Yemi Adebisi

Lateefat Tobun’s Ori Inu: The Silent Realities was shown as part of the contemporary African art exhibition at the 2026 Bradford African Festival of Arts, under the festival’s theme Nkosoo, an Akan concept of advancement and progress. It’s worth sitting with that placement for a moment before looking at the work itself, because a festival theme like Nkosoo tends to pull work toward a fairly narrow set of images: forward motion, arrival, the future as something bright and waiting. Tobun’s piece doesn’t do that, and the gap between what the theme invites and what the work actually offers is where its interest lies.

Seen from behind, two figures stand close together, heads inclined toward one another in an unposed, private gesture. Their bodies aren’t rendered as two separate surfaces but as one continuous piece of cloth, a shared pattern that runs across both silhouettes without a seam between them, at least not at first glance. Dark, flattened silhouettes strip the figures of individual features. There’s no attempt at portraiture here, no interest in who these two people specifically are, and that anonymity does real work: it lets the figures stand in for something larger than themselves without tipping into abstraction.

The pattern is where the piece earns its argument. On one figure the fabric blooms into large floral motifs, soft rounded blossoms in cream and rose with dark red centres radiating outward. On the other it resolves into something closer to feather or wing, its lines sharper, more linear, less organic. These aren’t two patterns placed side by side. Look at the diagonal gold band running from shoulder to hem and it becomes clear they’re two readings of a single fabric, physically stitched across both bodies. It’s a simple device, and it’s the strongest thing in the piece: identity here isn’t a matter of separate inheritances lined up next to each other, but one shared cultural material, expressed differently depending on where you look.

Technically, the work sits somewhere between illustration and textile design, which is itself worth noting. The pattern reads as digitally rendered rather than hand-drawn or painted, flat planes of colour with clean, printed-looking edges, and the silhouettes have the graphic weight of a poster or a piece of applied design rather than a painting. That’s not a criticism. It suits the subject: cloth, pattern, the visual language of textile production, is exactly the register this piece is working in, and a more painterly hand might have worked against the argument rather than for it. But it does mean the piece asks to be judged partly as design, and design of this kind lives or dies on precision. The gold seam is precise. The pattern-fill occasionally isn’t; there are a couple of places, around the shoulder on the floral side particularly, where the pattern’s logic seems to lose its own thread, less a deliberate fraying than a small technical slip.

The device carries weight against the backdrop of Yoruba textile tradition, where cloth has long carried personal and communal meaning without needing to state it outright, in the resist-dyed patterning of adire, in the ceremonial and social weight of aso oke. Tobun’s fabric doesn’t quote either directly. It draws on the same underlying premise, that pattern can hold identity the way language holds it, and that borrowing gives the fused cloth more ballast than it would have as a purely formal gesture.

It’s also worth placing this beside other work responding to migration and cultural inheritance through the body and textile, where the more common move is fragmentation: patchwork, torn cloth, garments literally stitched from mismatched pieces to signal a self assembled from disparate sources. Tobun goes the other way. The cloth here was never broken. That’s a smaller risk to take visually, since it resists the drama of visible rupture, but it’s arguably the more interesting claim: that migration doesn’t split a person’s inheritance into fragments to be reassembled, but simply asks it to travel.

Behind the two figures sits a large pale circle, moon or sun or halo depending on where the eye settles, and it’s the least resolved part of the composition. Read generously, its refusal to be one specific thing is the point, a form with no fixed referent holding the figures the way memory holds experience. Read less generously, it’s underdetermined rather than deliberately open, doing atmospheric work through scale and glow that the rest of the piece, with its careful pattern-logic, hasn’t quite earned elsewhere. It succeeds as a mood. It’s less certain as an argument.

The title adds a further layer, and it’s arguably the smartest thing about the piece. In Yoruba thought, ori inu names the inward dimension of personhood, the inner self bound up with individual identity, direction, destiny, a deeply private and individuating concept concerned with the particular course of one life. Setting that title against two figures fused into a single cloth doesn’t confirm the image so much as complicate it. If ori inu belongs to the individual, can it still be ori inu once it’s shared completely with another person? The work doesn’t answer that. It just puts the question in the room and leaves it there, which is a more demanding and more honest choice than resolving it would have been.

That’s also where the piece takes its real risk elsewhere. By binding the two figures so completely into a single fabric, Tobun edges close to letting individual identity dissolve into a collective one, and the work never quite settles whether that dissolution is the point or the danger. Credit to it for not settling it. That refusal keeps the piece from collapsing into easy sentiment about togetherness and asks, instead, what’s actually given up when identity is shared this closely. Few works hold that kind of ambivalence inside an otherwise reassuring thesis. This one does, if only in a single gesture rather than as something sustained through to the end. Having raised the question, Tobun doesn’t push on it again. It gets folded back into the larger, more comforting argument about continuity rather than left to complicate that argument all the way through, and a version of this piece willing to let that discomfort sit unresolved to the final line would have been the stronger work.

Seen against Nkosoo, the piece offers a considered answer to what advancement means. It moves away from progress as speed, as material gain, as leaving the past behind, and proposes something more reflective: progress as continuity, the past carried forward rather than shed. Migration, in this reading, isn’t simply departure or loss but a process in which memory and identity keep being negotiated, keep being renewed. Tobun’s version of Nkosoo isn’t really about the destination. It’s about what survives getting there, and about what a person chooses, or is compelled, to keep carrying.

There’s real economy in how the piece gets this across. No spectacle, no literal depiction of movement or migration. Meaning comes through proximity, pattern, and the private, turned-away posture of the two figures, a moment the viewer happens upon rather than one staged for them. That restraint is a genuine strength, and one worth naming plainly: the piece trusts its own metaphor enough not to over-explain it, which is rarer than it should be in work made for a themed group show, where the pull toward legibility, toward a wall label doing half the work, is strong.

Where it’s strongest is where it’s most specific: the fused fabric, the gold seam, the two motifs held in tension, the friction built into its own title. Where it’s weakest is where it goes atmospheric instead, the halo, the final turn toward reconciliation, the places where feeling is asked to stand in for argument. Tobun suggests that moving forward doesn’t require severing the past. Home can live inside memory. Culture can travel as one unbroken cloth rather than a set of separate remnants. Belonging can be remade without being invented from nothing.

Set against Nkosoo, that claim carries real weight, progress measured not by distance travelled but by what’s carried forward intact. Ori Inu: The Silent Realities is at its best as a formal argument about inheritance, built through cloth and pattern rather than statement, and it would be a stronger piece still if it let its own hardest question, what’s lost when the inward self is shared this completely, go unanswered for longer than it does.