Nigerian artist Azuka Muoh works through digital surrealism in painting, drawing and film to challenge masculinity and patriarchal hierarchies.
Read MoreAzuka Muoh was born in 2000 in Nigeria. She lives and works in Lagos.
Muoh works across painting, drawing and film. Her works are striking portraits of everyday African people: someone riding a motorcycle, a couple posing or figures holding a boombox. As portraiture, Muoh takes a digital surrealist approach to her works, integrating both collage and digital textures. A common motif is that the faces in her paintings are obscured by images of car wheels, either covering the figure's eyes or whole head. Muoh often keeps the bodies of her figures detailed while their backgrounds and clothes have minimal shadows and details.
Through her work, Muoh aims to bring to light overlooked nuances of daily life-ranging from street harassment to boyhood. Muoh advocates for gender equality in her work by reflecting on family traditions, systemic patriarchal maltreatment and an (over) celebration of masculinity. Her work has also been viewed with connections to Afrofuturism, an aesthetic that combines the African diasporic experience with sci-fi, history and fantasy.
Muoh has previously discussed Di Okpara as a metaphor in her work Mmechi Anya (2020), a portrait featuring a child crossing their arms in front of a simple landscape and linear designs. Di Okpara, as translated from Igbo, means firstborn son. Through her work, Di Okpara, then, refers to the oppressive nature of masculinity to which many women and queer people have suffered in her native Nigeria and throughout the African continent.
In her work The Whistleblower (2021), Muoh depicts a man wearing a suit and a hat holding a trumpet in front of a plain pink background. Like much of her work, the figure's face is replaced with an image of a car wheel. Muoh has previously written about this work in conjunction with #EndSARS, a decentralised movement and series of protests in Nigeria against police brutality.
Azuka Muoh has held exhibitions at the Aworanka Lagos and Christopher Moller Gallery, Capetown. Her first solo exhibition was in November 2022 at the Christopher Moller Gallery.
Azuka Muoh's website can be found here.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2022
