Redemption

Adeola Olagunju uses self-portraiture, along with the re-staging and interpretation of traditional Yoruba healing rituals, to explore her journey through a near-death experience and to visualize what it means to emerge on the other side. The visuality of these works and their use of memory as a subject can be understood through the operations of the body. The body, as an artistic motif, shaped the way the artist understood both her predicament and her artistic practice. The images communicate themes of trauma, alienation, repression, sacrifice, spirituality, identity, and home.

Olagunju began this body of work after discovering a tumor growing in her throat. Following surgical procedure, she gradually lost the use of her mouth due to temporomandibular joint locking. During this desperate time, she became exposed to layers of belief and faith. Her family guided her through a spiritual procession called irapada, a Yoruba term meaning “redemption.” Irapada is performed primarily for severely ill people as a way of renewing their lives. This practice is common within the so-called white garment churches, such as Cherubim & Seraphim and Celestial churches, as well as within the Yoruba traditional religion.

The performative role of the camera, and the power and control it bestowed on the surrogates—friends, family, and medical officers—who photographed the earlier images of the artist, raises the question of truth. The truth as seen by the surrogates, the camera, and the artist differed. The artist was aware of how the camera altered the subject, the object, and the behavior of those behind it, and of how reality, passing through different layers of perception, culminates in a single truth: a photograph.

Just as a diary often betrays an awareness of its potential to be read by others (Van Dijck 2007: 54), the artist’s body became a diary read by different people through the camera. Not only was the artist’s body read as a diary; it was also written as a photograph. The private experience was simultaneously a public one, shared with and by others—a personal story representative of a collective experience.

The artist later staged a secondary revision of the experience through self-portraiture, employing memory and artistic interpretation. She molded the experience into a language that speaks not only to the mind but also to the emotions. Here, memory serves as a witness to past events. Once again, the camera confronts constructed realities, personal mythologies, and beliefs that produce evidence of a truth. In this way, both memory and photography became subjective modes of recording the past in the present.