A practising artist with a six-and-a-half-decade career span, renowned printmaker Bruce Onobrakpeya is recognised as one of the founding figures of modern art in Nigeria. As a member of the Zaria Art Society (1958 - 1962), the group of ten artists later known as the Zaria Rebels, he established art-making practices that brought the politics of knowing into sharp relief. Rejecting the British colonial curriculum, they returned to local knowledge systems that included folklore, the sonically archived philosophy of the people, in order to create an art language that bore a meaningful relation to Nigeria, their newly independent country. Writing With focuses on Onobrakpeya’s work to retrieve and reinterpret texts written for the ear and reshape them into modern art. It draws connections between the world of literature and printmaking, and explores the artist’s relationship with key literary figures such as Cyprian Ekwensi, Wole Soyinka and Amos Tutuola.
