At the entrance to Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Instituut, a large screen gave a quiet thought public scale. Àsìkò’s 2025 commission The Ori That Speaks follows Ona, a woman seeking her Ori, a Yoruba conception of the inner head and destiny. She passes through stillness, ancestral presence and transformation. A work made for a digital screen could have announced its technical novelty at every turn. The artist instead wanted viewers to feel the weight of breath and the possibility that an inward voice might become audible. His future begins with an act of listening.
Àsìkò is a British Nigerian artist working in photography, moving image and mixed media. He grew up across Nigeria and Britain and has described his practice as a conversation between those places, with Yoruba heritage as a continuing source of thought. The Nieuwe Instituut’s interview identifies Afrofuturism among the ideas behind The Ori That Speaks and his earlier Walking with Ancestors and Encoded Woman. That history matters because the new commission is a change in scale and pace. It condenses the artist’s interest in mythic and ancestral worlds into a more intimate encounter with one character.
The screen is not merely a place to show a film. It sits in the threshold of an institution devoted to architecture, design and digital culture. Visitors pass it while entering or leaving, perhaps with no plan to watch a whole narrative. Àsìkò made an invitation suited to that condition. Ona’s inward journey can interrupt a hurried movement through a building. The work asks for attention without assuming that a viewer came seeking a lesson in Yoruba philosophy. The public surface and the private theme make a useful friction: a large image in a shared place opens toward a thought each viewer must test inside themselves.
Ori and the shape of a journey
Ori is often translated as head, but in the work it means more than anatomy. Àsìkò speaks of an inner head bound to consciousness and destiny. He uses the term to organize a visual journey rather than reduce it to a dictionary definition. Ona does not simply receive information about a tradition. She undergoes a transformation in which silence, meditation and the presence of ancestors alter her sense of self. The institution’s commission account gives that outline; the artist’s own interview stresses how much he wanted the audience to experience stillness rather than spectacle.
The distinction is an artistic one. A familiar screen narrative might mark transformation with a dramatic confrontation or a dazzling technical effect. Àsìkò asks whether change can happen in a pause. Breath becomes an event. The voice of Ori is not a command issued from outside the character; it is tied to an interior process of alignment. The large public display heightens the subtlety of that choice. An image that might easily have functioned as an advertisement for new software asks instead for a form of attention that cannot be bought or hurried.
The work is also Àsìkò’s first attempt to use artificial intelligence to build a moving-image narrative structure. He describes the technology as a tool for thinking and dreaming more expansively. That statement needs to be read beside the work’s cultural grounding. The system does not originate Ori, Ona or the question of ancestral memory. The artist brings those elements to a new method of making images. The interest lies in whether the method can give a viewer an experiential encounter with Yoruba thought while avoiding the generic surface that machine-generated spectacle can so easily produce.
Àsìkò has long used photography to make constructed scenes rather than treat a camera as a neutral witness. His images stage bodies, adornment, landscape and gesture. He has spoken of using the medium to negotiate cultural identity and the status of women within inherited traditions. Moving image extends that capacity for staging through duration. A gesture can unfold; a still figure can begin to seem present in time. In The Ori That Speaks, the duration serves a contemplative question. What can a person hear after the rush of ordinary interpretation has quietened?
Walking with ancestors
Before the Rotterdam commission, Walking with Ancestors developed a visual world around the relation between the living and ancestral presence. A 2024 account of the collection identifies works including Symphony of the Trio, Shrouded Testimonies and The Summoning, and describes vibrant colours, dreamlike forms and landscapes in which the physical and spiritual seem to meet. Àsìkò has called the images a love letter to African ways of life. He is not illustrating a finished catalogue of ancestors. He is building an atmosphere in which the possibility of relation becomes perceptible.
Walking is an apt verb for this series. It suggests company and movement rather than a single revelation. The ancestral world is neither sealed in a museum nor fully absorbed into the present. It accompanies. The images’ staged quality keeps them from being mistaken for documentary portraits of a specific ritual. Their truth is imaginative and relational. They ask a viewer to think about what travels with a person across years and places, particularly when migration makes a familiar cultural world less physically available.
Àsìkò’s own life across Nigeria and Britain gives that question a lived setting, though no image can be reduced to an episode of autobiography. In a 2024 interview, he described British Nigerian identity as carrying two worlds and finding a way for their rhythms to coexist. The phrase is more precise than a simple claim that he is between cultures. It allows both to remain active. His ancestral images work similarly: one does not have to abandon contemporary London in order to think with Yoruba history. The worlds are brought into relation through the form of the image.
The artist’s use of adornment gives this relation a body. Jewelry, fabric and sculptural additions can refer to inherited forms, but they also shape how a sitter occupies a scene now. Àsìkò’s photographs do not present cultural markers as captions attached to a person. They make those markers part of posture, light and composition. The effect can be ceremonial without claiming to reproduce a particular ceremony. A portrait becomes a speculative space where an ancestral vocabulary can act upon a present body.
The progression from Walking with Ancestors to The Ori That Speaks is therefore more than a change in technical medium. It shifts from a series of constructed visual encounters toward a single figure’s interior process. The collective or multiple quality of the earlier work does not disappear; Ona’s ancestors remain part of the later story. Yet the commission asks what happens when a person stops and listens to that company rather than merely appearing before it. The future becomes a relationship one can practice, not only an image one can see.
A visual language of dual belonging
Àsìkò’s practice is grounded in a personal account of Yoruba heritage and British life. His artist statement describes photography as a way to explore diasporic identity, gendered power, spirituality and belonging. He is interested in the body because cultural questions are lived through it. The body is adorned, judged, moved, remembered and imagined. In the images, it can become a place where inherited ideas are honored, challenged or revised. The future does not require a body to become anonymous. It asks what a person might carry forward and what they might need to change.
This tension has shaped his photographs of women. In an earlier interview, he spoke of wanting to make images that could start conversations about women and African culture, and to record nuance for viewers who might see them later. Such an ambition demands care. A striking female figure can be admired too quickly as an emblem of strength, leaving her personhood and the social forces around her unexamined. Àsìkò’s more searching images put power and vulnerability within the same frame. Adornment may signal dignity, but it can also carry the weight of expectation. That complexity is part of the reason he returns to women’s images without treating femininity as a single role.
His work also enters historic or colonial spaces and places African mythic forms within them. In The Haunting Masquerade, he has described bringing the Orisha Osanyin, associated with forests, plants and medicine, into visual conversation with architecture and his dual heritage. A Bracken presentation records his description of the project as an exploration of darker cultural aesthetics and the juxtaposition of Nigerian and British visual worlds. The masquerade is not a costume that simply makes a photograph look unfamiliar. It carries a claim about what knowledge a space has excluded and what a figure may bring into it.
This is a point of connection with Krull’s report on the 1-54 fair in Marrakech, which invites readers into a contemporary African art setting where artists and institutions meet. Àsìkò’s images have circulated through fairs and galleries, but their cultural sources are not supplied by the market. His photographs ask how a viewer can encounter a visual tradition without flattening it into a convenient emblem of “African art.” The answer lies in attending to the artist’s choices of body, setting, gesture and story.
Giants in an ordinary street
New World Giants makes the scale of diasporic memory literal. In the 2022 series, towering masquerade figures stand within quiet British townscapes. The Aesthetica Art Prize’s account identifies Yoruba Egun and Caribbean Moko Jumbie traditions among its points of reference. The figures are neither hidden inside a festival crowd nor removed to an ethnographic interior. Their height interrupts the ordinary streets and buildings around them. A passerby in the photograph’s world would have to change direction or look upward to take them in.
Àsìkò described the contrast in a first-person account of one photograph, noticing even a parked Land Rover within the composition. The vehicle matters because it anchors the scene in a contemporary British street rather than a vague mythic realm. He sees the image as a way to think about cultures evolving through migration and about his own Yoruba and British inheritance. The giant does not simply arrive from an untouched past. It has already changed by standing here. The photograph makes that change visible without asking the figure to become small enough for its surroundings.
The series gives a sharper context to The Ori That Speaks. Both works place ancestral forms within a present public space, but they address viewers differently. The giants demand outward recognition through scale; Ona’s journey asks for inward attention. Àsìkò’s range lies in keeping both movements available. Memory can tower above a street, and it can become the quiet voice a person hears after stopping.
What a digital image can remember
The introduction of AI to The Ori That Speaks invites a further question about memory. Digital systems can generate surfaces quickly and combine visual patterns at scale, but speed is not the same as understanding. Àsìkò’s commission slows the experience down. Its subject is the inward head; its desired effect is a viewer’s renewed attention to breath and ancestral presence. The tension between a rapidly changing tool and a meditative aim is productive. It forces the work to ask what technical invention is for.
Àsìkò has said that AI allowed him to think bigger and dream deeper, but he did not present the tool as a replacement for the philosophy directing the film. Yoruba concepts shape the character and the journey. The screen gives those concepts a new temporal and public form. This is one way to understand the Afrofuturist operation of the work. It is not a simple mixture of African symbols and advanced software. It is a decision to let an inherited worldview organize what the technology makes possible.
The viewer may never know all the steps by which the moving images were made. That opacity does not prevent an encounter with the work’s central choice. A large digital screen could have offered ceaseless motion, yet Àsìkò asks it to make space for stillness. The public scale could have made Ona monumental, yet the story draws attention to her interior life. The medium could have treated ancestry as an image bank, yet the artist frames it as a living relation that addresses a character and perhaps the audience. Each choice pushes against a predictable use of digital spectacle.
A similar discipline appears in the artist’s account of photography. He began with a camera that let him make images of the world, then moved toward staged scenes through which identity could be questioned rather than merely recorded. Technology mattered because it gave form to a way of seeing. The move to AI follows that pattern when it works best. A new tool enters a practice already committed to asking whose stories have shaped an image and whose futures that image can open.
The future at the threshold
Àsìkò’s work shows that futurity can be quiet. In Walking with Ancestors, it is the ongoing companionship of memory. In The Haunting Masquerade, it appears when a mythic figure enters a space with its own contested history. In The Ori That Speaks, it is Ona’s movement toward an awakened understanding of herself. None of these projects requires a future stripped of older knowledge. Each asks what happens when that knowledge is allowed to develop and speak in a new setting.
The Rotterdam screen gave the latest question a literal threshold. People arrived at an institution and found a story about finding an inner orientation. The encounter could last a few seconds or longer. In either case, Àsìkò made a public image that trusted viewers with an inward task. Afrofuturism here is not a distant date. It is the possibility that a person, meeting an ancestral idea through a contemporary form, may leave with a different sense of where they stand and where they can go.