Artist Statement

Artist Statement

I began my art practice in 2016 with cultural performance as a central framework. In 2019, I created a digital performance project titled Area Babes and Ashawo Superstars hosted entirely on Instagram, a body of work exploring contemporary African womanhood. The project unfolds through the lives of intergenerational, fictional African cosmopolitan women navigating sex, class, power, and identity in the 21st century. Originally presented through film stills referencing the golden age of Nollywood and layered with original texts, the work engages viewers with a form of feminism that exists outside normative definitions, grounded in the lived realities of contemporary African and diasporic women. I created this work to address dimensions of cultural discourse often considered taboo, particularly the economic agency and liberatory politics of sex, both transactional and otherwise. It is shaped with humor, wit, and sentiment while engaging questions of cultural ideology, social conditioning, morality, and the shifting dynamics of contemporary womanhood. What is presented here (select works) reflects the evolution of this work from digital media into series, photographic prints, sound, film, and site-specific installation. To view the full body of work or learn more about Area Babes & Ashawo Superstars, you may request my dossier.

Oroma Elewa