As migration continues to dominate world information and form political discourse, mainstream media usually carry stereotypical photographs of immigrants, portraying them as displaced, determined, prison.
The photographic observe of UK-based Nigerian artist Michael Oyinbokure (also referred to as Mike Kure) exhibits how African artists assemble counter-narratives. He makes use of images to specific insider views on life within the diaspora (overseas).
His artwork images presents what immigrants convey with them, their resilience, inventiveness, and enduring connection to their homelands.
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I’m a scholar and trainer who makes use of Oyinbokure’s work as a case examine in my undergraduate African Photography course. My research makes use of the Nigerian case to explore images as a method for understanding Africa’s colonial and postcolonial histories, together with the socio-political forces driving migration.
Through a wide range of strategies, Oyinbokure portrays immigrants as individuals who bear data, cultural heritage and inventive traditions. They consistently navigate questions of identification, belonging and survival as they transfer via totally different locations and construct a brand new life inside their host communities.
His pictures supply complexity, dignity and humanity in a world that always appears to lack it.
Who is Michael Oyinbokure?
Born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1997, Oyinbokure studied pc science on the Federal University of Agriculture in Abeokuta. He acquired a grasp’s diploma in undertaking administration from Coventry University in London. But he was fascinated by the probabilities for show and archiving of pictures on web platforms like Instagram. His personal observe as a photographer would comply with.
Courtesy Michael Oghenekaro Oyinbokure (Mike Kure)
Oyinbokure has been influenced by the work of Seydou Keïta, a famend Malian photographer, and by Rotimi Fani-Kayode, a Nigerian photographer who moved to the UK together with his mother and father in 1966. This was shortly after Nigerian independence from British colonial rule and through the disaster that climaxed within the Nigeria-Biafra war.
Oyinbokure present in images a language to convey the experiences of prejudice, displacement, and the crises of identification and belonging that he witnessed in Nigeria and within the UK. He moved there to check in 2022.
In the UK, Oyinbokure turned his digital camera to his fellow migrants. He confirmed them busy with financial actions or posing in studio settings. He generally enhanced these settings with touches of physique portray and costume show. Through these photographs, he seeks to light up displacement and the on a regular basis realities that outline the lives of Black immigrants.
Masked realities
instance of Oyinbokure’s strategy to his photo-storytelling is the Masked Realities undertaking in 2024. Here he labored with Lebanese-Nigerian painter Sinatra Zantout and with Nigerian immigrants in Peckham within the UK.
Oyinbokure’s photos present ladies going about their jobs. They are operating conventional African clothes stalls, providing hairstyling companies. Their work symbolises each financial mobility and cultural identification.
They inform a narrative of financial integration inside the diaspora, of resilience, of ladies striving to outlive and thrive in a brand new setting. But past documenting labour and survival, the images encode components of cultural heritage. The ladies’s actions and settings undertaking the aesthetics of their African roots.
Some pictures from the sequence have been translated into work by Zantout and exhibited alongside the total physique of Oyinbokure’s work on the Play Room Gallery in London. A bit from the collaboration acquired the Dubel Prize. Another paintings from the partnership with a unique Nigerian artist, Ken Nwadiogbu, was nominated for the Circa Prize.
Portraits
Besides photographing real-life conditions, Oyinbokure additionally adopts a performative strategy that includes cautious curation of his topics. This approach exploits the artistic and expressive potential of pose. It incorporates visible components like costumes, equipment and physique portray in a studio set-up.
It remembers the African studio portrait images of the early 1900s: the style that introduced Mali’s Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta into the limelight. With studio backdrops, props, equipment and co-produced poses, these photographers created photographs that got here to indicate the position of Africans inside the body of modernity.
We see comparable co-production in Oyinbokure’s Echoes of Pain, The Truce, Crowned in Silence, and In Bloom sequence.
Sidibé and Keïta’s images allowed viewers to think about liberation. Oyinbokure’s, however, curate the physique via facial expressions, physique work and gestures to talk of the emotional burdens of life within the diaspora.
In Bloom
For occasion, he created the In Bloom sequence by working with a younger Somalian lady dwelling in London who was dealing with the lack of her mother and father. Across the pictures, her facial expressions, physique actions, and the blurs produced via a number of exposures evoke a profound sense of loss. This bereavement transcends the non-public. It mirrors the broader sense of estrangement that always defines the African migrant expertise.
Exhibiting and sharing the images on Oyinbokure’s website and social media platforms broadens their viewers.
The photographs have been featured in quite a few exhibitions, inside group areas and on the worldwide stage. They have been in artwork exhibits with names like Echoes of Pain, Boundaries and Borders, Echoes of the Past, and Boundless Horizons.
Pushing boundaries
Oyinbokure is a younger artist who continues to push the conceptual boundaries of artwork images. Increasingly he’s utilizing props and equipment like mats and journey bins in his work. These carry Nigerian cultural symbolism and evoke motion and migration.
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Many components of the world are seeing harsh immigration insurance policies and rising racial and xenophobic hostilities. These are sometimes justified by migrants being portrayed as unlawful, defiant, and as threats to safety and financial stability. This notion is strengthened by photographs within the media.
Oyinbokure is pushed by a need to inform the tales that aren’t usually advised as a result of they don’t conform to dominant stereotypes. They are tales of Africans dwelling their lives, carrying with them their cultures, serving to to construct communities – actual individuals, not faceless numbers.