Starting off in Nigeria, moving on later to the United States of America and recently, to the United Kingdom, Onome Olotu, a contemporary Nigerian artist, is truly on the move, as well as her art.

The diaspora artist, who currently lives and works between Cambridge, UK and Lagos, Nigeria, is very conscious of her changing surroundings and others experiences, which combine to shape her works.

In the course of her movements across three continents – Africa, North America and Europe, she often faces the challenge of being in some places that continually question her presence.

But these questions are what formed part of the conversations around her work today as a painter, including those in her homecoming exhibition, which she titled ‘Before We Know Ourselves’.

The solo exhibition will hold from November 4-December 15, 2026, at SOTO Gallery, #10 Omo Osagie Street, SW Ikoyi, Lagos, where Olotu will present two bodies of work to her Nigerian audience; The Postcard Series and The Mask Series.

Speaking of the exhibition, the gallery noted that Olotu’s show is highly anticipated as it is the gallery’s last for the year as well as a homecoming show for the artist.

Uche Obasi, curator of the exhibition, in the curatorial statement, explained that ‘Before We Know Ourselves’, which is being sponsored by Art Audry, is built on the continuous process of examining how archives, the body, and materials shape people’s understanding of self.

“Olotu engages a visual language that draws us to have conversations about belonging and being seen within the mainstream,” Obasi said.

The highlights of the exhibition, according to Obasi, are Olotu’s Postcard Series and Mask Series, the two bodies of work, which includes archival images documented to reimagine the past, while navigating the complexities of life in the United States and currently, Europe, as an international student and non-immigrant.

The Mask series examines masking in relation to the body and identity. While the Mask Series is informed by W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of Double Consciousness, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the Postcards examine masking in relation to place and historical representation.

With painting and printmaking, this ongoing inquiry informs a broader conversation reframed from both black thinkers on societal belonging and alienation, to address public views on vulnerability, identity, and the need to continually seek resistance and negotiation.

In his introduction, Patricia Ekpo, an assistant professor, Art History at Cornell University, observed that the artist’s two series emerge from her serial displacements as she moved from her home in Lagos, Nigeria to Princeton and Ithaca in the United States and finally to Cambridge, United Kingdom.

“Through these paintings, we see Olotu’s keen investments in her changing surroundings and others’ experiences— ranging from bodily non-normativity in contemporary Nigeria to the racialized and gendered contours of collegial placemaking in Princeton and Ithaca,” the professor said.

Olotu, according to Professor Ekpo, does not just observe and reproduce the worlds, but uses her outsider status and its attendant mode of formal abstraction to interrogate assumed social, cultural, and place-making norms.

He is also excited with Olotu’s techniques across the two series as she offers a celebratory but layered portrayal of the uses and subjectivizing potential of the plump body, embracing the erotic and privileging experimentation and play “in order to tell new stories about what it means to be part of a diaspora, imagine alternative embodiments, and cross psychic borders.”

On her part, Olotu, who is excited to present the homecoming solo exhibition, explained that the two series were borne out of her creative ingenuity and experiences in the diaspora.

She was particular about the Postcard Series, which she noted has evolved to reflect her lived experiences as a non-immigrant, international student from Nigeria, navigating a complex life in the United States, and currently Europe. The above is amid the shifting politics of the current administrations in such places and at a time when immigration is at the heart of world political discourses.

She also explained the techniques in her series saying that she used the postcard as a tool, and combined it with textures from plaster and paste to talk about the personal weight of travel like displacement and longing.

“The textured surfaces are metaphors of the rewritten historical records and the postmarks and stamps speak to the specificity of time and location, which are personalized to each individual postcard and this process of layering for me, functioned as a form of masking,” she said.

For the Mask Series, the artist was able to convey the idea of people seeing themselves through their own eyes while also being aware of how they are perceived by a dominant society.

She achieved that by engaging with W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of Double Consciousness, and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.

“In this context, I reframed it through the experiences of my sister and other big-bodied individuals,” she said.

The figures, distorted proportions and blurred contours mirror the tension of being very visible yet unseen, at the same time.

“In this series I also layer with processes like screen-printing, graffito and washes to add more textual elements on my surfaces, similar to revealing and concealing the memories and trauma that we try so hard to hide.

“This development led me toward a more expansive understanding of the body because if the face can be covered, then the body too can function as a kind of mask,” she concluded.

Once again, ‘Before We Know Ourselves’, which is sponsored by Art Audry, will be held from November 4-December 15, 2026, at SOTO Gallery, #10 Omo Osagie Street, SW Ikoyi, Lagos.