THE ARMORY SHOW 2025 - A CLOUD OF WITNESSES

For our participation at Armory 2025, Retro Africa is proudto present “A Cloud of Witnesess,” featuring a selection of

works by Victor Ehikhamenor, Chidimma Nnoli, ChristopherIdowu and Leonard Pongo.

Victor Ehikhamenor’s Rosary Series, where the enduringsyncretism of indigenous and adopted African, Middle

Eastern and European belief systems in Benin culture andCatholic tradition, is re-examined through striking

figurative sculptures crafted from coral beads, reshapedinto rosaries. Ehikhamenor invites viewers to engage with the

stories embedded within each piece, creating a dialogue thatbridges his artistic practice and cultural heritage. His

works serve as a re-telling of accumulated narratives,reflecting the complex interplay between memory, history,

and identity. Influenced by his upbringing in a village richin artistic traditions and his literary background,

Ehikhamenor adopts a unique storytelling approach,demonstrating how art can transcend the limitations of canvas.

Through his pieces, he challenges us to be "gooddescendants" by recalling and acknowledging our ancestors,

emphasizing the importance of memory in shaping ouridentities. By working with inherited cultural fragments, he

poses a thought-provoking challenge: to honour our pastwhile forging a meaningful path forward

Chidinma Nnoli contemplates her constant conflict with selfand a background saturated with religion and

gendered obligations, questioning the tension between fateand free will not only as lived experiences but also as

recurring formal challenges within the act of painting. Bytreating the canvas as a living surface that can resist,

absorb, betray, or interrupt her intention, her work becomesa site where agency is unstable, both for the subjects

and herself as the artist. Whether through sudden visualruptures or hazy, dissolving atmospheres, she creates

passages that move from subject to space, space to spirit,and spirit to history. Her paintings evoke what can most

deeply be felt as intense, poetic, and balanced, even intheir continuous state of becoming

Christopher Samuel Idowu’s paintings reflect his upbringingin a mission, incorporating spiritual iconography,

historical landscapes, and the architecture of Badagry.Using diverse media such as conte crayon, charcoal,

watercolor, acrylics, oils, and printmaking techniques, heexplores time, memory, human connection, and

spirituality through portraiture. His compositions, enrichedby colors, architecture, and sitters, pay homage to

cultural and historical sites.

Leonard Pongo’s lens captures the raw, intimate essence ofCongolese life. His images, along with mixedmedia

video installations, present a nuanced counterpoint towar-torn portrayals, challenging the transcending

dominant depictions to reveal profound beauty amid despair.His work offers a deeply personal perspective on the

Congolese experience.

A Cloud of Witnesses is about presence, the seen and theunseen, the archival and the immediate. It gathers four

distinct practices that together trace how histories, ourdaily practices, bodies and communities hold and hold us. Each

piece in this selection is not only to be looked at, theyare sites of testimony where material, memory and belief

meet. They insist that it can be both evidence andconsolation, evidence of what happened and

consolation for what endures.

‍

‍