True democracy in the art world is still a theory and not a practice. Many people continue to feel the effects of an industry so institutionalised and, oftentimes, elitist, that it feels practically inaccessible to those outside it. However, if art isn’t a tool for everyone to express what is otherwise inexpressible, we must question if it has any real value at all.

Art potentially offers us the most fertile ground for dismantling binaries and expanding the way we understand ourselves and others. Like protest, art is most successful when large numbers of people engage with it, gaining strength through a plethora of voices and experiences.

I spoke to three women who occupy very different spaces in the art world to unpack how we can build creative practices around self-reflection and identity. Shahzia Sikander is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the ways identity can extend beyond society’s limitations. Enam Gbewonyo’s textile and performance art is a somatic process of communicating with her matrilineal heritage. And Emi Eleode’s research is one that seeks to decolonise art history and delineate western perspectives. Each of these women practice and advocate for self-exploration through the fluidity that art affords them.

Shahzia Sikander

Born in Lahore and having lived in several places over the years, Sikander’s work investigates migration, culture and the flux of human identity using a variety of mediums to address this multitude of ideas. Sikander’s work uses iconography and borrows imagery from all the cultures and social structures that she resonates with. “Becoming othered through the polarizing East/West paradigm led my work to an outburst of iconography of resistance,” she explains. “The forms that started to emerge were monstrous, playful, explicit, evocative, precise, and determined – a series of fragmented and severed bodies, androgynous forms, armless and headless torsos, floating half-human figures reminiscent of female and children’s bodies.”

Promiscuous Intimacies (2020), Sikander’s bronze sculpture depicts Greco-Roman Venus entangled with an Indian devata figure. The piece overlays multiple times, spaces, traditions, bodies and desires by representing the two female bodies in a suggestive embrace where each evidently carries the symbolism of their respective cultural identities. Their entanglement is critical as it represents the sheer complexity and layers of identity. There is the palpable sense that the figures are mirrors, lovers and even derivatives of one another. Either way, it is clear that now entangled, they can no longer be truly separate.

While these beings that Sikander depicts may be disconcerting and sometimes monstrous, she explains how this is her way of resisting “pre-determined frameworks, particularly the immigrant box, where you lose your authenticity.” Sikander’s images are visual representations of what it means to be othered, boxed in and marginalized – essentially to have parts of yourself cut off.

Enam Gbewonyo

For performance and textile artist Enam Gbewonyo, art is a holistic practice that allows her to return to her authentic self. Her performances are beautiful, meditative dances of organic movements through which she asserts her right to exist in spaces and institutions built on the labour of Black bodies. She describes how “art is a practice where I feel my most comfortable, most free, most authentic.” Gbewonyo is able to evade conflicts around belonging and acceptance through a self-expression that celebrates movement, recognising the inevitable ways that our identities shift and move. In essence, Gbewonyo is her own home. This acute sense of comfort in her work is one that Sikander shares. “I am at home in the act of making. Art is my abode,” Sikander explains, demonstrating self-determination and freedom in creating for herself a sense of belonging.

For Gbewonyo, it is the emotive power of art that makes it such a compelling tool for discussing otherwise elusive elements of identity. “It stirs the soul and carves out a space to even address some dark, dark stuff”, Gbewonyo explains. “Maybe it’s about lulling people into approaching around these dense subjects.”

Descended from the Ewe people of Ghana – traditional storytellers, weavers and performers – Gbewonyo’s work, too, is interrogative and introspective, using textiles to reconnect to her lineage. She celebrates the Black body as a testament to the survival of our ancestors, recognising that we exist only because they existed. “I meditate on my matrilineal line as I move and, through this practice, I recognise that these women are in me, even if I may have lost their stories,” she says. “They are still embedded in my core. So, it is actually through introspection that the answers will emerge.”

Still, there are challenges in this fight for self-determinism, and the burdens of external limitations are often hard to overcome. “I recall in the beginning of my career, in the 1990s, the onus was often on me, the ‘other’, to cull out my space or identity from within a broad category of ‘third world feminism”, Sikander explains. “I became aware very quickly that America was fundamentally about a Black and White relationship, where being Brown was not yet fully visible.”

Emi Eleode

Born in Austria to Nigerian parents and raised in the UK and the US, Emegha Eleode is a writer, visual artist and self-taught art historian. Having spent the greater part of her early years in Europe, her touchpoint of diaspora and experience of displacement came from watching her parents, both of whom were made to give up their Nigerian passports to gain Austrian citizenship. “For years, my dad would work all day, attend German classes and only have 3 hours of sleep a day in order to get the documents to stay in Austria”.

In 2017, Eleode founded @arthistorytalks, a platform that explores the often overlooked cultural histories and artistic contributions of communities outside of Western society. Ultimately, the platform grew out of an already established passion to make connections with Nigeria, following an initial period of struggle with her identity in childhood. “When I was younger and lived in Vienna, I was still learning about Nigeria and couldn’t really understand what it meant,” she explains. By the time she was at university, Eleode had fallen in love with the potency of African art and identity, realising also how great its sphere of influence is – from the influence of Benin bronzes and masquerade on Cubist art to the iterations of African culture in South America. Effectively, this knowledge became a vehicle for pride and self-assertiveness. “I don’t actively look to see if my presence is still questioned here. If people keep digging for answers, I just tell them that I’m a ‘citizen of the world’.”

For Eleode, the power of art is its ability to reflect. “Humanity isn’t monolithic. Each one of us has a different worldview and has experienced different things,” she explains. “I’m a firm believer that the power of art helps us to understand the complexities of what it means to be human”.

It doesn’t need to be complicated. For visual artist Theaster Gates, “art is the tool I have, and this tool is good enough”. If nothing else, art practice is about just being. Yet, we must recognise that art, expressiveness and the opportunity to create are privileges themselves. It is not as simple as preaching that art is the solution for self-determinism when, for so many, everyday realities mean that mere survival is an accomplishment.

As Sikander acknowledges, “It is from a place of privilege where one can even talk about transcending borders or breaking them. There are many borders that do not shift, that box you in and so many people have no way out.” Rather than advocating for a blanket approach, the idea behind making art a toolkit is to offer a gateway that allows for a full liberation of identity, whatever that identity may be. If art is malleable enough for someone to tape a banana to a wall and price it at $120,000, it is certainly fertile enough for me to assert the validity of my identity.

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Three women on art as identity exploration

Shahzia Sikander

Enam Gbewonyo

Emi Eleode