Roots in the Sky is the first institutional curatorial project by British-Nigerian artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones. This pivotal exhibition brings together new and recent works by ten contemporary artists whose practices span the United States, Europe, and West Africa.
Taking Adeniyi-Jones’s own practice as a point of departure - rich with West African heritage, fable, and ceremonial symbolism - the exhibition explores the cultural pluralism and layered identities that define the Black diaspora. Painting, sculpture, and drawing are employed in equal measure, with figuration and abstraction operating as shared visual languages to explore themes of mythology, community, lineage, and transformation.
The works on view are informed by both personal narrative and collective memory. As novelist Bernardine Evaristo writes, “We consist of multiples… descended as we are in Britain from fifty-four African countries and over thirty Caribbean countries… I believe in pluralism versus essentialism, always and all ways.” This ethos underpins Roots in the Sky, inviting artists to reflect on travel, hybridity, and the diasporic experience as a source of both creative expression and cultural logic.
Boundless interconnectivity—at times latent, at times boldly asserted—runs through the exhibition. The featured artists engage with questions of belonging and identity, resisting reductive narratives in favour of nuance, contradiction, and multiplicity. Their practices are further anchored by literary influences from James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, and Teju Cole—writers who, like the artists, trace and reimagine diasporic pathways through acts of cultural reckoning and creative resistance.
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones · Alvaro Barrington · Jade de Montserrat · Ivy Kalungi · Joy Labinjo · Sahara Longe · Nengi Omuku · Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia · Tschabalala Self · Shaqúelle Whyte
Credit: Roots in the Sky is curated by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones and developed with Clarissa Corfe, Creative Producer: Visual Art, HOME.
Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia creates large-scale immersive works on washi (Japanese paper). Reminiscent of political murals, her paintings draw on historical research to weave complex entanglements of human and animal figures into allegories of fundamental human experience. Her practice is shaped by the mixed-race experience, drawing on moments of tension and contradiction inherent to living between identities and recurring confrontations with “authenticity.” For this exhibition, Onwochei-Garcia reflects on the violent histories that shape her Spanish, German, and Nigerian heritage.
Across the allegorical triptych On Rebellion, comprising Fall of the Crocodiles, Civility and Allegory of the Third of May, symbolic motifs build a dense visual language. Pallas Athene, Greek goddess of war and “enlightened” wisdom, emerges from a struggle between a horse, symbolising the state of nature and the human condition, and a crocodile, which within Igbo tradition is both a guide to primal wisdom and an embodiment of deception. Fire appears as a recurring motif in the triptych, referencing a painting of Prometheus visible in documentation of the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester. Onwochei-Garcia’s symbolism draws on this history: the re-coding of Prometheus from a colonial mythology of a European “civilising” force into a symbol of Black resistance and agency. These violent entanglements speak to a diasporic understanding of history: that living in a state of emergency is not the exception but the rule, and yet hope persists for breaking the cycle.
Fight/Flight of the Birds meditates on how everyday life continues amid violent turbulence. Caught between the stork and skeleton, its figures contemplate resilience, adaptation, and uncertainty.
Fight/Flight of the Birds, 2025
Oil on washi
Fall of the Crocodiles, 2025
From the triptych On Rebellion
Oil on washi
Civility, 2025
From the triptych On Rebellion
Tempera on washi
Allegory of the Third of May, 2025
From the triptych On Rebellion
Oil on marble