The Aesthetics of Healing in Contemporary African Art
By Gloria Adegboye
Healing is a quiet but powerful current, a way of making that acknowledges pain while refusing to be defined by it. Artists across the continent and the diaspora are reshaping the visual vocabulary of restoration, transforming their materials into instruments of care. What once carried weight or rupture is now reimagined as texture, colour, and form, the debris of the past becoming the foundation for new ways of being.
To speak of healing in this context is not to romanticize suffering, but to trace how beauty becomes a site of transformation.
These artists do not turn away from fracture; they dwell within it and find language there. Their works remind us that art is not only a record of what has been endured, but also a method of survival, a practice of returning, repairing, and becoming whole again.
Image Courtesy of Mikhail Nilov
Why Healing Matters Now
The aesthetic turn toward healing is deeply intertwined with the historical and emotional landscape of African and diasporic life. The afterlives of colonisation, migration, and systemic inequality continue to shape both the social fabric and the psychic space of artists.
Yet rather than framing these wounds through narratives of despair, contemporary practitioners are searching for new spiritual and material grammars of wholeness.
In recent years, this pursuit has found visual form in practices that blend the ritual, the ecological, and the deeply personal. Across Africa and the diaspora, healing becomes an act of reclamation, where tenderness and repair stand in quiet opposition to exhaustion.
What emerges is a collective insistence that beauty can hold truth, that care, slowness, and reflection are not secondary to resistance but essential to it. In this evolving landscape, the aesthetics of healing invite us to see art not merely as expression, but as ceremony: a visual practice through which both artist and viewer might learn how to begin again.
The Shape of Silence
In The Shape of Silence, Olamide Ogunade explores the quiet spaces where healing takes root. Exhibited at the Eclectica Contemporary in Cape Town, the show turns stillness into a living language, a way of attending to the self and the world with care.
“Floating Thoughts” (2025) by Olamide Ogunade (Image Courtesy of the Eclectica Contemporary).
“Her World, Her Poodle” (2025) by Olamide Ogunade (Image Courtesy of the Eclectica Contemporary).
With the medium of charcoal and acrylic, Olamide gives form to a kind of beauty that heals through mindful presence. His portraits of Black figures, set within richly textured rooms and natural landscapes, carry a sense of calm that feels both intimate and sacred. The recurring bubbles, light and translucent, drift through these scenes like memories trying to stay afloat. They hold breath, pause time, and remind us of how fragile presence can be.
The density of his figures contrasts with the luminosity of their surroundings, suggesting that even in heaviness, there is light to be found. His compositions invite a slower looking, the kind of looking that feels like listening.
In this way, The Shape of Silence expands the language of healing in contemporary African art, showing how rest, tenderness, and stillness can become acts of restoration in themselves.
After the Dance
Ugo Ahiakwo’s After the Dance embodies healing as both reckoning and renewal. Exhibited at Rele Gallery, Lagos, the show transforms industrial remnants, bent metal, discarded vehicle parts, rusted fragments, into sculptural meditations on love, damage, and repair.
Ugo’s practice turns the language of machinery into one of tenderness. Through welding and reassembly, he mirrors the emotional labour of healing: the effort to rejoin what has been fractured without erasing the marks of its breaking. His surfaces, polished yet scarred, carry the tension between resilience and vulnerability, suggesting that beauty can emerge through the visible trace of endurance.
“Flirtation I” (2025) by Ugo Ahiakwo (Image Courtesy of Ugo Ahiakwo and Rele Gallery).
An Image of the “After the Dance” Exhibition at Rele Gallery (Image Courtesy of Ugo Ahiakwo and Rele Gallery).
Drawing from Marvin and Jan Gaye’s story of passion and rupture, After the Dance situates love as a site where care and violence coexist. Yet Ugo refuses despair; he reframes love, and by extension healing, as an active, spiritual practice: an ongoing negotiation between harm and hope.
In this way, After the Dance expands the vocabulary of contemporary African art’s turn toward restoration. Healing here is not sentimentality, but an aesthetic of survival, where material and emotional labour meet, and where beauty becomes a way of holding what remains.
In Conversation with Data Oruwari on Healing
For Data Oruwari, healing is not a theme but a practice: a way of reconciling the inner and outer worlds through colour, line, and spirit. In conversation with her, the idea of healing expands beyond recovery to become an act of remembering, a return to self and source. This philosophy comes to life in her exhibition Echoes of the Nile, where each work serves as a visual totem, inviting viewers to reconnect with ancestral wisdom and their own inner landscapes.
The exhibition is accessible online, and you can explore the full catalog here. Interested collectors can also visit the catalog for inquiries about purchasing artworks or commissions.
Image of Data Oruwari (Image Courtesy of Data Oruwari).
Gloria Adegboye: How does the idea of healing influence your creative process or the stories you choose to tell through your art?
Data Oruwari: I think for me, it comes down to how I define healing in the first place. What does healing really mean? Yes, I’m an artist, but I’m also a spiritual advisor and guide, and at the core of what I do is the intention to re-establish reconnection.
To me, healing becomes necessary when something is out of alignment, when there’s no equilibrium or harmony. Healing is what brings things back into balance. That’s what informs my work. What I see, especially among people connected to African history and identity, is a deep imbalance, a disconnection that stems largely from colonial influence.
There’s a disconnection from our traditions, our artifacts, our identities, and our ways of being. There’s disconnection caused by religion, from our cosmologies, and even from how we once understood time. For instance, in the tradition I follow, called Odinani, which is practiced by the Igbo people of Nigeria, time was measured through four market days and guided by the moon’s cycles. Our days and rituals aligned with the lunar rhythm, the new moon, the full moon, and so on, reflecting nature’s own flow.
But now we follow the Western calendar, months with 30 or 31 days, sometimes 29, and it doesn’t follow any natural pattern. That disconnection from nature and rhythm has affected us deeply, even mentally. We’ve been made to think that we stand above nature, whereas the African worldview teaches that we are nature. There’s no separation between us and the soil, the trees, or the stars.
So my work is ultimately about identifying where those disconnections exist and creating what I call “visual totems” that help us remember what was lost, so that we can restore connection. My process is grounded in telling stories of ancestral wisdom and exploring our cosmology: how we once understood the world.
That’s why I have pieces that reflect how we perceived the sun as a deity, as a cosmic force of nature, because without the sun, there is no life. Its light mirrors the light that animates us. I also create works around Ala, the Earth goddess, who represents our physical connection to the land. How can we disregard the Earth, when she sustains us? If you doubt her importance, try going without food or without the minerals she provides.
So that’s how my creative process is shaped. On another level, I feel the next generation is at risk of completely forgetting who they are because much of our wisdom has been damaged or erased. Through art, I’m trying to contemporize that understanding: to translate ancestral knowledge into forms and languages that resonate with today’s world. Our ancestors lived in a different time, so their language must evolve. My art becomes that new language of remembrance and reconnection.
“I Am Trustful In My Relationships” by Data Oruwari, As Part of the “Echoes of the Nile” Exhibition (Image Courtesy of OSENGWA and Data Oruwari).
Gloria Adegboye: How do you think African or diasporic artists are redefining what healing looks like in contemporary art today?
Data Oruwari: I’m beginning to see a wave where more artists are engaging in authentic storytelling, where people are starting to tell stories from their own point of view and challenge pre-existing narratives. I think that when someone stands in their true identity and expresses things from their own perspective, rather than through the lens of another, that in itself is a form of healing.
I’m a bit torn about this, though.
Because, I’m not seeing many people championing that right now. I can think of maybe two artists I know who are actively doing that work, perhaps in different ways, but not on the scale I believe it should be. There’s art created purely for aesthetics, and then there’s art that serves a function, to communicate something deeper.
One artist I see doing this kind of work is Harmonia Rosales. She paints what many would call “religious” or “spiritual” subjects, but in a way that reclaims our divine identity. She’s forcing us to see ourselves as divine beings, too.
On a large scale, I don’t really see many people approaching it from that perspective.
I think part of the reason for this is that, as I discussed once with a curator, art that expresses the African perspective on healing is often censored in the commercial art space. That’s one of the reasons I remain an independent artist, many galleries won’t take my work. They don’t understand it, and it challenges them to confront their own complicity in the systems that created this disconnection in the first place.
For me, part of my practice is continuing what our ancestors used to do. When you look at our ancient artifacts, statues, carvings, sculptures, they carried immense spiritual energy, what we call Aṣé.
Those objects were taken from us and carried to other lands, and that energy now benefits those people. But who is making such works today? Who is continuing that legacy? Hardly anyone.
What we often see now is art created for the Western gaze: abstract, cubist, or “contemporary” in form, but disconnected from the essence of how we originally created art. Our art was never about aesthetics alone; it always had a function. The beauty was a byproduct of purpose. Those bronzes, sculptures, and carvings were made to communicate our cosmology, to teach and to preserve knowledge.
People say Africans were primitive because we didn’t write, but we didn’t need to. Our art was our writing. It was painted on walls, inscribed on fabrics and ceramics, spoken through stories, songs, dances, and griots. Sadly, I’m not seeing much of that being expressed in a contemporary form today. What many artists are doing instead is producing Western art, just with African aesthetics. And that, to me, is not the same thing*.*
“I Embrace The All” by Data Oruwari, As Part of the “Echoes of the Nile” Exhibition (Image Courtesy of OSENGWA and Data Oruwari).
Gloria Adegboye: If someone encounters your work for the first time, what kind of emotional or inner experience do you hope it stirs in them?
Data Oruwari: I would say my work aims to evoke two main things: memory and reverence.
First, there’s memory. I want people to remember who we were before colonization, to reconnect with our traditions and the ways we once understood the world.
The second is that feeling of reverence: similar to what you experience when you walk into a church, especially a Catholic one, and see divine beings portrayed in such a way that you instantly feel connected to source, to God, or whatever name one calls the divine. I want my work to stir that same sense of awe and connection, but through the lens of African
spirituality.
When we talk about African spirituality, it’s often viewed through the lens of fear or negativity: as something evil or demonic. For me, my work challenges that idea. Our own ways of being and perceiving the divine are not demonic; they are profoundly beautiful.
Beyond spirituality, I also want people to see African science and knowledge systems in a more positive light. Much of what our ancestors created forms the foundation of society today, agriculture, medicine, beauty, art, astrology, but we are rarely given credit. These innovations were taken, repackaged, and claimed by others, while we were labeled “primitive.”
So, for me, it comes down to those two things: memory, helping people remember who we are; and vision, helping them see African ways of knowing and being as powerful, sacred, and deeply intelligent.
“I Live In Truth” by Data Oruwari, As Part of the “Echoes of the Nile” Exhibition (Image Courtesy of OSENGWA and Data Oruwari).
In Conclusion
Across today’s African art, healing is a lived process: layered, vulnerable, and deeply personal. Artists like Olamide Ogunade, Ugo Ahiakwo, and Data Oruwari show that to heal is to remember, to question, and to create new meanings from what was broken. Their work holds space for pain but also for beauty, the kind that restores a sense of belonging.
In their hands, art becomes both a mirror and a balm: a way to reclaim what was lost, and to remind us that even after everything, something tender and true can still grow.
