By Udemma Chukwuma 
Two decades after completing it, Nigerian artist Olusegun Adejumo is showing Migration of the Unlucky to the public for the first time. The mixed-media piece was finished around 2005 and has remained out of view ever since, part of a small, recently rediscovered body of work from that period in his practice.
The piece traces a
migration route familiar to many who have left Nigeria: through Niger, Mali,
Mauritania and Libya, toward a crossing into Spain that many who attempt it
never complete. Rather than dwelling on the ones who make it, Adejumo turns his
attention to those whose journeys end before arrival. As he put it in
presenting the work, “there's a difference between owning a painting and owning
a piece of testimony.”
The canvas is built from layered, stitched panels of raw and painted fabric in muted light brown, dusty rose, plum and burnt orange, arranged like a patchwork of torn geographic fragments. This quilted construction reads almost like a map stitched together from displaced pieces before a single figure comes into view. Along the bottom, ochre-red silhouettes of walking figures, including a child being led by the hand, form a steady horizontal procession. Painted flat and repetitive, almost like a frieze, they carry the anonymous, collective quality Adejumo describes in his statement: “not individuals, but a continuous flow of people.” The rust tone suggests both earth and blood.
Above them hangs the piece's most
physically aggressive gesture: a vertical cluster of wrapped, knotted fabric
bundles, bound tightly with thread and wire, some dangling from thin supports
like broken limbs or effigies. Twisted and mummified, they stand apart from the
free movement of the painted figures below, bound where the others move,
restrained where the others walk on. It is in that vertical relationship, free
bodies below and immobilised ones above, that the work makes its argument
visually, echoing Adejumo's own framing of the piece as being about who arrives
and who doesn't.
He is careful not to narrow the piece to a single route or story. He acknowledges the thousands who attempt similarly dangerous crossings each year, many of whom go unnamed if they don't survive; he also recognises that many migrants find safer paths and build new lives elsewhere, carrying the memory of those who didn't. He says, “It is for anyone who has weighed everything to leave home and still thinks of the people who never got to.”
That framing is part of why the piece hasn't lost its charge in the twenty years since it was made. Its release now isn't a new response to migration but a return to an older one, a work that sat unseen, now entering a different moment to be read against present-day experience. Adejumo calls it an archive piece: something that holds a particular point in his artistic journey while still carrying stories that remain unresolved.
“This is an archive piece, something that preserves a particular moment in my practice, unseen until now. It belongs in a collection built around work that carries real weight.”
Migration of the Unlucky, then, isn't simply an old work getting its first presentation. It's a recovered testimony, quietly brutal rather than didactic, that, two decades on, still asks what it means to remember the journeys that never finished.
About the artist:
Adejumo serves as Director of OneDraw Gallery, is a former President of the Guild of Professional Fine Artists of Nigeria (GFA), and co-curated the Rasheed Gbadamosi Eko Art Expo for "Lagos at 50" in 2017. His work has been featured in major exhibitions (Emotions, Expressions), auctions, and international artist residencies.
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