Nigerian artist and filmmaker Olubukola Bolarinde developed her debut solo exhibition 106 Expressions as a visual record of African childhood, cultural identity and experiences at risk of disappearing.
Presented in Lagos in June 2022 and curated by Nike Davies-Okundaye, the exhibition followed Bolarinde’s 2018 film Onigiri and extended her work as a storyteller into a gallery setting.
Memory as a form of preservation
Bolarinde described the collection as a celebration of African heritage, people and culture. Each work drew on experiences remembered from childhood and attempted to carry them into a period in which younger generations might no longer encounter the same environments or customs.
The artist was born in Lagos but spent formative years in Jos, Kaduna and Zaria. Moving between northern and southern Nigeria gave her a sense of identity shaped by regional difference as well as continuity.
106 Expressions used that background to create what Bolarinde called a documentary about her people, land and culture. The works did not treat heritage as a fixed image. They presented it through personal recollection, allowing individual memory to become part of a wider cultural archive.
Architecture, film and visual narrative
Bolarinde is a self-taught artist and trained architect whose early interest appeared through pencil drawing. She later worked across film, writing and other creative fields.
These different practices informed the exhibition’s emphasis on narrative. Each piece was intended to carry a particular story rather than function only as a decorative image.
The involvement of Davies-Okundaye connected the debut exhibition with an established Nigerian tradition of supporting artists and preserving cultural knowledge through contemporary practice.
106 Expressions therefore marked both a personal milestone and an effort to protect ordinary cultural experience from erasure. Its central argument was that childhood memory can hold historical value when translated carefully into visual form.