By
Tajudeen Sowole
When
painter, Chuka Nnabuife opens his solo art exhibition titled Memoirs of a Generation 2, at
Quintessence Gallery, Ikoyi, Lagos tomorrow, the works would be explaining the
artist’s thoughts on the difficult task of managing his visual arts practice
and journalism.
In fact, it’s the second in the series
after he showed Memoirs of A Generation
at the same venue in 2008.
And by extension, he has deployed his
art skill to chronicle the challenges of the people in a changing, perhaps
dynamic socio-economic environment.
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| My Baby, You Are the Most Beautiful by Nnabuife. |
Currently a journalist with The National Compass newspaper,
Nnabuife, who has put in over 20 years in the media, is also attempting to use
his Memoirs series to highlight the
challenges in journalism, a profession he noted is woven with “24-hour
chores.”
Four years after the first Memoir, the brushstrokes of Nnabuife –
so suggests some of the new works – appear more precise, taking a leap from
cautious, perhaps conservative rendition stranded between abstraction and
realism into definite visual commentary.
A prolific writer, as the visual arts
sub-section of arts journalism demands, Nnabuife, perhaps, would have loved to
stress his proficiency at the studio end, as some of the works explain. For
example works, such works as Migrant
Workers, African Magic, Love Child and My Baby, You Are the Most Beautiful show an artist with instinct
for deeper visual narration. Sometimes, it takes another leap into satirical
and covert humour as My Baby, You Are the
Most Beautiful and Single Fatherhood
disclose.
In his Artist Statement, Nnabuife
explains how he refused to accept losing art practice to journalism. He states,
“I consoled myself (and still console myself) that my mission in journalism is
a divine call and a very necessary service, which I must personally render to
the arts and humanity.”
In striking a balance, he has had to
find a way to be mobile, so he came up with what he describes as “idea of
working in materials and formats that are comfortable for a mobile artist and
in convenient sizes that I could carry along while commuting to and from work.”
On the Memoirs series as a concept, he explained that he has had to
chronicle the challenges of the current generation, within the context of
culture, social, economy and politics, saying, “Through the series, I capture –
celebrate, spoof or critique – some trends I have spotted in the Nigeria of the
past 20 through 25 years.
“Money madness, disenchantment with
scholarship, migration, violence, drop in family value, religious craze,
showbiz frenzy, abuse of vital traditional heritages such as royalty, religious
favuor, general socio-political hypnotism, celebration of brawn against brain
and joblessness et al are factors I noticed of the time”.
Although to a large extends, the
strokes, light and shades of Nnabuife attempt to equal his depth of writing,
but the constrain, mentally, would not let go. And how did he get entangled in
the ‘media Vs visual arts’ dilemma? He traces the beginning of his sojourn back
to September 1992 when he worked at the Information Department of the Osun
State Ministry of Information and Culture.
Other chains of career build up that
cannot be divorced with his current experience, he listed having been published
or broadcast in Old Anambra Broadcasting Service Television, ABS TV, Enugu; Osun
Voice Newspaper, Osogbo; Osun State Broadcasting Corporation Television,
OSBC TV, Ibokun.
“Following those early years of
'infatuated' adventure into mass media practice, albeit without any form of
payment or employment status, I spotted, to my discomfort, a conspicuous
backwardness, if inexistence, of active press projection of
the developments in creative industry, especially the core arts and
culture. Hence, I noticed a vacant space of socially relevant service for a
person of my kind of multidisciplinary endowment in the Nigerian society.
“I therefore craved to work actively in
the mainstream of mass media because it also gave me the opportunity of
developing my creative, writing passion while also learning more about my
society through the investigative reporting faculty of the profession. I also
had to be regularly involved in an endeavour I love – reviewing art as well as
idealising issues around the artistic industries and cultural sector.
“Given my natural predilection towards
the literary and the practice of journalism even as an art school student,
particularly, my discovery of a vast, socially dangerous vacuum in the
Nigerian (and African) mass media for in-depth reportage of artistic and
cultural events, I deliberately committed myself to journalism with stubborn
bias for the Arts, Cultural and Tourism beats once I found myself settled fully
in the field.
“However, my consciousness of the
drawbacks the journalism venture could pose to my art practice brought a wave
of worrisome brain cracks.”
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