By Ifeoluwa Olutayo.
These signs follow those who believe. Signs are all there; the magic of the hues, the textures, and the composition, all made manifest for a willing audience. I went sign searching again over the last weekend, and I happened upon Gainyyscope, a solo exhibition at Windsor Gallery, located on a quiet street in Victoria Island, curated by Richard Vedelago.
Gainnyscope is the brainchild of Musa Ganiyy, a well-travelled Lagos-based painter, photographer and illustrator, one with a long history of engaging the realities of everyday people living in his environment. I found this exhibition, at first glance, to be a layered experiment of colour, one that prompted me to reminisce on the form I found in the pages of newspapers like the Punch growing up, where you’d find on any given day illustrations satirizing the absurdities of Nigerian living and more pointedly, Nigerian politics, comics that presented as fiction, but used that freedom of character and design to paint a vivid and (sometimes) grotesque picture of our country’s failings.
Why did these works evoke these same energies? I found that to be in what free text and connections were made on various mediums. These renditions tell a sort of continued tale across canvases (and other surfaces) of what Nigerians have to battle against and make do of to maintain connections, be they electrical or pecuniary dependencies.
Many of the canvases focused on the anxieties of immediate issues, such as the national grid’s continuous collapse, twelve times over the last fifteen months. In a country providing electricity for more than 200 million residents, less than 5000 MW is generated, way below the 40,000 MW needed to sustain the residents’ basic needs.
People have, for the better part of the new millennium, depended on petrol (and diesel, for those who can afford it) generators to provide sore-needed electricity for their homes and their work. The lack of access to stable electricity could be mentioned as a critical contributing factor to the dearth of investment and exponential growth, with various stakeholders in industries unable to keep up with the cost of running entire businesses on fuel.
It is, therefore, not too far to see why this focus turns up in Musa’s work. It is the first inkling of what I believe has been the building of a budding democratic nation and business dependencies on faulty systems. You had key public servants holding private interest in Generator companies, and suddenly, the electricity generation problem never went away. I also had my attention on the crushing cost realities of the last year, with electricity tariffs going up by more than 50 percent with a new Band system that is ineffectually applied, effectively placing a torturous burden of harshly-priced continued access on small businesses who depend on electricity for their wares.
He paints, more than once, harbingers of anxiety in the form of Power Holding Corporation employees, who almost only appear when the “evil” of disconnection is to be done. The works are titled Agents of Light I and II, and this naming further connects the works to a satirizing eye, one that critiques the state of things.
Agents of Light II (2023), Acrylic and Oil Pastel on Paper.
It is telling that this work feeds not only on the immediate anxieties of these figures in the present but also a certain dread-contained nostalgia, further reinforcing the continuous struggles with power and its costs. This same anxiety exists in Marriage Wars, where we see figures connected with the same anxieties around electricity and the prepaid meter system.
Marriage Wars (2024), Acrylic and Oil Pastel on Canvas.
Musa Ganiyy also inserts himself into this brewing chaos with the work Dreading the Void, in which we see him painted, worried about the state of things in the country and how that affects his ability to exist as the very best version of himself.
Dreading the Void (2024), Acrylic and Oil Pastel on Canvas.
He paints on various mediums, with works like Agents of Light done with acrylic and oil pastels on paper and Marriage Wars, with the same, but on canvas. He also brings in real-life objects to express on with the work, Changeover Box, done with acrylic and oil pastels on an actual electric circuit “changeover” box, a model that shows the Nigerian creative’s dependency on electricity whether it is provided or sourced from fuel-dependent alternatives. This was striking for me, as I thought it was interesting to bring this tool guarding the in-between, providing connections either way.
Changeover Box (2024), Acrylic and oil pastel on Electrical Circuit Box.
Ever present are also the Point-of-Sale (POS) systems that have almost totally replaced the Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) found at every bank branch. These systems can be found outnumbering ATMs on every street, mine for example, at a five-to-one ratio. Popularised during the dearth of cash crisis in 2023, they’ve become prevalent, and livelihoods are dependent on these figures and their machines, often a few steps off the premises of banks. It’s another example of the complexities of dependencies on faulty systems, where informal solutions in times of crisis become crystallised into legal means, with even microfinance banks and service providers (like MTN) issuing their own POS machines for use in this growing structure.
I found these leanings existing in Musa Ganiyy’s work, running parallel to those satirists in the newspapers of old. It’s also telling in the technique, as even though the works are layered with color and with various objects of interest on other planes, you find an almost garish effect of these worlds collapsing into each other, an effect you could say mirrors the very essence of Nigerian living.
It is, after all, a cacophony of existence, especially for someone based in Lagos, listening to the irascible and cantankerous exchanges on the streets and even in how certain figures speak to themselves. An angry pitch, even in remarks about the weather, is represented in a figure I found in the world Musa had created on the second level of the exhibition.
Another striking painting is Disappearing Spaces, which speaks to the continuous loss of public spaces to privatization, especially beaches, and how that informs how we view third spaces in Lagos. On the walls around this painting, you find figures in relaxing postures, enjoying the beaches in ways that are effectively not possible for a lot of people in 2025.
In all of the bleakness, he also places recurring plants and flowers, maybe as a way of finite escape or a way to seek beauty in the chaos.
By the Balcony in Lagos Island (2022), Gouache and Oil Pastels on Paper.
One painting stands out on the second level, the work titled From my Balcony on Lagos Island. It is truly different in how it’s painted, with clear lines and a clear figure. Musa Ganiyy took his time to paint this woman in the flurry of a beautiful world, the only painting done in Gouache and Oil Pastels. The serene qualities don’t necessarily lift it out of the thematic considerations; It could be seen as an anchor for this exhibition, a certain pointer to the people that matter to the artist amidst all the cacophony in this immensely chaotic world.
It’s a world that is saying a lot at the same time, and its effects can be a bit overwhelming, but it says something timely and important.
Narratives abound, and signs were present.
Nigerian anxieties, symbolically represented in angry forms and loud colours, but anchored in the sanity of personal connections.
