Becoming an embodiment of memories merged with an orchestra of emotions and travails
Towards the last wave of shuddering spring in May 2025, I came across a poster on a notice board at the basement of the School of Art, Texas Tech University. Unlike earlier, when people would have continually punctured the quietness of this space with paces, it was quiet, and it afforded me the space to stand transfixed at a green poster. One that distanced itself from other papers that called for attention out of their bonds of typography, like the way an odd color stood out in the myriad of other similar ones. Indeed, this was an odd color amongst others. Perhaps the graphic/poster designer had also thought of this—perhaps not—yet, I stood in front of the poster ingesting the information as if my existence depended on it. Minutes later, I would be back upstairs, to a room filled with colors emanating from the wall like the ghost of a Nun in one of the quasi-religious movies. This time around, the images were not scary; rather, they moved, some stood still, some whispered, and some—like the papers on the board—called for attention.
Moving Vietnam, the title of the poster I saw on the board, was a call to experience an exhibition that was currently being held at the Landmark Gallery by Dr. Kevin Chua. As I stood in front of those captured moments of people I would probably not meet in my lifetime, I thought about how we only get to see that moment in their lives. How important it is to tell a story and how important it is to show the world an agency of who and what we have become, and there it was again— “agency”, the most said word up until that moment. I drifted briefly to Dr. Orfila Jorgelina’s class and thought about dimensions of agency and how it is more than what I had known before then, as an organization, but rather as an individual; as a philosophical encapsulation of the totality of oneself and how it is being represented. Then back to the gallery room—alone—staring at the images, I recalled Idowu Odeyemi’s Transatlantic [Heartbreak] Love, and in that instance, it all felt like a fitting puzzle; agency-story-visual-exhibition and right on that spot, I knew I wanted to tell a story of migration, one which does not just capture the existential question of movement but pierced into various facets of becoming a new person whilst on that movement up to getting to desired location. I have recounted to Kaiti once that the first thing I noticed when I got to the United States was the abundance of colors, and as I pieced my thoughts together, it became more obvious that I was ready to show what I saw, and that began the inception of an exhibition themed Beyond Atlantic that featured three artists including Ameen Abdallah, Daniel Mensah, and Kevin Abankwa.
Later that day, I met with the artists; whilst I had been meaning to talk about the idea of an exhibition to them, Kevin brought it up, and I thought to myself how nice it would be to curate an exhibition—albeit my first—before the year runs out. After we dispersed, I met with Dr. Klinton Burgio-Ericson and shared the idea with him. He looked happier than I was at that moment. Before we moved to another discussion on why I enjoy reading Russian authors, he implored me to apply for the ongoing application that calls for the use of the Charles Adams Studio project Gallery at Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts by the School of Art.
During the summer, then, I fiddled with the idea so much that it began to slip from me until I received Dr Klint’s email asking if I had submitted my idea to collaborate with other artists for the exhibition, and in that instant, I felt a rush I had experienced earlier while looking at Dr Chua’s exhibition in the Landmark Gallery and I started with my curatorial statement. By the time we resumed, I had submitted my statement and got a book from Dr Klint on an exhibition by Black Artists on movement.
Hence, what began as a personal encounter—with images, movement, and the quiet insistence of color—soon demanded a clearer articulation of purpose. Beyond Atlantic emerged not merely as an exhibition about migration, but as a meditation on what it means to become a body shaped by movement, memory, and displacement. It asks how individuals carry fragments of elsewhere within themselves, and how these fragments are negotiated, performed, and sometimes resisted in new sociocultural terrains.
The exhibition takes hybridity not as a fixed identity but as a continuous process—one formed in transit, in longing, and in adaptation. From the perspective of the works collected for viewership in this exhibition, crossing the Atlantic is not simply a matter of moving from one geography to another; it is a process of reconfiguring the self, where memory and immediacy coexist, and where the body becomes an archive of past homes and present realities. In this sense, Beyond Atlantic understands the migrant body as an active site of agency—one that does not merely absorb experience but reconstitutes it through visual expression.
Within their presence, the works presented in the exhibition do not just offer a singular philosophy about migration. Instead, they propose multiple modes of becoming: through material, gesture, memory, and form, all channeled towards a quasi-storytelling yet ontological engagement with the concept of migration. Each artist engages the Atlantic not only as a physical crossing but as a conceptual space—charged with histories of movement, rupture, and reassembly. It is from this shared yet differentiated inquiry that the individual practices of Ameen Abdallah, Daniel Mensah, and Kevin Abankwa unfold.
What is Beyond Atlantic & How Does Each Artist Embody This Theme?
Movement has become one of the major characteristics of human civilization, either for adventure or economy, right from the start of time. If we are to cut off years of earlier movements, one can begin with the recent prominent one that offshoots the European civilization to the other world, the 15th-century exploration. While this movement was mainly fueled by economic reasons, countless others followed and began to immanently reshape their reasons and thence, birthing adventure, vacation, devotion, and whatever reasons that may appeal to the traveller. As years moved forward, and Columbus had boasted to have “discovered” a new world, on the other side of the map, the paradox of discovery marked the people, and thence, leading to the 400 years of moving passages that became widely known as the Transatlantic slavery. Even though prior to this, the dusty road of Fezzan, had become a testifier to Trans-sahara slavery, the 400 years of crossing atlantic became more known and widely dreaded in colloquium of intellectual discussions for various reasons like that of Professor Bethwell Ogot who pointed out how the movement led to depreciation [and total annihilation] of indigenous knowledge on some skills that the people had boasted of as a community. Professor Ade-Ajayi, in one of his essays, had noted how it factored incessant wars among neighboring communities, especially with the presence of Maxim guns and bayonets compared to the bows and arrows common with them, and by impact, some villages/societies were completely wiped out.
Each artist occupies a distinct position within the continuum of displacement, self-recognition, and transformation, offering a visual and material response to the conditions outlined above.
As the movement began to dwindle, thanks to abolitionists, another movement arose—focusing on the same expanse of geography that came to be known as Africa—called colonialism. What followed became what Chinua Achebe captured in his book, Things Fall Apart, as the dearth of indigenous cultures and the rise of a hybridized culture, of which Historians have offered solace of terminology by calling it assimilation policy. By the 21st century, a movement that had once been characterized by forcefulness had now become what the indigenous do willingly, as in the 15th century, in search of a life. One difference from what is experienced at home. One with a colorful sky and with less uncertainty for the future.
It is towards the conceptualization of this idea that to define Beyond Atlantic, one must take note of the following terms: hybridized body, agency, memory, and movement. For context, Beyond Atlantic is an exhibition that through a multimedia and multi-artistic practices addresses the conversation on belonging to a new community while also being an emboiment of an “old” one [hybridized body], and at the same time also serving as a witness [agency] to the changes in experience [memory] as one recount their present through the lens of where they come from [movement].
It is from this open conceptualization focusing on the highlighted terms that the exhibition turns toward the practices of the participating artists. Rather than approaching migration as a linear narrative with a singular origin and destination, Beyond Atlantic is structured around three conceptual moments of becoming. Each artist occupies a distinct position within the continuum of displacement, self-recognition, and transformation, offering a visual and material response to the conditions outlined above.
The exhibition unfolds through three interrelated sections using the works of each artist as an authority for the theme they embody: The Beginning, focusing on the works of Kevin Abankwa; Know Thyself, highlighting the works of Ameen Abdallah; and Re-adaptation, embodying the works of Daniel Mensah. These sections do not suggest a fixed chronology, but rather propose overlapping states through which the migrant body may pass, return, or remain suspended. Together, they map the shifting terrain of identity formation across movement—where departure initiates rupture, reflection negotiates memory, and adaptation becomes a strategy for survival and renewal.
Kevin Abankwa — The Beginning
To conceptualize the themes of movement, one must first acknowledge the role of where one set out from, and this is where the works of Kevin come in. Kevin’s work essentially focuses on the use of coffee and charcoal as a medium to visualize the throes of human existence. The closeness of labourers’ feet to the earth, and the travails of man in his brutish existence. Similarly, his works explore the role of community and constant migration and the impact it often leaves on travelers’ feet by engaging in hyperrealism.
Through a sustained focus on the feet of laborers, Kevin draws attention to the body’s most intimate point of contact with the ground. These feet, worn, brownish, wrinkled, and textured, bear the imprints of movement long before migration becomes a choice or a destination. They speak to a brutish yet dignified existence, where survival is negotiated daily through physical toil. In this sense, the feet function as both witnesses and archives: recording journeys taken, burdens carried as a means of survival, and communities traversed.
Kevin’s engagement with hyperrealism intensifies this narrative by disposing of abstraction. Instead, the viewer is confronted with the immediacy of the body at work—its fatigue, resilience, and vulnerability. Iconographically, the closeness of the laborer’s feet to the soil, even as they crouched on the floor and with visible veins contouring the image, becomes symbolic of an unbroken relationship between the human body and the land it departs from. Movement, here, is not yet aspirational; it is compulsory, cyclical, and rooted in economic and communal necessity.
Community also occupies a central place within Kevin’s works. During his interview, he related how his society—Sekondi, Ghana—becomes a major drive behind his feet series art. Migration is presented not as an isolated act but as a collective condition, one shaped by shared labor, shared routes, and shared uncertainties. The repeated emphasis on feet—often anonymous—resists individual heroism and instead gestures toward a broader social body in motion. By being anonymous also, there is a vicious call to genderless and the death of the owner. While some may point to the fact that it is visibly vein-lined like that of a man, there arose a question: are women without veins? Or do they not labour?
Importantly, Kevin positions movement as a communal inheritance, passed down through generations whose histories are inscribed not in written records but in calloused skin and scarred feet.
Within the larger perspective and understanding of Beyond Atlantic, The Beginning establishes the corporeal and material groundwork of migration. It reminds the viewer that before displacement becomes psychological or cultural, it is first experienced physically through weight, friction, and fatigue. In this light, Kevin’s works thus anchor the exhibition in the realities of departure, making visible the bodily cost of movement and setting the stage for the reflective and adaptive processes that unfold in the sections that follow.
Ameen Abdallah — Know Thyself
In Odeyemi’s poem mentioned earlier, there is a line that reads, “—it is a disservice to leave home and forget how it built you.” It is about visualizing this poem, speaking to the interior nature of the viewer, that Ameen’s collection of pictures and his role as a visual artist using photography as a medium come into discussion. Ameen Abdallah’s works tell stories using bodies, society, and his family’s interwoven relationships. He often emphasizes multi-dimensional art practices aided by visual artistic techniques.
Working primarily with photography, Ameen constructs visual narratives that position the body as both subject and site of inquiry. His images often unfold through layered compositions in which familial relationships, domestic spaces, and social environments are interwoven, collapsing the boundaries between the personal and the collective. In these works, the act of looking becomes an act of remembering and playing on the nostalgianess of the viewer that resists erasure by insisting on visibility and self-awareness.
Ameen’s emphasis on multidimensional artistic practice extends beyond the photographic image itself. His installation of a working, aged Singer sewing machine—continuously threading a seven-foot piece of cloth embedded with family photographs—introduces a material invocation of nostalgia and inherited memory. The repetitive motion of the machine evokes domestic labor, care, and the loud persistence of familial bonds, transforming the act of stitching into a metaphor for continuity and remembrance.
Through deliberate staging, gesture, and spatial arrangement, Ameen’s works invite viewers into intimate moments of reflection where identity remains fluid rather than fixed. The bodies that appear in his photographs are not passive representations; instead, they actively negotiate selfhood, performing memory while confronting the pressures of social expectation, displacement, and belonging.
Thence, within this framework of Beyond Atlantic, Know Thyself, acting as a Socratic term, occupies the contemplative midpoint of movement, one which the migrant turns inward to assess what has been carried forward and what risks being forgotten. Ameen’s works underscore the necessity of this introspection, suggesting that migration without self-recognition results in a rupture that extends beyond geography. By visualizing memory through bodies and relationships, his practice affirms that to know oneself is to acknowledge the structures emphasizing familial, cultural, and societal that have shaped one’s becoming.
Daniel Mensah — Re-adaptation
Daniel Mensah’s work reflects various facets of socio-cultural hybridization using the role of hip-hop culture as an anchor for his muse. His works, expressing hip-hop cultures, explore conversations on society’s impact. His works, comprising mainly spray paintings, focus on becoming a hybridized person in a new culture. Each dot of color becomes a referent to my first experience upon stepping into the airport, seeing a myriad of colors. In Re-adaptation, movement is no longer defined by departure or reflection, but by the ongoing process of adjustment—where identity is continuously reshaped in response to new social codes and visual ecologies.
The spray-painted surface metamorphoses into a canvas for this inquiry. Congregated through accumulations of dots, gestures, conjoined faces of black artists and his, and layered color fields, Daniel’s works resist singular readings, instead mirroring the fragmented and evolving nature of diasporic experience. Each dot functions as a unit of encounter that highlights an impression of a moment of contact, which, by impact, suggests how identity is assembled through repeated exposure to difference. In this sense, the works embody hybridity not as loss, but as an adaptive strategy, one forged through proximity, negotiation, and creative survival.
Daniel’s use of color, therefore, resonates deeply with the sensorial shock of arrival, signifying the sudden confrontation with abundance, contrast, and visual intensity that marks the early stages of resettlement. The dense chromatic fields echo the experience of stepping into a new cultural landscape, where familiar references dissolve, and new ones emerge. Here, adaptation is neither seamless nor complete; it is an ongoing process of recalibration, marked by both tension and possibility.
Re-adaptation thus positions hybridity as an active condition, and Daniel’s works suggest that to adapt is not to assimilate fully, but to remain in motion, allowing identity to expand through contact with difference while retaining traces of origin.
Conclusion: Curator’s Note
Beyond Atlantic highlights a continuous discussion of the importance of understanding one’s place and identity in a new culture without allowing a total overhauling of the old in place of the new. Its exegesis is to bring together the sacrifice of a preceding journey and labors that predate a journey of willingness [The Beginning], together with the knowledge of oneself in society by being reflexive about leaving [know thyself]. Just like Socrates’ definition of the term, to come to the conclusion of moving is to know one’s place and nature within oneself and in society. The result—leading to leaving—becomes Daniel’s [Re-adaptation], which brings to the viewer the continuity of identity reshaping. In this space, therefore, hybridization is neither a one-off journey nor the apotheosis of discovery; it is the continual understanding and refitting of oneself into a society.
Oluwabùkúnmi Awóṣùsì is an MA student in Art History at Texas Tech University, where his research focuses on Yorùbá visual culture and the intersections of indigenous knowledge and contemporary theory.