THE JOURNEY THAT STARTED IT ALL Okereke’s artistic journey started 21 years ago, but in hindsight, it started long before. His first road trip was, in fact, at a very tender age and fundamental to where he is today. As a young child, he suffered a severe illness, and his mother made the decision to travel across Nigeria to take young Okereke to his grandmother, a powerful healer that saved his life and continued to strengthen his body. He reflects on how meaningful this moment was, “Without this body, there’s nothing. Part of the initial healing has also partly sustained me artistically and as a person.” He also reflects on his father’s impact on his personal and artistic development. From a young age, his father instilled the importance of being useful to the people around us and taught him to question the real reasons why we work and what we work toward. From his father, he learned that work could be utilized as a self-manifestation tool. With these two grand inspirations in his life, art followed naturally. “When I met photography, my dad and grandma had already laid the foundation,” he says. Another instrumental piece of his artistic development was his desire to conceptualize a world through his eyes. There was a need to move this conceptualization process to materialization, and since he never picked up a paintbrush, photography gave him the tools to complete this process. Naturally curious and able to effortlessly correlate concepts, Okereke soon understood his strength as an artist. “It is not so much outside the box as it is between the boxes. It’s not about inventing grand ideas but rather how you move between spaces. With a sense of multiple identities, you can go forward and backward, and yet, this would still mean moving forward.” His next journey expanded his sense of self-identity and allowed him a more expansive perspective of Africa since he was no longer looking from within. Studying at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris provided him with training at an infrastructural level but simultaneously
Between El Gadarif and El Galabat, Sudan
Is it a couple in love, or is it like in Nigeria, a love-hate relationship?
We all have a story. Cross-River, Nigeria-Cameroon border
193
Made with FlippingBook Digital Publishing Software