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Omenka Gallery is proud to present Refracted Realities: Contemporary African Art through Form, Image, and Symbol, a group exhibition featuring five Nigerian artists: Damilola Victoria Akinpelumi, Matthias Ibileke, Bukola Febisola Ogunsakin, Adeola Abisoye Odewole, and Olu Frank Idoze. Running from January 30 to February 13, 2026, the exhibition explores how contemporary African artists are reshaping form, image, and symbol to reflect evolving identities and cultural narratives.
Drawing from African philosophies, vernacular materials, and experimental processes, the artists in Refracted Realities reconfigure the familiar into something newly resonant. Whether through layered abstraction, symbolic figuration, or conceptual installations, their works question linear histories and offer new visual grammars for understanding the self and society. This refracted lens — at once personal, political, and poetic — reveals the multiplicity of African experience and expression today.
Damilola Victoria Akinpelumi employs mixed media and found materials to explore personal and collective memory, embedding fragments of domestic life, ritual, and generational knowledge into richly textured compositions.
Matthias Ibileke, a documentary photographer, captures the dignity of ordinary life in Nigeria, using unposed imagery to construct intimate narratives of resilience and cultural continuity.
Bukola Febisola Ogunsakin weaves Yoruba cosmology and feminist symbolism into vibrant paintings and installations, interrogating the role of women as custodians of heritage.
Adeola Abisoye Odewole combines digital art and spiritual symbolism to explore ancestry, identity, and metaphysical transformation through a multidisciplinary lens.
Olu Frank Idoze works with straw inlay and indigenous design systems to create textured visual manuscripts that meditate on resilience, unity, and African material heritage.
Collectively, these artists challenge the viewer to see beyond fixed representations. Their works are portals into refracted realities — where past, present, and imagined futures merge in powerful acts of cultural re-visioning.
About the Artists
Matthias Ibileke
Matthias Ibileke is a Nigerian documentary photographer whose work captures the emotional weight of everyday life through visual storytelling. With nearly a decade of experience, he blends photojournalism, portraiture, and travel photography to explore themes of dignity, connection, and cultural memory. Ibileke’s images are rooted in empathy and observational detail, often focusing on fleeting but profound moments. His storytelling approach transforms the ordinary into visual testimony, revealing quiet narratives of resilience across communities. His work has appeared in lifestyle and editorial contexts, and he continues to build a photographic archive shaped by care, respect, and truth.
Olu Frank Idoze
Olu Frank Idoze is a self-taught Nigerian visual artist and art director whose mixed-media practice explores African heritage through symbolic storytelling. Working with straw inlay and indigenous materials, he merges traditional craft with contemporary aesthetics to create textured, culturally resonant compositions. His work draws from historic African patterns, architecture, and spiritual motifs to reflect themes of unity, resilience, and identity. Idoze has exhibited widely and developed his practice through mentorship with local artisans. As creative director of OFI Expressions, he remains committed to using art as a medium for preservation, dialogue, and the elevation of cultural memory.
Bukola Febisola Ogunsakin
Bukola Febisola Ogunsakin is a Nigerian multidisciplinary artist whose work interrogates memory, heritage, and gender through bold colour, symbolism, and Yoruba cosmology. Her practice spans painting, installation, and digital expression, often exploring the body as a vessel of cultural transmission. She has exhibited at Freedom Park Arts Centre and with the Society of Nigerian Artists and leads community workshops focused on youth empowerment. Drawing on oral traditions and ritual forms, Ogunsakin positions her work at the intersection of preservation and critique, reimagining the role of women as custodians of cultural identity in Nigeria’s evolving art landscape.
Damilola Victoria Akinpelumi
Damilola Victoria Akinpelumi is a Nigerian contemporary artist whose work explores identity and cultural storytelling through mixed media and experimental forms. Her textured compositions combine found materials, paint, and symbolic marks to evoke personal and collective memory. She has exhibited at Terra Kulture and the National Museum, Onikan, and participated in residencies within Lagos’s creative communities. Akinpelumi also collaborates with cultural institutions on projects that centre youth engagement and visual education. Her work reflects a dynamic and evolving practice that situates memory as both medium and message in Nigeria’s contemporary art discourse.
Adeola Abisoye Odewole
Adeola Abisoye Odewole is a UK-based Nigerian multidisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, digital art, and commercial storytelling. His practice explores identity, ancestry, and cultural memory, often combining African spiritual symbols with contemporary narratives. In 2022, he held his debut solo exhibition, Inward Gaze, at Windsor Gallery, Lagos, followed by Rooted Echoes in 2024. A former art director at X3M Ideas Nigeria, he contributed to award-winning advertising campaigns, including Soot Life Expectancy. Odewole holds an MSc in Design Innovation from De Montfort University. His visual language merges fine art with digital forms to bridge tradition and modernity.