Deborah Abosede Ibeme hosts her solo exhibition titled “Threads of the Unspoken”. It is
her second solo exhibition after her debut at the Nike Art Gallery in Lagos last year,
announced with a completeness that debut exhibitions rarely manage, that something
significant had arrived in Nigerian photography.

This year, she’s hosting at Onobrak Art Centre. Onobrak is not a name that appears on
the usual lists. It is not in Lagos nor in Abuja. It does not feature in the seasonal
roundups of must-see exhibitions that circulate among the people who determine, through the collective weight of their attention, what Nigerian fine art considers important this month. The centre is located in Ughelli, a Delta State city with its own density and character and history, operating quietly, seriously, in a region that the metropolitan gallery circuit has not yet learned to look at with the attention it deserves.

“Threads of the Unspoken” is what Deborah’s practice looks like when it goes deeper,
when it moves from declaration into excavation, from the formal establishment of a
visual language into the more difficult and more important work of using that language
to say something that has not been said before, about people who have not been
shown before, in a place that has not been shown before.

The exhibition is nine works. All black and white. All of them, shot with the tonal
precision and symbolic density that have become Deborah’s signature, the deep
contrasts, the deliberate light, and the sense that every element in every frame is
earning its place. The subjects are mostly women. The subject, underneath and behind
all of it, is what women carry without being asked whether they are willing to carry it, and what it looks like when they carry it anyway, with the specific grace that endurance produces in a body over time.

The first work that stops you is the one nearest the entrance, and it stops you because it refuses to give you what portraiture usually gives you first, which is “a face”. The studio portrait is titled “Veiled Majesty”.

The image, black and white, shot from the shoulders up, the background a clean,
neutral grey. A woman in an enormous gélé, the fabric wrapped with such architectural
precision and such structural ambition that it dominates the entire upper half of the
frame. The gélé is metallic, textured, luminous even in monochrome. It’s folded and
pinned into a form that is simultaneously headdress and sculpture, adornment and
statement. Multiple strands of beads cascade from her throat. Her bare shoulders are
visible below, a small scar on the upper arm the only detail that reminds you, gently, that a human body is beneath all of this. And her face, entirely concealed. Wrapped inside the gélé, present only as absence, as the space the fabric has claimed completely. Most photographers, confronted with a subject whose face is hidden, treat it as a problem, but Deborah in “Veiled Majesty”, treats it as an argument.

What the image is saying, and at that with considerable force, is that first, identity does not require a face to be legible. That’s loud. It also asserts that authority does not require expression, and majesty does not require eyes. What remains when the face is removed, the posture, the adornment, the specific way the gélé has been wrapped with
the particular knowledge that belongs to the woman who wrapped it, is sufficient. Even
more than sufficient, it is, “Veiled Majesty”, argues, the whole story. As a matter of fact, the face would have been a distraction. A viewer could land on the face and feel they have arrived at the meaning, meanwhile, they are more to be perceived and wrapped in. By removing the face, Deborah removes the landing spot and asks the viewer to stay in the discomfort of not knowing where to rest until, gradually, they begin to understand that the fabric itself is the face. That the wrapping is the identity. An understanding that what is worn, how it is worn, and what it communicates to anyone who knows how to read it, is as legible as any facial expression the woman might have offered. “The Good Effect” is the second work on our highlight and it is everything “Veiled Majesty” withholds.

An older woman, outdoors, a village background softened almost to the quality of a
painted backdrop. Visibly seen in the distance are thatched huts, a flat expanse of
ground, a grey and open sky. She is laughing. Apparently, her laughter is not a
performance for the camera, nor is she offering the managed smile that most photographic subjects produce when asked to express joy. She’s laughing with the total,
unconsidered abandon of someone in the middle of something genuinely funny. Her
eyes are closed, her head tilts slightly back, and her mouth wide open. The laugh is so
complete it has temporarily taken over her entire face, her entire body, and the frame
entirely.

She holds a clay pot. Both hands wrapped around it, drawn close to her body, the way
you hold something you value and I don’t mean carefully, but familiarly. The pot is
decorated with geometric patterns etched into the clay in a tradition that is specific to the pottery practices of the Niger Delta, each mark a form of knowledge passed down
through the hands of women who made pots before her and women who will make
them after. Silver bracelets at her wrists. Large circular earrings. A printed headwrap. A wrapper tied across her chest. Every element of adornment communicates something, her age, her status, her belonging to a specific place and community and tradition. And she wears all of it with the unconsidered ease of someone who has never thought of these things as costume.

Placed beside the concealment and architectural gravity of “Veiled Majesty”, this
woman’s laughter is the most radical thing in the exhibition. Joy is not radical in the
actual sense of it, but this specific joy, in this specific body, held in this quality of photographic attention, refuses every narrative that has been constructed around
women like her. She isn’t suffering, enduring, not performing dignity for an audience that requires it of her. She is laughing, completely, in the middle of an ordinary moment, holding a clay pot that she has probably held a hundred times before, in a village that the art world has never considered worth looking at. And Deborah’s camera has looked at it, has found it, and has held this woman’s laugh in a frame with the same formal seriousness, tonal precision, and quality of light as well as intention that the studio work “Veiled Majesty” brings to its more obviously monumental subject.

That equivalence between the wrapped, faceless, architectural gravity of “Veiled
Majesty” and the laughing, outdoor, utterly unguarded joy of “The Good Effect”, is the
argument the exhibition is making at its core. That both of these women are fully,
completely the subject. Gravity and joy are not in competition for the right to represent African womanhood. There’s also a bold statement that the thread connecting them is not their similarity but their completeness, each one entire in herself, requiring nothing additional to constitute a valid subject for serious art.

Move through the rest of the exhibition with these two images in mind and they become
a key to reading the visual logic that governs everything else in the space. The
unspoken threads of the title are everywhere once you know how to look for them. In
the specific arrangement of the older woman’s bracelets, a record of occasions and
gifts, of the accumulation of a life’s significant moments on the wrist. In the pattern on the clay pot she holds, etched with the knowledge of a specific pottery tradition that lives in the hands of the women who practice it and nowhere else. In the way the gélé in the first image has been wrapped, the particular architecture of it communicating, to those who know the grammar of this adornment, something precise about the woman inside it.

These are the things that do not get recorded. Not because they are unimportant, but
because they are important in a register that official documentation has never learned to read. They live in the body before they live anywhere else. They pass from woman to
woman through demonstration and proximity rather than through instruction. They are,
in the most literal sense, unspoken, and in that silence, they constitute some of the most significant knowledge a community carries about itself.

Deborah’s camera reads this silence. The images do not explain the symbolic
vocabulary they are working in, they do not need to, for the audience in this room, who
carry the grammar in their bodies the way all of us carry the grammars we grew up
inside. What the images do instead is hold the vocabulary in a frame with a quality of
seriousness and attention that the vocabulary has not previously been given. They say,
through the light and the tonal precision and the careful formal construction of each
work: this is worth this quality of attention. These women too, are worth this quality of attention. This knowledge, carried in these hands and these fabrics and these pots and these wraps, is worth preserving with the full resources of fine art practice.
The audience at Onobrak Art Centre receives this argument the way audiences receive
arguments that are true: in the concentrated silence of recognition; of seeing yourself
and the people you come from held in a frame with a seriousness that the world has not
routinely extended, and an understanding, in the body first, the mind following, that the seriousness was always deserved.

It is worth saying, plainly, that this exhibition is in Ughelli because Deborah Abosede
Ibeme chose to bring it here. She had other options. Her Nike Art Gallery debut last
year established a profile that opens doors in Lagos. Her work is showing in New York
this same year, “Afrocentric Perspectives”, her first American group exhibition, the kind of placement that tends to redirect a practice’s geographic attention outward and
upward. She is building exactly the kind of international profile that makes Lagos
galleries, and eventually London and New York galleries, the natural next conversation.
She brought “Threads of the Unspoken” to Ughelli.

The choice is not incidental and it is not modest and it is not a detour from ambition. It is the most direct possible expression of what the practice is for. The women in these frames, whose gélé contains her entire identity, and the one whose laugh fills the frame and the room are from communities like the ones around Ughelli. The symbolic
vocabulary of this work including the pottery tradition, the adornment, the specific
knowledge encoded in the wrapping of cloth, is living practice in this region, where, it’s a far fetched reference. It’s also not a cultural material gathered from a respectful distance. Practice. Things that women in this community do, today, with the same accumulated knowledge and the same unspoken fluency that this exhibition is built
from.

Deborah brings this work to Onobrak Art Centre I other to return the documentation to
the documented. She hosts her second exhibition at this centre to bring the images
back to the people the images are made from, and to submit the work, without
statement or ceremony to the most demanding critical question available: Is this true?
The answer? A definite yes. And you could see it in the quality of attention the arts were given.

Deborah Abosede Ibeme is three years into a professional practice. She has shown at
the Nike Art Gallery. She is showing in New York. She is building a body of work that the Nigerian fine art conversation is only beginning to adequately account for, and that the international fine art conversation will need to account for soon. “Threads of the Unspoken” is the most complete expression of her practice to date.

It is showing in Ughelli, Delta State, through August 2023.