For his first solo exhibition in Nigeria, Temple Muse proudly presents 'THE SPACE BETWEEN WORLDS: A Cartography of Self' by multi-disciplinary artist Myles Igwebuike, in a showcase curated by Avinash D. Wadhwani and supported by The Macallan.

Igwebuike is a global voice in the world of research-led design who received formal training at the Royal College of Arts, London. He approaches art as a partnership with materials to creates end results that are resonant with the material's desired expression.

Igwebuike's practice is marked by some distinct through-lines: the first being that he believes in the sentience of materials. In his practice, his aim is to midwife the innate form that his materials intend to bring forth. Whether staining textiles with dyes of striking metal with a hammer, Igwebuikee leaves room for the materials' right to resistance, understanding that the most compelling expressions of art are those that are volunteered rather than coerced.

Download Catalogue

Igwebuike's stance on materials is also demonstrated in his acceptance of the philosophical idea tagged by literary poet Édouard Glissant as "the right to opacity." Igwebuike does not create art that concludes; in fact, he strategically employs concealment and untranslatability. His creations are an open-ended works that invite the viewer to ardent consideration. He offers no conclusions through his works, nor does he give direction or translation. To encounter Igwebuike's creation is to lean in and extend your soul in exploration of the multiplicity of meanings that the material themselves decide to reveal. Nothing is as it seems, form slips, meaning shifts, emotions undulate, and eventually through patience, the hidden language of the materials is slowly unveiled.

The exhibition unfolds as what Igwebuike calls "a constellation rather than a collection" of works that exist in relation to each other, creating approximate fields of meaning through proximity and distance. This metaphor is very apt, and takes into consideration the artist’s own liminal space of physical existence between Enugu, Fes, Luanda and London. Each of these places carries its own distinctive geography, its own insistent culture, its own innate ‘shaktipat’, yet each shares the common thread of urbanism, heritage, and communal hope.

This exhibition creates conditions for ongoing inquiry and perpetual making, and it is to this precise adventure that the artist invites his viewers.