Beauty as Protest: The Politics of Softness in Contemporary African Art
By Gloria Adegboye
Beauty has been called indulgent, distracting, and it has been disdained for being decorative; as though the act of making something beautiful in a broken world were an evasion of truth. Yet, what if beauty is not merely an escape, but a way of surviving and thriving? What if its gentleness and loveliness is not weakness, but a form of strength, so steady it goes unnoticed?
What if it could stand where anger falters, and could mend where words cannot reach?
In the landscape of contemporary African art, beauty is no longer the afterthought to protest. It has become the protest itself. Across canvases, textiles, installations, and gestures, artists are discovering that tenderness can be a political act and that grace can stand shoulder to shoulder with resistance. Artists are reaching for softness as a counterpoint to the violence that has defined so much of Black representation. Their gestures are not loud, yet they reverberate deeply and insist that care is a radical thing in a world shaped by violence.
Beauty’s power is one that lingers. It invites us into presence, into slowness: a kind of meditative seeing that disrupts the speed and spectacle of our time. To dwell in beauty is to resist the erasure of what is soft, feminine, emotional, or tender: qualities too often dismissed in dominant narratives of strength.
Blossoming (2025) by Deborah Segun (Image Courtesy of the L’Appartement)
This turn toward beauty rejects the expectation that African and diasporic art must perform trauma to be seen. Instead, it claims the right to stillness: to dream, to adorn, to find divinity in the everyday. The artists working within this quiet rebellion understand that the aesthetic can also be ethical: that how we look, touch, or create can reorient the very idea of what it means to exist.
This is the quiet but profound movement shaping the work of African and diasporic artists: one that reclaims aesthetics as a mode of truth-telling; where beauty is no longer treated as an afterthought to politics but as its pulse. It professes that the decorative is not empty, and that adornment can be armour. It holds grief and grace in the same breath, binding what was fractured into something luminous.
And through this lens, beauty becomes both sanctuary and stance.
Within this language of softness, the works of artists like Rita Mawuena Benissan, Adulphina Imuede and Ashiata Shaibu-Salami, and Deborah Segun breathe deliberately, and find space to reimagine what resistance can look like. It’s poised and unhurried, yet behind their serenity is a kind of knowing. They remind us that beauty is a threshold: a way of moving through pain toward something whole, toward the light.
Rita Mawuena Benissan’s The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold
Beauty, in this sense, is not just what pleases the eye, it is what insists on visibility, dignity, and remembrance. It gathers fragments of the past and holds them tenderly, revealing that restoration, too, can be a form of resistance. In Rita Mawuena Benissan’s exhibition, The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold, at Gallery 1957, London, (14th October – 20th December, 2025), beauty becomes both armour and offering, and an act of restoration taking place.
Rita turns her gaze toward colonial-era photographs of Ghanaian royals and subjects; images long suspended in the stillness of black-and-white archives across Europe and the United States. Through recolouring, embroidery, and sculptural intervention, she breathes light, brightness and beauty back into these figures, transforming what was once documentation into ceremony. With gold, crimson, ochre and indigo (amongst other colours), her palette becomes a language of rebirth.
Source Photograph: Basel Mission Archives
Reimagined Work: “Man of the Cloth” (2025), Embroidery on Canvas, 200 x 162cm (Image Courtesy of Gallery 1957).
With stitch, shimmer, and scale, each decision in Rita’s process carries both tenderness and charge. Through her work with Ghanaian artisans, she layers digital precision with handmade devotion, merging technology with heritage. What emerges are portraits that glow with quiet authority: faces no longer flattened by the colonial gaze, but re-seen in their dignity and divinity.
Even the sculptural umbrellas, as they fold and rest like guardians, speak to this philosophy of still power. Their stillness is not absence, but presence held in pause, echoing the posture of the ancestral and the eternal.
In The Ones Before Her Were Covered in Gold, beauty becomes an act of recovery. It gathers what was fragmented, reweaves it with care, and returns it shining. The gold that covers her subjects is not decoration but declaration, it is a reminder that grace itself can be political, and that the aesthetic gesture, when guided by memory, can heal what history sought to erase.
Deborah Segun
In Deborah Segun’s work, softness is a way of rebuilding the self through form and colour. Her figures, often fragmented and stylized, stand in deliberate repose: serene, balanced, yet charged with quiet assertion. The calm that envelops her compositions is not emptiness but intention: a space where identity gathers and reforms.
Deborah adopts a Cubist-like approach to painting. Her bodies are made of planes and arcs, her faces simplified to the point of abstraction; yet within that lies intimacy. Like a sculptor of emotion, she builds the feminine figure out of geometry, offering not distortion but redefinition. In exaggerating silhouettes, Deborah reclaims a visual language historically used to fragment or fetishize women, particularly Black women, and turns it inward, toward healing. Through form and reduction, she recenters the Black female body as a locus of intellect, interiority, and calm.
Beautiful Beginnings (2025) by Deborah Segun (Image Courtesy of the L’Appartement)
Her recent exhibition A Moment to Myself (Saatchi Gallery/BEERS London) reflects this inner turn. Indeed, her work reads like a diary of becoming, and her paintings use beauty to bear that tension: the sense of a woman, and an artist, in constant negotiation with herself.
In a world that still demands spectacles of visibility, pain and performance from the Black body, Deborah’s refusal is radical. Her figures are not performing; they are being. Through composure, she asserts sovereignty. Her art becomes a form of protest and a declaration that the self, in all its tenderness, is enough.
Deborah’s art, then, stands as both mirror and manifesto within the politics of softness. It affirms that beauty need not be loud to be transformative, nor aggressive to be powerful. Her reductive aesthetic is not absence, but fullness controlled. In her work, beauty becomes a language of resistance, a method of repair, and a politics of grace.
Delicate Things and A Place Called There by Adulphina Imuede and Ashiata Shaibu-Salami
Delicate Things and A Place Called There, a joint exhibition by Adulphina Imuede and Ashiata Shaibu-Salami at the Wunika Mukan Gallery, Lagos (2025), turns inward, tracing how beauty dwells in vulnerability.
Bringing together Adulphina Imuede and Ashiata Shaibu-Salami, it reveals how fragility can hold strength and how the delicate gesture can become a declaration. Through the vulnerability of their materials and the intimacy of their imagery, both artists trace the contours of transformation, reminding us that softness too is a site of power.
In Adulphina Imuede’s practice, the body, especially the head, becomes a vessel of destiny and identity, echoing African cosmologies in which the head carries the essence of personal becoming. Working across watercolour, acrylic, ink, oil, gouache and pastels, Imuede negotiates between precision and fluidity, between what is held and what is released. Her return to paper feels symbolic: a surface once fragile now layered, sculptural, and enduring.
The Delicate Things and A Place Called There Exhibition (Image Courtesy of the Wunika Mukan Gallery).
Ashiata Shaibu-Salami’s paintings, in turn, move with intensity and stillness. Her figures, rendered in rich acrylics and textured collages, inhabit dreamlike spaces where emotion and spirituality converge. Her palette, deep, layered, and contemplative, carries the pulse of inner life. Drawing from mythology, faith, and personal history, she transforms pain into reflection and isolation into sanctuary. Through her imagery, the mind becomes landscape, and nature becomes a metaphor for renewal.
Adulphina and Ashiata create a shared space of tenderness. Their works meet in the liminal space between what has been carried and what is yet to come. They speak to the quiet persistence of becoming: the soft work of healing, remembering, and reimagining. In this way, Delicate Things and A Place Called There reveals a transformative beauty.
Lastly
The power of beauty lies in how it asks us to look longer, to stay with what shimmers beneath the surface.
In doing so, it disrupts the very systems that profit from our drain and the world’s fascination with pain. To choose beauty now, in this cultural moment, is to choose attention and care. And these, when offered with tenderness, are radical.
