OSINACHI

Solo Show, March 2020

OSINACHI - EXISTENCE AS PROTEST - SOLO SHOW BY OSINACHI, AFRICA’S FOREMOST CRYPTOARTIST

 Foreword by Artnome founder Jason Bailey

Artists already face established and well-documented gender and racial biases in the art market. As a writer, curator, and lecturer, I sometimes wonder (and worry) if by celebrating art made with the latest technology, I am inadvertently reinforcing a new bias, one which excludes artists without access to the latest technology. 

How can an artist from a country like Nigeria where 87 million people (half their population) live on $1.90 a day in extreme poverty be expected to compete in the world of digital art? Just 4.2% of Nigerians even have access to a PC, and less than half have access to the internet. I write this as someone who has had every advantage. I grew up in a family of engineers, just a stone’s throw from MIT and Harvard. While I’m very excited about the future of digital art and the way that artists are embracing new tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning, I also know these tools are computationally expensive and not everyone has access to them. 

Frankly, I’m depressed by the idea that my support for art made with tech may be giving momentum to a movement that excludes large populations of creative artists from participating. Then I discover an incredible artist like Osinachi and I remember that great art comes from the artist, not from the tools they use.  

Osinachi was born and raised in Nigeria where the odds were greatly stacked against him becoming a digital artist. Osinachi had:  

• Limited access to a computer

• No access to computer graphics software

• A government with a poor record on freedom of speech

Despite these limitations and, in part, due to these limitations, Osinachi pushed through and found a way to make art on computers and to spread his message around the world.

Osinachi’s work would be remarkable and worthy of great attention if it were made in Zurich or where I live in Boston, but the fact that it emerged against the odds he faced in Nigeria makes it that much more impressive.

Osinachi took Microsoft Word, a word processing tool with 1.2 billion users globally, and found a new way to use it as a tool for making digital art that none of us have seen before. Through sheer effort, imagination, and creativity, Osinachi brings virtuosity to what most people overlooked or cast aside as a crude tool for making basic shapes and patterns. Osinachi’s textures and color palettes sing out and demand attention. Inspired by the textiles found in Nigeria, they feel more like a rich collage of vibrant fabrics than a screen full of cold lifeless pixels. The fearless creative energy and positivity of Osinachi’s aesthetic extend seamlessly into the subject matter of his work.

Osinachi is a brilliant protest artist. Rather than depict dramatic scenes of struggle and conflict as is often typical with protest art, his weapon of choice is to highlight normalcy and positivity. 

His government has some of the most vicious anti-LGTBQ laws in the world, yet he chooses to celebrate this community in the face of these laws by showing its members happily living their lives as everyday human beings. By avoiding negativity and drama and simply presenting positive images of people just trying to live their lives, Osinachi completely defangs anti-LGBTQ propaganda. Rather than pour gas on a fire, he extinguishes it all together. 

Like all great artists, Osinachi is a mirror of his times, and the topics he addresses -- from environmentalism to racism and single parenthood -- resonate far outside the borders of Nigeria. He is a reminder of what art and artists can be for us all when they are performing at their best and fulfilling their most important function within our increasingly global culture.