FREE LOVE is the first solo exhibition by British-Nigerian artist Temitayo Shonibare. This exhibition – drawn from the artist’s cultural background – investigates Nigerian, specifically Yoruba, weddings

as a site where money-spraying culture is a central gesture. Interrogating the synergies between monetary flows and social respectability, the exhibition considers the material and symbolic

exchanges between the ceremonial performance of money showers and the increase in societal value bestowed upon women through the institution of marriage.

Shonibare’s practice spans photography, video, installation, and performance, staging actions that challenge conventional socialized norms. She plays with the imagined psychological, physical and

digital boundaries between public and private spaces — questioning who is and what makes up the public. Shonibare seeks to expand the site of art making from a physically grounded space to a relational encounter between individuals, affecting how viewers-cum participants experience the work.

In this exhibition, Shonibare’s newly commissioned works combine her design training and background in performance to create an immersive installation consisting of emblematic works in an attempt to encapsulate the sensorial experience of a traditional Nigerian wedding. The exhibition explores and challenges the expected social path for women to become brides and thereafter, mothers. Shonibare has made a multi-channel video work, which is presented on two small screens that sit well below eye level, forcing viewers to kneel for optimum viewing – a corporeal act holding multiple meanings for the artist. 

On the one hand, kneeling might connote the spiritual act of prayer, and in many parts of Nigeria, as a gesture of respect for greeting and acknowledging elders. On the other hand, kneeling might signify gendered and sexualised choreographies of submissiveness and subservience – a symbolic slippage playfully paralleled in the video, where footage of brides being showered with money is juxtaposed with pole-dancing strippers being rewarded in a similar way.

At the centre of the installation is a kinetic sculpture, in which five dollar notes flutter over a set of floor-level fans – a nod to money being at the centre of the spectacle-driven wedding industry in

Lagos. The exhibition further queers the experience of Nigerian weddings with sensory queues: moth balls – often used in Lagosian cupboards to ward off insects – are carefully distributed around the space; and a seamless blend of Trap music and Fuji (a popular genre of Yoruba music often played at wedding receptions) emanate from spatially distributed speakers. 

FREE LOVE is a cathartic release for the artist and a humorous reflection on the gendered collective and personal pressures inherited from an older generation of women in her life. These women feature in all the presented works, from fleeting interactions with childhood hairdressers to life lessons imparted by her aunties, mother and grandmother.