The first photograph in Enesi’s sequence stops you before you understand why. It is the praying hands, most likely, held so close to the chin that the beaded bib beneath them looks less like jewelry than like something growing out of the sternum. Or it is the eyes, half-lowered, refusing to meet yours even though […]
3 years ago
The first photograph in Enesi’s sequence stops you before you understand why. It is the praying hands, most likely, held so close to the chin that the beaded bib beneath them looks less like jewelry than like something growing out of the sternum. Or it is the eyes, half-lowered, refusing to meet yours even though the face is angled directly at the camera. Either way, you stand in front of it longer than you planned to, and that delay turns out to be the point. Enesi is not asking for a glance. He is asking for the kind of attention people used to reserve for something on an altar, which is a fitting demand for an exhibition built entirely around the proposition that femininity itself can be the altar.
What the four-panel hang does that the wall text does not quite say is stage one woman moving through successive states rather than survey four different women in Yemoja’s costume. Same face, same locs pooling past the knee, same silver spiked halo built like something forged rather than bought. It functions less like a fashion series and more like an icon cycle, the kind you find in Orthodox chapels where a single saint is walked through birth, trial, and ascension across adjoining panels. The recurrence carries the theology. A goddess who can only be captured once was never much of a goddess, and a divinity built from femininity specifically needs that repetition to register as durable rather than momentary, a state rather than a costume.
Panel two answers the opening portrait’s stillness with the only real motion in the whole run. Two sheets of silk lift vertically behind her, arms raised, palms open, and there is no visible source for the wind inside the frame, no fan line, nothing to explain the movement except her own gesture. The fabric reads as summoned rather than blown. It is worth comparing this instinct, image as invocation rather than document, to Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photographs from the 1980s, where Yoruba ritual objects and the nude body were staged together not to illustrate belief but to enact it. Fani-Kayode was working through exile and diaspora; Enesi is working through a gallery in Lagos itself, which changes the stakes of the gesture without softening the ambition. Both photographers understand something that a lot of religious art forgets, that divinity has to be performed by a body before it can be believed in by a room.
Panel three is the strangest image in the show and the one I keep returning to. A curtain of loose pearl strands falls across her whole face, not concealing so much as interfering, like static laid over a signal that was coming through clearly a moment ago. Her crossed arms hold two abalone shells angled outward, offered toward something outside the frame. There is no second figure anywhere in this sequence, no implied audience, which means the offering has nowhere to land. It is a goddess mid-ritual with no congregation yet assembled, and that unresolved posture does more theological work than the halo does. Zanele Muholi’s self-portraits come to mind here, adornment piled on not to decorate the body but to armor and elevate it simultaneously, the accessory functioning as both shield and crown. In both bodies of work, the femininity on display is not offered for anyone’s consumption. It is withheld even while it is fully visible, which is its own kind of power.
Then panel four abandons the cool blue-grey palette for warm sepia, and the shift is worth sitting with rather than skimming past. The scallop-shell harness reads as armor now, chain instead of pearl, and for the first time in the sequence her gaze lifts above the frame instead of into it or away from it. Where the earlier panels stage devotion, this one stages arrival, a warrior stepping fully into a body rather than a body being prepared for worship. The tonal break does the same work Awol Erizku’s photographs do when he drops a Black subject into the exact lighting scheme of a Dutch master and dares you to notice the substitution has changed everything and nothing at once.
The Botticelli comparison is unavoidable given the shell, the rising pose, the halo, and Enesi clearly knows it. But the actual departure matters more than the quotation, and it is where the exhibition’s idea of divine femininity separates itself most clearly from the European tradition it is borrowing from. Botticelli’s Venus arrives finished, weightless, already the ideal, born fully formed from foam, femininity presented as a completed aesthetic object for someone else to behold. This Yemoja arrives with mass, with visible effort, mid-labor rather than post-arrival. Her divinity is not that she is perfect. It is that she is generative, which tracks with the myth itself. Hers is the water that broke and became an ocean. It was never water that sat there waiting to be admired.
What keeps the show from collapsing into generic sea-imagery is the discipline in the materials. Cowrie, scallop, and abalone each carry distinct weight in Yoruba symbolic language, wealth, protection, fertility, and Enesi keeps them legible rather than folding them into one glittering texture. That precision is easy to miss on a first pass through a room this maximalist, where the instinct is to read everything shimmering as the same gesture toward “the spiritual.” It is not the same gesture. It is closer to vocabulary than to mood, and the vocabulary is specifically feminine in the way it distributes meaning, fertility here, protection there, wealth somewhere else, rather than collapsing womanhood into a single decorative idea the way a lot of divine-feminine imagery tends to.
Where the exhibition holds itself back is in scale. Four panels built around one recurring face start to feel, by the fourth frame, like a closely observed study of a single body’s capacity rather than a fuller claim about Yemoja as an idea distributed across many. The concept has room for more than one woman to carry it. That may be the more ambitious version of this project still waiting to be made.
Yemoja, photographed by Ayuba Enesi, and Curated by Mustapha Abubakar, was on view through June 13, 2023 at the EcoBank Pan-African Centre.
