Nigerian Modernism review: sacred groves, a shackled king and women with astonishing hair

Tate Modern, London
This ambitious and sprawling show charts Nigeria’s messy history over the past century through the country’s art. It’s fascinating but frustrating

Subtitled Art and Independence, Nigerian Modernism is a complicated, contrary exhibition, tracing the development of modern art in Nigeria from the period of British colonial rule to the end of the 20th century. Focusing on individual artists and on various artists’ groups, it attempts a history of movements and of alliances in a country that has been both factionalised and divided by language and belief, religious and ethnic divisions, by the traumas of colonisation and of civil war. The sweep of Nigerian history, even over the past century or so, is too big and too complicated to be charted through the lens of the country’s art. What can modernism possibly mean here, especially from our position at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century?

European-style academic portraiture, including paintings by Aina Onabolu (one of the few women here) and by Akinola Lasekan, who also depicted Yoruba acrobatic dancers and mythic scenes, jostle with a pair of 1910-14 carved wooden door panels, depicting a British officer, carried in some sort of sedan chair, with shackled prisoners carrying his possessions, to be received by the Ogoga – or king – of Ikere. The officer looks, inadvertently, like a little homunculus on a bier. Nearby photographs, by Jonathan Adagogo Green, one of Africa’s first professional photographers, show the king of Benin, deposed in the brutal invasion of Benin City in 1897, shackled on board a British yacht, on his way into exile. The photographer is complicit in this scene, and in others where he was hired to photograph similarly deposed local rulers, dressed in all their finery.