Jumoke Sanwo is a self-taught lens-based artist, cultural interlocutor, and creative director of Revolving Art Incubator in Lagos, Nigeria. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (BA Hons) in English studies from the Obafemi Awolowo University Ile-Ife, and is an alumna of the New Dimension extended reality residency program (2017), organized by Electric South, a non-profit South African company based in Cape Town that funds, incubates, and exhibits the work of African creators.
As a storyteller, she works in 2-D and 3-D photography, video, film, and virtual reality mediums. She engages with the realities and complexities of spatiality/temporality in postcolonial societies, reflecting on how self-perception and separation are experienced through time and space, and documenting the NOW for archives of the future. Her conceptual framework and practice are largely informed by “Global Localization,” or “Glocalization,” that is, by a local approach to engagement and storytelling, whereby the individual cultures, histories, and traditions are presented as independent frames within the Global Picture. Her works have been shown in galleries, museums, and festivals in many regions across the world.
In 1970, Johnson Donatus Aihumekeokhai Ojeikere, otherwise known as J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere (Nigerian, 1930–2014), made Fro Fro, the point of departure of this short text. Storyteller and lens-based artist Jumoke Sanwo reads this image, produced during Nigeria’s nationalist drive and considers Ojeikere’s subjects and their unapologetic defiance.
