Roots in the Sky is the first institutional curatorial project by British-Nigerian artist Tunji Adeniyi-Jones. This pivotal exhibition brings together new and recent works by ten contemporary artists whose practices span the United States, Europe, and West Africa.
Taking Adeniyi-Jones’s own practice as a point of departure – rich with West African heritage, fable, and ceremonial symbolism – the exhibition explores the cultural pluralism and layered identities that define the Black diaspora. Painting, sculpture, and drawing are employed in equal measure, with figuration and abstraction operating as shared visual languages to explore themes of mythology, community, lineage, and transformation.
The works on view are informed by both personal narrative and collective memory. As novelist Bernardine Evaristo writes, “We consist of multiples… descended as we are in Britain from fifty-four African countries and over thirty Caribbean countries… I believe in pluralism versus essentialism, always and all ways.” This ethos underpins Roots in the Sky, inviting artists to reflect on travel, hybridity, and the diasporic experience as a source of both creative expression and cultural logic.
Boundless interconnectivity—at times latent, at times boldly asserted—runs through the exhibition. The featured artists engage with questions of belonging and identity, resisting reductive narratives in favour of nuance, contradiction, and multiplicity. Their practices are further anchored by literary influences from James Baldwin, Chinua Achebe, and Teju Cole—writers who, like the artists, trace and reimagine diasporic pathways through acts of cultural reckoning and creative resistance.
