In Exercises in liberation, Diana Ejaita explores the layered nature of human experience, spirituality, and cultural memory. Drawing from West African literature and textile traditions, she develops a visual language that blends abstraction with storytelling.

Best known internationally as an illustrator for The New yorker, Ejaita has recently returned to analogue production. This exhibition spans painting, drawing, sculpture, and poster installation, created during the artist’s residency with kó in Lagos. Her paintings embody the idea of assembled histories, where past and present converge through forms, symbols, and negative space. Fluid silhouettes emerge from dense layers, with recurring motifs resembling bodies, natural elements, and ritual objects such as horns, shells, plants, crowns, and natural fibers.

Ejaita’s indigo drawings suggest the fluidity of timeless water, created daily at dawn and dusk as rituals of calm and meditative prayer. Her sculptures appear as communal bodies that act as vessels linking earth and sky, pointing to our shared spiritual experiences and the wellbeing of the community. The textiles evoke the challenges the body must pass through, walls that bear the traces of passage.Across these media, Ejaita works through a process of layering and assemblage. She creates what she refers to as “nature morte” or “visual prayers” that imagine new forms of experience and exchange. For Ejaita, art is an exercise of liberation, breaking away from repetitive gestures and rigid structures through meditative making that counters the accelerated pace of contemporary life.