Asiwaju: The Journey Through Unveiling the Woman

Performance by Taiwo Aiyedogbon

A Curatorial Reflection by Aderemi Adegbite

Taiwo Aiyedogbon’s Asíwájú is an invocation, an ancestral summoning of heroines who once held the axis of our world in balance. In her body, gesture, and presence, we do not witness mere representation; we encounter a living portal. Through her, generations of Nigerian women—named and unnamed—are called forth to testify, to stand, to be seen again, and to remind us of the sacred continuity that has been endangered by forgetting.

In Yoruba cosmology, rites commence not with noise but with reverence. The feminine force – Ìyá Apani má wá jú, olókìkí oru – is acknowledged first: the force that births, holds, heals, disrupts, and remembers. Asíwájú begins not as performance but as procession – a passage into remembrance. The artist invited friends, colleagues, and passing women into this possession, activating the spiritual essence of heroines past – àwọn Ìyá Alásẹ́kù wá. Attention is given to the unveiling of woman not as figure but as force. Each name: Funmilayo, Margaret, HID, Ladi, Bolanle, Ibiyinka, Dora, is not a historical footnote but a spiritual anchor. Each breath is an offering; each name, an altar.

This is no sentimental archive. Memory here is muscular, defiant, alive. Aiyedogbon does not beautify history; she exhumes it. Her gestures excavate stories buried beneath the weight of systemic forgetting. Her body maps lines of resistance: market women who opposed colonial taxation, scholars who unsettled imported epistemes, potters who shaped cosmology in clay, mothers and teachers who scripted the first alphabets of freedom into children’s minds.

Asíwájú reclaims leadership from sterile corridors of power and returns it to its rightful domains: the market, the classroom, the kitchen, the studio, the courtroom, the protest ground, the silence. Leadership, as this work insists, is not title-bearing but the holding of space: to nurture, disrupt, protect, and transform. These foremothers led through fire, through silence, through vision, grief, and unwavering presence.

Embedded within the work is a sacred refusal: a refusal to let these women be footnotes; a refusal to allow patriarchy to archive them in shadows; a refusal to forget. As the Yoruba proverb reminds us, Ọmọ tí ó gbàgbé ilé, ó so àpò ìyà kọ́ ni, the child who forgets history shelves its crying days. Asíwájú is a corrective social ritual, realigning fractured memories and whispering remembrance into the ears of the distracted.

The work does not conclude with the performance. It lingers and continues as conversation and installation within Ilà Collective – a sanctuary for quiet revolt, for gathering of artists and art enthusiasts, for remembering aloud. Here, Aiyedogbon becomes both performer and priestess, bearing the echoes of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Kudirat Abiola, Mabel Segun, Flora Nwapa, Chioma, Kofo Abayomi, Oyinkan, and the countless women history did not record, but whose lives form the architecture of resistance.

Asíwájú is not spectacle; it is gathering, sitting, naming, and listening. It reminds us that every woman is a continent of stories. To name her is to open a door; to walk through is to confront complicity in silence and erasure. Taiwo Aiyedogbon has opened the door. The question is not rhetorical: will we walk through?