SWIRL AND CONQUER: THE MASTER’S GATHERING

Text by Nkhensani Mkhari

To enter Ebenezer Samuel Akinola’s world is to step into the chromatic vortex of a metaphysical order where the body is more than flesh—it is archive, inscription, oracle. The figures that populate his canvases refuse containment within the linear temporality of the colonial gaze; instead, they gather, they converge, they swirl—folding time in upon itself in a fugitive choreography of remembrance and becoming.

The ritualized postures of Akinola’s subjects—adorned in the richly textured lexicon of Buba, Iro, Kaftan, George Wrapper, and Kele—summon an epistemic rupture: an insistence that African spiritual life-worlds persist beyond the forced enclosures of colonial modernity. Here, dress is not merely adornment but an archive of knowledge, a grammar of resistance, an assertion of what Wande Abimbola calls “the inseparability of worlds.” Each gesture, each sweep of fabric, is an invocation—a rejection of the Cartesian split that would render the spiritual and material as oppositional rather than co-constitutive.

Akinola’s aesthetic decisions—his textural density, his radiant palette, his layered brushwork—function as acts of refusal against the empirical regimes that seek to reduce African spiritual systems to the anthropological relics of a past long surpassed.

What “Swirl and Conquer” ultimately proposes is an ontological insurgency—a radical refusal of the colonial binaries that would position tradition against innovation, spirituality against materiality, past against future. Instead, Akinola’s works stage what Henry Odera Oruka might term a visual “sage philosophy,” an embodied wisdom that does not merely survive the wreckage of colonial modernity but actively reconfigures it on its own terms

In an era where global capital fragments communities and commodifies the sacred, Akinola’s figures gather—against dispersal, against rupture, against the violent erasures of history. They do not merely depict community; they perform it into being. This exhibition is not an invitation to look but to partake—to gather at the threshold, to recognize oneself within the ancestral continuum, to swirl, to conquer, to become.