SOLDIER: ‘BLACK STAR”
Leonard ‘SOLDIER’ Iheagwam3 April - 3 May 2025
PRESS RELEASE
“I reflect everything I’ve seen from Lagos in my work, and more generally the world.”
Leonard “SOLDIER” Iheagwam (b.1999, Lagos, Nigeria) is a London based multidisciplinary artist whose work blends Pop Art influences with reflections on his upbringing in Lagos. Black Star is the artist’s second solo exhibition in London. The exhibition is a continuation of SOLDIER’s investigation into what African Pop Art could be. ‘Nigeria is a dumping ground for consumer culture. The West literally dumps products’ SOLDIER points out. It is this state of affairs that influences the concerns in the body of work for Black Star. The landscapes and protagonists of the exhibition have their genesis in an imagined manifesto titled “Afro-Futurism”.
The Afro-Futurist manifesto postulates a dystopian future in which a hope in humanity is rediscovered. The machines and ideologies that promised liberation have betrayed humankind. But in a world that is on the verge of ecological and social collapse hope is found: machines have intertwined with humans; new technologies have merged with ancient wisdom; a new paradigm is reclaiming what has been lost.
SOLDIER is concerned with ‘everything the world is, and everything the world could be…’. In Black Star the Nigerian cultural landscape, Pop Art and sci-fi culture merge in the future SOLDIER presents us with.
