At the Nicoleta Gallery in Berlin, a group exhibition titled Living Berlin (named after the building in which the gallery is located on the third floor of) lasted from 1st to 30th November 2024 and featured several artists and photographers, both emerging and established, from across the world, including Americans Cris Bozas and Ana Violeta, German Laura Koch, Polish artist Elzbieta Wilk, Catalan photographer Jordi Piris, Albanian artist Nika, and Nigerian photographer Samuel Oladele.
Berlin’s relatively new Nicoleta Gallery is unique in its showcasing of art and musical instruments. It seeks to find common ground in making of art through fine art, photography, and music. Founded by the Berlin-based painter, Nicoleta Albei-Wigger, the gallery seeks to be an extension of her own artistic practice. It is within this dream that the artists featured at the exhibition tried to express their vision of Berlin’s cityscape as a melting pot of cultures and currents from across the world.
The city’s cosmopolitanism is seen, in different interpretations, from the pieces shown at the exhibition. The art shown by each artist is marked by their different approaches to art. The Mexican-American artist, Violeta, makes Eco-conscious art in which she aims to reduce her carbon footprint by painting with biodegradable materials such as plant extracts. There is Elzbieta Wilk, who turns emotions into canvases of abstract art. And Albanian artist Nika uses cubist patterns in her paintings.
Oladele, the Nigerian concept and documentary photographer featured at the show, has been doing the fledgling work of documenting African culture through photography. His women subjects are conceptualised through makeup and costume. Often, his compositional methods allow for the interpretation of more than one meaning. The Manchester-based photographer had started photography back in Nigeria when he was a car salesman.
That experience went on to influence his photography in unique ways. He sees photography as a form of soul-searching. Within its lenses—its ability to offer “extra eyes”, as he observed—is the power to put the human spirit in conversation with culture, people, and things. This is seen in the photograph featured by the Ilorin-born photographer in the “Living Berlin” exhibition.
The photograph, just one in a series titled “Inferno’s Dance”, pictures a European woman playing with and swallowing fire—a conjured magician’s trick or a fascinating aspect of Eastern European culture found in Berlin. In the photograph, the woman stands in a fire-illuminated room marked by shades of yellow, brown, and dark shadows. While parts of the woman’s body have been lost in those shadows, the outline of her upper body is visible (she’s wearing dark slips). What we see is a side view of her body: her face tilted upwards, her mouth spewing fire upwards, and her left hand holding a stick of fire over it.
Fire-eating traditions, such as that performed by the woman Oladele has photographed, trace back to the far east religions, especially in Hindu and Fakir practices. From here, the tradition would have migrated to Eastern Europe and then the rest of Europe through the Roma people and other gipsy tribes in Europe. Clearly, such feats and performances also exist in African culture. For Oladele’s photography to capture this is to recognise that a part of modern European culture comes from the melding of several traditions across the ancient world.
*Chimezie Chika is an essayist and writer of fiction. His work has been published in many journals across the world, including The Republic, The Weganda Review, Terrain.org, Channel Magazine, and Afrocritik. He found on his X handle: @chimeziechika1
