WHAT happens when two distinct African cosmologies meet in contemporary art? In ‘Passages of the Unseen’, Godspower Ignatus Okoro brings Yoruba and Igbo ideas of spirituality into the same visual field, using installation to explore memory, transformation and cycles of loss and renewal. His work does more than revisit mythology: it considers what these belief systems might mean today.
An assemblage of 14 panels, arranged in two rows of seven, ‘Passages of the Unseen’ explores movement between the material and spiritual worlds. At its centre is an encounter between two West African traditions: Yoruba and Igbo.
In Nigeria, the Yoruba and Igbo hold distinct cultural and geographical spaces. So where does Okoro locate their point of convergence?
The answer appears to lie less in shared mythology than in a common engagement with spirituality, healing and remembrance. Through colour, texture, absence and intervals, Okoro turns the installation into a space of transition. Its shifting palette and abstract suggestions of earthly and cosmic matter draw the viewer towards ritual, symbolism and forces that resist easy definition.
This does not necessarily collapse the differences between the two traditions. Instead, Okoro places them alongside one another, keeping their affinities and distinctions visible. The installation’s strength lies in that tension.
Okoro turns more directly to Igbo mythology in another work, ‘Ogbanje’. The term refers, within a traditional Igbo spiritual framework, to a spirit associated with repeated cycles of birth and premature death. The child is believed to return to the same family, producing a cycle of grief and loss.
In prints on paper that resemble drawings, Okoro renders the ogbanje myth through images of infant heads. White figures emerge against black backgrounds, producing an atmosphere that is stark, mysterious and troubling. Among the elements associated with the tradition is the iyi-uwa, understood in some accounts as an object or personal belonging believed to anchor the spirit to the cycle of birth and death. Its discovery and destruction are traditionally understood as a way to break that cycle.
Here, a striking parallel emerges. Yoruba tradition has its own related concept in ‘Abiku,’ a spirit child associated with repeated cycles of birth and premature death. Yet Okoro does not explicitly connect ‘abiku’ to his treatment of ‘ogbanje’.
The omission is worth considering. If ‘Passages of the Unseen’ brings Yoruba and Igbo traditions together through broader questions of spirituality and memory, ogbanje and abiku offer a more specific point of comparison. Both concern the recurring child and the persistence of an unseen spiritual world. The absence of abiku from Okoro’s treatment of ogbanje does not necessarily weaken the work; instead, it leaves open a question about how contemporary artists should approach parallels within African traditions without reducing their differences.
Chronology may also be significant. ‘Passages of the Unseen’, which might have provided a conceptual bridge between the two traditions, was created a year after ‘Ogbanje’. The relationship between the works therefore remains suggestive rather than explicit.
Together, ‘Passages of the Unseen’ and ‘Ogbanje’ show Okoro using African cosmologies not simply as subjects to be represented, but as ways of thinking about memory, death, spirituality and transformation. In the installation, Yoruba and Igbo traditions meet through the language of the unseen; in ‘Ogbanje’, an Igbo myth of recurring birth and death becomes an image of grief, mystery and remembrance.
The absence of abiku from Ogbanje leaves the relationship between the two traditions unresolved, but that gap is productive. It points to the complexity of bringing distinct cosmologies into dialogue while allowing each to retain its history and meaning. Okoro’s works ultimately suggest that the value of these traditions rests not only in preserving their myths, but in asking what those myths can still reveal about life, death and belief in the contemporary world.