Je’ni isi isi (Jenisisi)
To the Beginning

Solo exhibition: Ebuka Pascal Agudiegwu

Je’ni isi isi , translated from Igbo as “go to the beginning”, is both an invocation and an artistic excavation. It is not merely a return to origins, but a deliberate act of re-entering the mythic, imaginative space from which the artist’s visual language first emerged.

The works in Ebuka’s Agudiegwu , exhibition move fluidly between personal memory and collective myth. They draw on the cosmologies of Igbo folklore, where humans, animals, plants, and celestial beings coexisted in a shared, animated world. Under the ritual glow of moonlight, elders recited these tales by moonlight, narratives that did not simply entertain but encoded moral, environmental, and metaphysical knowledge. These early encounters with oral tradition shaped the artist’s capacity for visual allegory, a skill now embedded in his painterly vocabulary.

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