distance shakes his head disapprovingly. The confusion is both en-
tertaining and distracting, at times counterproductive. The same is true when we discuss our com-
plicated and frustrating political condition. At every moment, from Senators to market women, to
area boys, has something to say about the decades of malaise that grips our political class and its
resulting impact on the long suffering masses. The shouts of anger and lamentations of suffering
are loud and enduring, but when I finally leave the streets, and sit in darkness permeated by the
death rattle of a generator, I’m often left with the question, “is anybody really listening?”
In the silent haunting figures of Muyiwa’s show, Those That Were Crushed, we can finally tell Ni-
gerians that they have been heard. A collection of abstractions and intense portraits in ink, water-
color and mixed media the works in Those That Were Crushed cut to the heart of Nigeria’s political
frustration and situate it firmly in the realm of our current and widespread global political turmoil.
Like the political process and its after effects on us, the unsuspecting but ever engaged and ever
hopeful and ever disappointed masses, Muyiwa’s works are beautifully unsettling.
The swirls of color presented to us in “Internally Displaced”, the haunting shapes semi-profiled in
“Army of the Unemployed”, the comically frustrated squatters of “Shithead”, the paired but ever
separated lovers in Muyiwa’s colorful diptych “Butterflies” are all manifestations of a creative
mind that listens intently to what the world around him is saying and then reflects the hope, pain,
love and longing that are the very essence of our humanity in the most perilous of times.
If Muyiwa’s curved brush strokes seem like the search for answers, it is because Nigerians are
searching for answers. If his bold colors dazzle, it is because the common folk he depicts in ab-
stract form inspire, in spite of the difficult conditions that entrap them. Those That Were Crushed
is not a sentimental celebration of poverty and hardship, but rather a concerted effort to show
that truly listening to the surrounding chaotic world often means responding with illustrative si-
lence. In this silence we can truly feel the weight of a collapsing world and the strength of those
who labor day after day to give it shape.
I hope you too will feel the silence that I am proud and privileged to present in Muyiwa Akin-
wolere’s Those That Were Crushed.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Those Who Were Crushed
Muyiwa Akinwolere

The world is at a tipping point. Things are falling apart and the centre can no longer hold. Peace, as
a commodity is in very short supply across the globe. We have succeeded in improving the quality
of life through the advancement of technology, doubled the speed at which we send and receive
information, and developed stem cells to cure various types of diseases. Business and commerce
have also taken on a whole new dimension, increasing the per capital base of many businesses.
Yet, we have not been able to apply technology in achieving global peace. It has been used to fuel
conflicts in potential hot spots instead. This stirs up a lot of questions.

i. Who really are the victims of war? The victor or the vanquished? (The lines have been blurred
these days about what this means) Who are the casualties of war? Cain or Abel? capitalism or
socialism? fundamentalists or constituted governments or the people? The rich or the poor? The
warmongers or the peacemakers? Who really are the casualties?

ii. Who do conflicts benefit? Who benefits when people are up against themselves in arms? To
whose credit is the prolonged feud between the herdsmen and farming communities in Sub-Sahara
Africa? My intention is not to answer these questions.
I have set out to create these bodies of work in other to raise more questions. Those That Were
Crushed is my commentary on the politics of war and the aftermath.

In making Those That Were Crushed, I experimented with antique ink and pigments. The ink draw-
ings are a continuation of my socio-political commentaries. I have chosen this route because I
believe there is a need for a fluid vocabulary to communicate these rather troubling realities.

Jawjaw/ Warwar II, 2015. Antique ink on board, 77x 64 cm

“Art does not reproduce what is visible, it makes things visible.”

Paul Klee, Creative Credo (1920)

Fighting Temptation I. Antique ink on paper. 102 x 72 cm

Fighting Temptation II. Antique ink on paper. 102 x 72 cm
IT IS WE ALL THAT WERE CRUSHED
Michael Enejison

Not all of us will or have witnessed the disasters and misfortunes of terrorism, religious intolerance and the
crises of immigration. Not all of us have been caught up in environmental abuse or resource misappropria-
tion. Not all of us have had our children leave for school only to be told an ambiguous tale of abduction, rape,
sabotage, death or nonexistence. Not all of us will be caught in the misfortune of occasional explosions with
body parts dismembered and souls absent to tell the tale of loud echoing pains.
But all of us are involved in the circumstance rocking our age in shared humanity. If our humanity is shared
what or how do we experience the pains that are remote to us? Or how do we react to an experience we only
have a hearsay of, through visuals and or frequencies of modulation?
In 2015, I visited my mother in a suburb of the FCT. She took me around her farm. She pointed at her lat-
est acquisition, as she explained how she got it, the excitement fizzled out of her tone like dead smoke. She
had gotten the farm from a neighbour who had fled Chibok to the FCT. But now the neighbour had to leave
because her husband had an accident and needed to recuperate at home with his family. Home is Chibok. It
triggered a shocking thought: Chibok is home, a place we unconsciously forebode.
This was my closest encounter with Chibok, through my mother, then her farmland, then a neighbour. A piece
of farmland led my experienced to a nation’s tremor. Through it all, through all the reports we got from the
news, I lived in Port Harcourt, and even though I grew up in the north, my family lived there at the time. The
situation seemed farfetched to my experience, irrespective of the media dispersed. Now facing a real story,
a real circumstance I can hardly call it gain or loss. I’m reminded of a scene in Chimamanda Adichie’s novel,
Half of a Yellow Sun where a stubborn mother of the protagonist refused to run from her home because of
the invading army, insisting she will die in her home, beside her dead husband in honour and conviction. That
is a strong statement of sharing in suffering and hardship and a bold, aggressive definition if home. Home
could be Chibok, home could be Kaduna, Nnewi, Aluu, Ikot Abasi or Akure. Home could be anywhere, and
the brave insist on home.
Internally displaced persons, 2015. Antique in on paper, 72 x 50 cm
Yet, Port Harcourt was no haven; it gave no immunity to a variety of a social menace that rocked a nation. The
agitation in the Niger Delta for resource appropriation and the subsequent sense of that, has morphed the
youths in the region into a people that demanded remuneration without pay.
This scenario begs us to define being human. How much or how close will we ever be to those that were
crushed? How can we tangibly relive a phenomenon that is farfetched? How can we awaken our empathy
and perhaps take a stand or make a difference in the smallest way?
Enter an artist with a deliberate distraction in method, medium and ideology in prior practice. Muyiwa Akin-
wolere has been able to sense the pulse of the society than any physician can. Living in a world of dreams,
the artists connects easier to the unavoidable consequence of ephemeral phenomenon. Therefore, he has
been defiant to the norm, protesting a lukewarm community and prescribing solutions for mass drowsiness
and grieving loudly for those that were crushed.
More to his credit is not just sensing the national issues, but also the similitude and relationship he created
through this journey of local and global situation. His vision therefore creates a microcosm of the national
state which is also a microcosm of the global state.
Throughout the two-year journey of making this body of work, Akinwolere has followed the news and al-
lowed himself to be troubled by it, a deliberate vulnerability that helps him transcend sympathy and embrace
empathy and anger for the victims. His followership and immersion into the news is made evident on his
social media posts, in words and occasional visuals. We can hear a man venting loudly and poking the con-
science of the lethargic, a man that has constantly fought the temptation to court lethargy.

The history of Nigeria is ladened with crisis, iterations and episodes that leaves one helpless in articulating
and identifying the emotions that these brings. We are clouded with moment in our recent history that con-
fronts the hopes we have nurtured if we have not discarded them all long time ago.  Such loss of hope can go
so far in affecting our identity. Like a child who is treated cruelly by her parents, we start to ask are these my
parents? Do I belong here? Should I give my allegiance to a nation that cares nothing about me?

Internally displaced persons, 112 x 116 cm Jawjaw/ Warwar I, 2015. Antique ink on board, 77x 64 cm
Two sides of a coin I, 2015. Antique ink on paper. 54 x 76 cm Two sides of a coin II, 2015. Antique ink on paper. 54 x 76 cm

The house that men built, 2016. Mixed media on canvas. 95x 85 cm
HOW DO WE MANAGE TO KEEP IT TOGETHER
Michael Enejison
Consequently, the language of emotional expression can be truncated by distances and culture, thus we are
in need of some sort of aid to connect with our own feeling. It is a hopeless or limiting reality of being human,
that limitation of being unable to access our own feelings.
Akinwolere has come to our rescue. Our recent history can be arguably the most turbulent times of our his-
tory. No aspect of  our nationhood has been left untouched. Religion, education, economy, infrastructure
and natural endowment seem to be in a crisis that is held in a tension that is greater than the force to keep
a people together.
Even though the theme of Muyiwa’s exhibition seem to be set in the past, it is a cautionary venture. To ignore
this caution is to become a fool because only fools play superiority to caution. Within this context is the suc-
cinct situation of Muyiwa’ method and message.
By transforming his own practice as a result of necessity, a necessity which arose from a sense of respon-
sibility, patriotic anguish, challenge, and discomfort. The elements of his metamorphosis and practice are
significant. It bears an epigraph, a token representative for our own national learning and history. It is easy to
dismiss this body of work as a mere caricatured representation. But eventually we will come to embrace the
fact that truth, the kind that confronts and eventually liberate has to be presented in the most pristine and
unadulterated format.
Muyiwa represents a camp of artists that have after a long venture founded an original leitmotif and narra-
tive. The years spent to create the works in this oeuvre, demonstrates this sort of transformation. The house
that men built is quintessential in this narrative of perpetual artistic reinvention and originality. We are the
masons of our destiny either as individuals or as a collective. Since independence, we have been handed over
the reign of our nation to construct an African giant. The expectation was high, and the world hoped that Ni-
geria will be a shining light of what a modern African civilization would be. What kind of house did we build?
It would be too sadistic to claim that we did absolutely bad job. We have built some successes for ourselves
in the arts and some sports but not garnered enough material to affect the self-worth of the representative
Nigerian.
This kind of hiccup success is the kind of house we have yet built and have shown to the other African na-
tions that eagerly look for inspiration from kin nations. The kind of house we built is reflected in the MMM
conundrum, the Ponzi phenomenon. MMM swept the nation like and epidemic and it was easy to make an
alibi with the recession. Average intelligence will agree that actions generate consequences. Why didn’t they
stop to consider the speed of turnover from their so-called investment? Even the religious rationalized it as
God’s manna from heaven. When the crash came, so many were crushed. Those that were crushed in this
were not far from us. But could we have prevented their misfortunes by liberating them from their ignorance.
And couldn’t this be an express illustration that all the ones crushed need to be jolted from slumber with an
aggressive dose of knowledge?
I’ve followed the art and Muyiwa Akinwolere, for ten years now. He awakened more art in me after Claude
Monet did that afternoon in a University library.  When I first met him, he was heavily cubic, talking about
Picasso like a second cousin, he painted western Nigeria everyday scene as if Picasso was in Osogbo. His oils
were very blue, bluer than Picasso’s blue days. His edged were geometric and arrogant and dark. Then like a
helpless child he was seduced deeper into the very culture that gave birth to him, having an affair with Ono-
ism and the Osogobo movement, he seared the artifice lineage with the Spaniard and embraced inks and
earths.
His space was a sprawl of magic, fantasy mythology interlaced with ephemeral pop. He even tried some
dungs as if trying to create immortality from the basest form of mortality.  He invented his own motif and
christened it Adiitu.
That era marked a drastic change in materials and medium. He found relentlessness in experimentation. He
never stopped contemplating themes with metaphoric mediums. Paul Klee made a daring assertion. Muy-
iwa Akinwolere affirmed it. With that invention, Muyiwa has respectfully, consciously and objectively grown
away from Ife’s signature.
He didn’t do this as an ungrateful and renegade disciple of the nest that nurtured him. Adiitu was like a
ranger that led him to the present fluid play of ink and pigments. Sometimes, a visionary man will have to
leave his place of origin and move to start a dream.  
We only know where but not how and why. Eventually our journey becomes the map itself instead of the
map directing our path. Continuously and consciously, Muyiwa’s works point us to the essential and turbu-
lent issues of our time.
In army of the unemployed, Muyiwa presents interwoven characters all unified by a hopeless situation, the
inability to be economically sufficient of one’s self. The title the Army hence creates a paradox which suf-
ficiently communicates the consequence or perhaps the opportunity that confronts a continually growing
population. This army like every other army can devastate and destroy or protect and liberate. The choice
belongs to us- to liberate the army as a force for good or let the army develop into an unhealthy cancer until
it starts eating the society that mindlessly created it. The issues of unemployment, inflation and a growing
population is a hard question we are yet to ask ourselves, perhaps because we know that an honest answer
would lead to confrontation.
The issues of unemployment, inflation and a growing population is a hard question we are yet to ask our-
selves, perhaps because we know that an honest answer would lead to confrontation. Taking cue from his
original affiliation with the rebellious and child artist, Picasso, Muyiwa’s  piece Catching butterflies, resonates
several layers of message and possibilities. The colours in the atmosphere are so rudimentary and sweet,
almost pristine and non-symbolic. The butterflies are flying with a minimal draughtsmanship. Again, one
can easily critique the methods and aesthetics of this artist as a form artistic escapism. But the basic inter-
pretation is balanced with the inventive use of native colours in this pair of portraits. I have observed that
throughout this body of works, Muyiwa has consciously drawn us to balance. Balance is a simple and difficult
notion. Balance, the mastery and non-mastery of it creates the dichotomy between master and non-masters.
Shithead I-VI, 2015. Antique ink on paper. 27 x 28 cm
White Collar, 54 x 76 cm White Collar, 54 x 76 cm
 Red Bus. 119 x 56 cm

Catching butterflies’ fuses balance in theme, technique and even gender corresponds with several other sub-
series in this collection or works. Balance is loud and subtle in two sides of a coin, blue collar/ white collar,
and  jaw jaw war war.
Overall, this new artistic invention of Muyiwa is a reference to how the most pristine aesthetics can speak
with apt clarity than an overload of visual elements.
What is at once fascinating and liberating about this compendium is the new and courageous attempt to
bloat artistic depiction on paper. This fearless temperament is one of the characteristics of artists who are
going to reinvent themselves over and over and continue to delight and inspire us with new perceptions of
living and being human. Many artists have taken the most mundane and cliché medium and brought new
light and possibilities.
Like El Anatsui demonstrated how the mundane objects can create new visions of beauty and reality. Through
this continuous discourse of artistic exploration, we see a trend as Muyiwa bloats out water mediums and hy-
bridizes it with crude native ink from tree barks.  We hope to see more of his reinvention as we contemplate
the beauty and truth and even discomfort that this collection has brought us.
Taking a step away from formal and dogmatic figurative, Akinwolere brings to fore knowledge from a nation in trauma.
Knowledge can be imbibed from a distance, but knowledge not experienced can be shallow, incomplete, with no
significant impression in our soul. For Paul Klee, this kind of knowledge that we hear only of and not experience is a
phenomenon where an artist reproduce what is visible. Imagine a painted scene of immigrants or internally displaced
people. It will probably convey the likeness of travel and forceful ejection, maybe a family with their tiny parceled
belongings on their head. This in no way is poor art. It however has reproduced what is visible. But the transcendent
artist goes beyond that.
Some things are not easily visible and Klee’s declaration about reproducing the visible becomes a starting point for a
new thought. Art does not reproduce what is visible, art should reproduce what is visible. Art journeys to the unknown
and returns to create the invisible.
Now through a journey of almost two decades, Akinwolere has found a language, juxtaposing inks, making a timely lin-
gua franca for the destiny of the Nigerian state. Like his art journey, thework. We have a national destiny and we must
work together to get to it. It is a future we see yet with an unknown path. It lends its voice to Paul Klee’s perception of
art, a metaphor for our national journey. Catching butterflies II, 2015. Antique ink on paper, 54 x 76 cm
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Those That Were Crushed is a satirical labour I undertook in 2015, to illustrate the
gnawing inequalities of society and the politics of oppression. This project would
not have been possible without the tireless contributions of those who worked with
me to ensure its success.

God
Uzo Iweala
Ventures Africa
Victor Ababio
Micheal Enejison - Curator
My Wife and Kids
Rev. Richard Udoh
Pastor Fidelis Okonicha.

Obrigado!!!
 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the
publisher.

Images copyright © Muyiwa Akinwolere

Curated by Michael Enejison
Published in 2018 by A Whitespace Creative Agency

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