DISCUSSION BY MOYO OKODIJE

ALOZIE CHIBUIKE ONYIRIOHA articulates the visual linguistics of talking trash by joining a growing group of African environmental artists compounding filth as compost for inestimable cultural possibilities. From the foulness of the African gutter he is germinating a garbage language for fertilizing and fecundating national development and humanist decency, in a terrain that reeks of pollution, corruption, and criminal fraudulence.

Out of the heaps of trash and rubbish, Alozie is filtering a visual dialect that speaks to power about the corrupt culture around which sludge collects. But his verbs are active critiques that not only illuminate the rubbish heaps; he addresses the redemptive aesthetics of galvanizing the spirit of cultural morality through the cultivation of ethical cleansing. His vision is, therefore, not merely negative and accusatory. He ardently designs and constructs a searching architecture of hope out of sheer despair, dilapidation, and collapse. Using toxic and unsightly wastes, he brings attention to the rot and rust that clogs the wheel of progress, and the dehumanizing effects that these devolution wrecks on the psyche and body of the common citizen. A people that feed and live in the ordure of its sewage are not only scavenging at the bottom of global dung, such a people are so inundated with the fecal deposits of life that they are incapable of perceiving or acknowledging any decent illumination or freshness of thought. They become one with the turds among which they live, and revert to a subhuman level of existence.

Alozie is clearly influenced by the work of Ghana’s El Anatsui, who is actively changing the subject of African aesthetic dialogue to a discussion centralizing the humanism of environmental habitation. Alozie has experimented with the formality of stacked and singed wooden panels that occupied Anatsui earlier in the carrier of the Ghanaian master. It is an exploration that brings attention to the deforestation of Africa, a reference to Wole Soyinka’s poetry in “Ogun Abibiman,” which began, “No longer are the forests green….” The forests become the people, and the people become the forests. When people destroy their forests, the fallen forests destroy the people. This tension between people and forest plays itself out in the early works of Anatsui, whose poetic invocation erases and masks its portent tracks.

Alozie is less subtle. The wooden panels that he burns and scarifies are laden with skeletal piles and packs of human figures that he consigns with ruthless abandon to the surface of the wretched planks to which he yokes them. The wretchedness of the human piles is palpable as they struggle against impossible odds like terminates scavenging the fabric of their own casing. The futility of life lived under these destructive customs is glaring yet seemingly indiscernible to those condemned to this corrosive existence.

When Alozie turns his efforts to Anatsui’s rumination over discarded junks, including metals, plastics, and wooden wastes, his directness and rawness of emotional commitment discards the subtlety that graces the poesy of his mentor. Alozie welds, fasten, and incinerates these materials into monumental and imposing spectacles with a three-dimensional opulence that are sometimes reminiscent of African masquerades dancing to cleanse the environment and the people of social, cultural, and entrenched systems of decadence and filth. Alozie is talking the proverbs of trash, hoping someone is paying attention.
ALOZIE CHIBUIKE ONYIRIOHA, following El Anatsui articulates the visual linguistics of talking trash by joining a growing group of African environmental artists compounding filth as compost for inestimable cultural possibilities. From the foulness of the African gutter he is germinating a garbage language for fertilizing and fecundating national development and humanist decency, in a terrain that reeks of pollution, corruption, and criminal fraudulence.
Alozie welds, fasten, and incinerates these materials into monumental and imposing spectacles with a three-dimensional opulence that are sometimes reminiscent of African masquerades dancing to cleanse the environment and the people of social, cultural, and entrenched systems of decadence and filth. Alozie is talking the proverbs of trash, hoping someone is paying attention.

ALOZIE CHIBUIKE ONYIRIOHA Out of the heaps of trash and rubbish, Alozie is filtering a visual dialect that speaks to power about the corrupt culture around which sludge collects. But his verbs are active critiques that not only illuminate the rubbish heaps; he addresses the redemptive aesthetics of galvanizing the spirit of cultural morality through the cultivation of ethical cleansing. His vision is, therefore, not merely negative and accusatory. He ardently designs and constructs a searching architecture of hope out of sheer despair, dilapidation, and collapse. Using toxic and unsightly wastes, he brings attention to the rot and rust that clogs the wheel of progress, and the dehumanizing effects that these devolution wrecks on the psyche and body of the common citizen. A people that feed and live in the ordure of its sewage are not only scavenging at the bottom of global dung, such a people are so inundated with the fecal deposits of life that they are incapable of perceiving or acknowledging any decent illumination or freshness of thought. They become one with the turds among which they live, and revert to a subhuman level of existence.
Alozie is less subtle than Anatusi as this stack of sacrificial heads shows. He layers, burns and scarifies a multitude of materials in skeletal piles and packs of human figures that he consigns with ruthless abandon to the surface of the wretched planks and piles within which he yokes them. The wretchedness of the human piles is palpable as they struggle against impossible odds like terminates scavenging the fabric of their own casing. The futility of life lived under these destructive customs is glaring yet seemingly indiscernible to those condemned to this corrosive existence. Like the tree that does not allow the view to see the forest.

Different heads, different destinies, different reactions and attitudes, and different desires and expectations, with respect to the vicissitudes of life. The stack of heads shows an array of expressions: hope, resignation, despondency, calmness, despair, agitation, fortitude or cool determination, sublime joy, misgivings, anxiety .... Oh mine, the list is endless. This is a visual symbolism of humans and how individual person responds to the intrigues of life. Some are lucky, while some are less fortunate ... many factors are responsible for these variations. 'Ohun gbogbo lowo ori' a Yoruba adage captures the essence of Alozie's 'Configuration of Heads' or 'Human Destinies' in which the individual head 'ori' or 'chi 'plays a vital role.
Micheal Olusegun Fajuyibe

The head, always the leading essence and core of human existence. When different heads in their status as principal entity meet in one pile vying for supremacy and authority, is it a wonder that chaos ensues? Or is there the possibility for such heads to congregate in an atmosphere of harmony?
Philip Effiong

discussion
by Moyo okodije.
Art History Professor at University of Texas, Austin