The first time I saw Modupeola Fadugba’s 2017 triptych, Pink Lake: The One that Looked Back, I was taken with the title. I wanted to know more about her art. And to my delight, I found Fadugba works in series and each is a social commentary addressing an issue: cultural identity, justice, gender equality, women’s empowerment, and commercialization in the art world.
Starting in 2014 with a game installation, The People’s Algorithm, Modupeola Fadugba, who was born in Togo in 1985, educated in the US and UK, and is now based in Nigeria, according to her website “attempts to bring Nigeria’s enormous and complex education and unemployment crises into an accessible format. [The game] Ruled by chance and the roll of the dice, players move along a Monopoly-like board, learning facts and proffering solutions to some of the country’s most pressing educational challenges.” In Like Play, Like Play (2016), she explores “play as a form of resistance to the suppression of freedom of expression and other forms of control.”
Of Heads or Tails (2014–2017), she said “I adorn painted coins with the faces of young Nigerian women, reversing social hierarchies that historically have portrayed only men on monetary objects.” In Tagged/Dear Young Artist (2015–2017), she created a series “where swimmers engage in a game to get a red ball, which symbolizes the red stickers placed on sold artworks. I have found this transactional assessment of an artwork’s value to be both an important method of validation and a trap, painting only a partial picture of what it means to thrive as a professional artist.”
While with Synchronized Swimmers (2016–2017), she looks at a situation where the swimmers, like artists, “begin to explore more collaborative ways of being in the water together.” And of Flowers and Prayers (2014–2017), she said “In this series, I return to the questions of faith in oneself and one’s country. Church architecture forms a symbolic framework, and the repetitive geometry of stained glass windows calls to mind the notion of “God’s handiwork.”
Adekemi is a lawyer and writer with a passion for the arts, particularly African art history. She is dedicated to discovering and documenting the most excellent artworks of our time. Follow her on Twitter at adekemitweets.
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